The Weekend Visitor

by Jessica Thomas

  "Ah, Jack." At last! I leaned forward. "Does Jack by chance drive a Mercedes?"

  "Yeah. Navy with a ragtop, really sharp. Why?"

  "This is not easy to say, Pete. But a young lady, a client of John Frost's, was date raped Monday night, and some of her information is pointing toward Jack."

  I was totally surprised at Pete's reaction. He leaned back in his chair and roared with laughter. "Jack? John Lanham Sanhope?

  Rape . . . date or otherwise?" He wiped his eyes with his napkin. "Oh, Alex, you've got to be kidding."

  "I'm afraid not," I answered a little stiffly. "Several things point toward him."

  "Oh, sure." Pete got his laughter under control. "Like a curly-haired, good-looking guy with a Mercedes and lots of the ready having to rape a girl? Alex, he travels with a broom to beat 'em off! My brother Augie and I could be happy till death with his rejects! You're way off on this one."

  "Oh? His looks and the car fit. How about the house? Maybe some back stairs, dimly lit? With a green carpet? Maybe a bedroom with some trophies—you know, cups—from athletic events? And, I admit this is probably silly, but does he have a telescope?" I watched Pete's laughter die and his eyes turn from merriment to concern.

  "Jesus, Alex. Jesus. What are you saying? The girl told you she remembered all those things?"

  "Yes."

  "I still don't believe it. All kidding aside, Jack isn't the rapist type. He's never taken girls that seriously. He really is like the old adage about the trolley . . . if you don't catch this one, there'll be another in ten minutes. And believe it or not, he's a good student, and he's still got law school to get through. Girls are . . . handy, I guess ... and fun, but they're not his life. And God knows he's got nothing to prove. I don't understand what the telescope has to do with it. It's been out in the yard—out on the point—ever since I can remember."

  I shrugged. "A lot of people aren't what they seem, Pete. We've all got a dark side. About the telescope, the girl thought she saw one through the fog that night, and how many mounted telescopes are there in town?"

  "Alex, I ask you, please not to ruin his life with this! Trust me, Jack is one of the good guys." Pete grasped my hand across the table. "Let me talk to him first, before you do anything. I'm sure there's a simple explanation. Please!"

  I tried to think of the best way to handle this. Maureen had been very convincing, but so was Pete. And for some reason I would have been hard-put to explain, the fact there was a telescope in the yard made me more inclined to believe Jack was innocent.

  "No, Pete, you don't talk to him. I do. You can set up an appointment. Tell him to be at my house Monday at two o'clock."

  "He won't be here until Monday night. Augie Jr. and I are going over Monday with my pickup to help him clean out his room and cart stuff up here. Would Tuesday be okay?"

  "I guess so, God forbid we should interrupt a Harvard graduation. But you don't tell him why I want to see him. Tell him ... tell him a car like his may be involved in a crime. Don't tell him the real reason, Pete. If I think you've warned him, I'll go straight to Sonny and Jack will be arrested in five minutes. I mean it."

  Pete stood up and looked at me with a kind of disappointed dignity. "You forget, Alex, Jack may be my cousin, but I am a cop. I will not tell him." He laid fifteen dollars on the table. "This should cover my lunch." He turned and left.

  And I felt as if the Rat were a very good place for me to be at that moment.

  Chapter 9

  I decided to finish my beer and have another cigarette. Something told me just to quit counting before I added more guilt to my day. As I sat at the table, idly watching the lunch crowd thin, I kept going back to that damned telescope.

  According to Pete, it was "way out on the point" of the land. That would put it considerable distance from the house, which sat back in the center of the property. I didn't know the place well, but as I recalled it from going to some charity party with my mother several years back, you didn't go near the point to reach the mews, as they called the converted stables/garages. It seemed very chancy to me that Maureen, still drugged, staggering, recently raped, scared, and probably in pain, would notice a telescope set many feet away and blanketed in fog. And probably draped with some protective cover, anyway.

  She almost had to have been there before and noticed it. Suppose she and her roomies had been at some party Jack had given. Maybe he'd wanted to have sex with her, and she'd maybe led him on and then said no. He apparently wasn't used to being turned down and maybe it made him all the more intrigued. So Sunday night, he added a little something to her drink. She remembered the telescope, but either she really didn't remember being there before . . . drunk? . . . maybe drugged then, also? Or she didn't want to admit it. Maybe afraid it would make her look bad or upset Mary. It worked for me.

  I looked at my watch and waved for the check. Cindy would be in need of my expertise. Well, she'd at least appreciate another warm body trying to be of some help.

  I headed for the liquor store and then for home. On the way, I stopped at the flower shop and picked up what the florist called "a romantic little French nosegay." I knew Cindy would have taken care of flowers for the living room and for the dining room table, but the nosegay was just for her. She loved it. And that made me happy.

  With Fargo's help, I got out some extra lawn chairs and little tables and filled the grill with briquettes and got out the utensils I figured Sonny would need. I knew he would insist on doing the outdoor cooking. I set up the bar on the lowboy in the living room. Cindy and I agreed that it seemed to be turning cloudy and might become too cool to eat outside, so I set the dining room table. Finally, I fed Fargo, in the vain hope it might make him less interested in our dinner.

  Cindy and I looked around, looked at each other and declared all in order. Time to shower and change and have that one relaxing drink before becoming hostesses.

  Half an hour before party time, I mixed us both a bourbon old fashioned and carried them outside where she sat. She had her feet propped up on another chair, and I assumed she been on them most of the day, though she looked fresh and vibrant.

  She asked about my day, and I told her about my lunch with Pete Santos. I could tell she felt bad for Pete, but she said she didn't see I'd had much choice in the way I handled it. Perhaps when all was settled we could have him and his girlfriend for dinner or something. I grunted, got up and lit the grill. One dinner party at a time, please.

  I started to tell her about Maureen's visit and Nacho's car-tracking success, but was cut off by the arrival of our first guest. Lainey walked up the drive, bearing one of her pecan pies. With Lainey's pies, you didn't think of calories or carbs or cholesterol, you just thought of how it tastes!

  "Where's Cassie?" I asked, as I gently relieved her of the pie. "Don't tell me she had to make a flight?"

  "Oh, no. No, we're actually going to make our dining room a real dining room after only seven years of a card table and some rickety chairs and shelves. Peter and the Wolf have a small break-front they want to sell, and Cassie went to take a look. She'll be along shortly."

  Peter and the Wolf were two older gay men who ran a B&B patronized mainly by mature gay men, who were said to appreciate the good-looking young houseboys employed there. Their names were actually Peter Mellon and Frank Wolfman, but years ago, someone had used the sobriquet Peter and the Wolf. It had stuck, and thus were they usually called. They sort of fit the names. Peter was not tall and becoming quite rounded, complete with a shiny bald top. If anyone had needed Friar Tuck for a movie, Central Casting would have sent him along. Wolf, on the other hand, was tall and lank, with sharp gray eyes and a sarcastic grin that framed very business-like molars.

  Lainey was in fact followed by Trish and Sonny, who pulled into the drive and began unloading steaks, which Sonny took out to the grill, while I got the lobsters from the kitchen. I brought him out a drink while he checked the state of the fire and doused the meat with various sauces he had concocted. I not
iced he was limping, but had no opportunity to ask about it, as Cassie picked that moment to arrive and handed me a DVD with the explanation, "I brought this along to watch after dinner. It's a docudrama about Amelia Earhart. Supposed to be good, with really fabulous aerial shots."

  "Oh, that's a splendid idea!" At least I hoped it was. I knew Sonny and I would be interested. I wasn't so sure of the other five. Well, we'd see. "I'll just go put it safely in the house." I arrived at the back door the same time as Peter and the Wolf, who was carrying one of Peter's applesauce walnut cakes with some sort of butter creme icing. I knew it would be moist and delectable, and was already thinking with pleasure of tomorrow's leftovers.

  We all gathered in the yard to keep Sonny company in his cooking. He's one of the few people I know who can broil a lobster on a grill, get it evenly cooked and serve it up unburned. And he broiled a good steak as well. We had our drinks and munched on crudites with a dip of yogurt, dill and just enough bleu cheese to give it some pizzazz.

  The clouds were definitely moving in and a cool breeze was trying itself out in tentative little puffs, growing more self-confident as time passed. Eating inside would prove a wise choice.

  The table looked lovely. A white damask cloth held light blue dinner plates with silver filigreed edges, and creamy white salad plates with a thin blue rim, and was set with graceful Royal Danish flatware ... all from my grandmother. The wine and water glasses were plain and clear with simple rope stems, all set off by Cindy's centerpiece—a lovely grouping of narcissi, blue hyacinths and pale pink tulips in a bowl of streaked cobalt.

  It was simple and elegant and I was very proud of us.

  "Just look, Cassie," Lainey expounded. "See what you can do when you graduate from card tables."

  Everyone laughed and Peter answered, "And now you've got a great little breakfront as soon as we can figure out how to get it over to your place."

  "Well, whatever you do, don't borrow Mary Sloan's boat trailer and tie it onto that to move it," Sonny said with a sigh.

  Trish looked startled when the table erupted into laughter.

  Wolf was the first to speak. "So she finally got you, too? That makes about half the town now. What happened?"

  Sonny looked embarrassed and Trish answered. "We borrowed Mary's trailer to move a little boat I just bought. Unfortunately Mary came with it... the trailer, I mean. We got the boat into the water okay, then Mary said she'd pull the trailer out. She accidentally put Sonny's Explorer in reverse and damn near ran him over. Sonny was barefoot, and when he jumped aside, he came down on a big rock. We think he broke his middle toe."

  "You have just joined a large and unexclusive club." Wolf smirked. "Mary's hell when it comes to getting boats in or out. She left me standing in a hole with a sprained ankle, and she let Alex walk home in the rain with a badly scraped shin."

  "Don't forget me," Lainey chimed in. "She roared her truck out while I was still in the water. I got so much sand in the face, I went around for a week explaining I really didn't have pink eye. But, Sonny, did you take care of that toe?" Lainey was a nurse at the clinic, and never really went off duty.

  "Taped it to the next one. What else is there to do?"

  "Not much," Lainey admitted. "Try to stay off it. Ooo-oh, look at all this!"

  Cindy and Peter and I had brought in the food. Platters of steak and lobster, a large bowl of lightly curried rice with raisins and small chunks of mango and toasted almond slivers, a bowl of mixed salad greens with a dressing of boiling hot olive oil and vinegar, and fresh basil. And, finally, white corn muffins with kernels of shoe peg corn and chips of crisp bacon in the centers.

  Wolf poured the wine, to save Sonny's foot, and we settled in to a truly scrumptious meal. Conversation understandably faded to various murmured comments while we all took the edge off our hunger.

  Then Cassie looked toward Sonny. "Speaking of Mary Sloan, her girlfriend had a terrible thing happen, didn't she? Any luck finding who raped her?"

  The table went dead silent and silverware stopped wherever it was.

  Finally, Sonny answered. "There . . . uh, there is a possibility such an event occurred. But I'd love to know where you garnered that information." He always gets pompous when he doesn't know what to say.

  Cassie shrugged and pointed. "Peter told me. He said Freddie, the cook at the Bitter End, called to reserve a room for two friends next weekend and told him what happened. Why? What difference does it make?"

  "Well," Trish explained, "It's just a matter of protecting the victim from any embarrassment. . . you know, town gossip." She looked embarrassed herself. Certainly she hadn't phrased it very tactfully.

  And now Wolf made it worse. "Dammit, Peter, Freddie asked you not to blab it all over!"

  Understandably, Cassie started working up a head of steam. "So I constitute 'blabbing it all over?' So what am I? Chopped liver?" She looked around at seven guilty faces. "But you all knew, didn't you?"

  At that point we all needed something to do. Lainey dropped her napkin and started a floor search. Cindy decided the centerpiece needed some adjustment and was making a royal mess. Trish grabbed the breadbasket and ran for the kitchen. Peter picked that moment to stand up and start serving salads.

  And Cassie continued her accusatory screed. "I guess Sonny told Trish and Alex, and Alex told Cindy." She was wrong, but I felt this was not the moment to correct her. "Freddie told Peter and the Wolf. And," she addressed Lainey's back in a voice that carried throughout the house. "And you . . .you knew. You've been working the ER for a couple of weeks. You—my lover, my friend, my mate—you knew! But you didn't tell me! Why am I the only person in town who didn't know?"

  Lainey straightened up and snapped. "Yes, I knew. I also work under certain rules of patient confidentiality. Now you know. So do the neighbors. Feel better?" She polished off her wine and set the glass down with a thump that made me grateful for a thick table pad.

  Now it was my turn. "Wine, we need some wine here!" I went to the sideboard for a bottle that was "breathing."

  "Isn't this a lovely little wine? Sturdy enough for steak, light enough for lobster, a cosmopolitan little—" Seven voices put aside other concerns long enough to chorus, "Shut up, Alex!"

  I went around the table, pouring wine. As I got to Sonny, he was wrestling with a lobster claw. It broke off unexpectedly and skipped merrily across the table, landing in Cindy's ramekin of drawn butter, making a fine spatter on the tablecloth and then rolling onto the floor, where the ever-alert Fargo darted from under the table and began slurping at the butter. I had been watching the claw's progress and consequently filled Sonny's wineglass to overflowing.

  "Alex! What the hell—"

  Trish was already up and wiping his shirtsleeve with her napkin. "It's all right, Sonny, just a little mishap. Don't get snarly just because you're miffed I knew about Maureen first." That earned her a glare and a wordless gargle from Sonny and inquisitive looks from everyone else.

  I was no longer concerned with the success of our dinner party. It was obviously unforgettable. My worry now was that the crystal and china would survive it.

  Chapter 10

  We got through what was left of dinner with the age-old crutch of an in-depth exploration of the weekend weather forecast, augmented by a detailed exchange of various recipes no one would ever remember.

  Trish, Cindy and Peter, the truly civilized among us, eased us into the living room for coffee and dessert and plugged in the movie of Amelia Earhart's last hours. I love the description of a movie as a docudrama. It gives you total, individual choice of what you can consider to be absolutely true, possibly true or no-way true. These choices can lead to a lively discussion among the viewers, and I didn't think any one of us was up to that. I hoped no one would lead us into it.

  What I knew to be true was that Amelia was on a west-to-east global flight in a beautiful little twin-engine Lockheed, accompanied by her navigator, an ex-naval officer named Noonan who had resigned because of alcohol
problems. They were about to fly their longest leg of the journey, from Lae, New Guinea, to Howland Island, an infinitesimal blip in the middle of that trackless watery desert of the Pacific Ocean.

  Personally, I wouldn't want to make that flight with a cockpit full of radar, loran and global positioning gear—much less with the limited navigational aids of 1937. And a navigator who may or may not have been drunk the night before. But away they went, so heavily laden with fuel they barely made it off the end of the Lae runway. Flying dead reckoning with no firm idea of wind speed or direction.

  Theoretically they had a little help from the U.S. Navy, who had stationed some ships en route as they neared Howland, to fix her position via radio directional beams and tell Amelia where she was. But it didn't work out. The ships presumably heard her brief calls, but she couldn't receive their requests to broadcast longer so they could get a fix, because—unbelievably to me—she had scrapped a trailing antenna at Lae in order to carry about two more gallons of fuel. And lost she was. Eventually out of fuel, she and Noonan crashed somewhere at sea and perished.

  But, there was a possible alternative scenario. United States intelligence sources believed that Japan was building an airstrip and fortifications on the island of Saipan, preparing for war and violating some treaty or other. Earhart would pretend to be lost, per her radio calls, but actually bypass Howland and fly to the much larger Saipan, where she would get a great aerial view of whatever military preparations were going on. Then she would make a genuine low-fuel emergency landing on Saipan. The Japanese would doubtless radio the U.S. Navy that the famous aviatrix was safely down and to come and get her. Everyone would have a cup of tea and it would all be terribly civilized.

  The problem was an inexperienced young Japanese officer who was the first to reach them after they made a landing in shallow waters nearby. He was not so green he didn't recognize a couple of nosy bastards when he saw them, so he simply shot them. Then he radioed Tokyo and sat back to await his promotion. Tokyo panicked. In 1937 you did not yet go around shooting Amelia Earhart or ex-U.S. navy officers. They yanked the lieutenant and his squad off the island and put the fear of God into the natives. It simply never happened. The Japanese were most helpful in the unsuccessful search of the vast sea for Amelia. The Americans were suspicious but helpless.