Black Tide

by Brendan DuBois

  In exchange for this wonderful arrangement, all I have to do file a column each month through my modem. The arrangement I had with the admiral is that my column would appear, sometimes edited, sometimes not, and if they considered it crap, another column would be inserted under my name. When I was going into the hospital earlier this summer, in one three-day space of time I had written two columns ahead of schedule. But only once have I ever missed a deadline, and that had occurred last week.

  I tapped the heavy envelope against my teeth as I thought about that. Miss a column and get a letter from the editor. Makes sense. But maybe something else was going on. There was a new administration in Washington, and maybe past embarrassments were quietly being disposed of. Perhaps my little electronic sleuthing in DefNet last week had been detected. Then this letter could be something else, a dismissal. Promises had been made, of course, that I would be set for life in exchange for what the Department of Defense had done to me and my friends in Nevada. The promise included this job at Shoreline, but that wouldn't be the first time that promises had been broken. Just ask the South Vietnamese, the Kurds or the Bosnians. With one motion I tore open the envelope and a thick piece. of stationery came out, embossed with the same seal and words as the upper left-hand corner of the envelope. It was a simply written message:

  Cole

  Have you forgotten what a deadline means? You've got another two weeks.

  -Holbrook

  Well, there had been that arrangement back then. I had been promised total freedom to write anything I wanted and to submit a blank sheet of paper if I felt like it, but something had changed. He still wanted a column, no matter what the arrangement had been. It looked like the admiral's blood was slowly becoming the fluid of an editor. I put the letter and envelope down in my lap and looked out over the ocean. The air was hot and still and I remembered what Paula had said yesterday. She was getting tired of summer and wanted it over, and I could see her point. It was hard to do your work with so many people around you, vacationing and having a good time. Their sense of relaxation and play was intoxicating, and it was hard to keep focused, something like being a janitor in an opium den. In a few weeks Labor Day and the traditional end of summer would be upon us, and the tourists and their intoxication would leave.

  But I had so much to do in that time. The Petro Star. My column. And my promise to Felix, and in remembering that promise, I thought with another smile of Christy, and decided Felix would be the first I would attend to, later today. In the meantime, the waves were something to look at.

  Back in June and about three days after my surgery I was curled on one side, watching a soap opera on television and wondering what had happened to all those wonderful game shows I had watched as a kid growing up in Indiana. At least those shows pretended they were passing on some sort of knowledge, ranging from history to art to Hollywood. I'm not too sure what kind of knowledge the soap opera writers were trying to provide, though it seemed to revolve around whose bed got warmed. The door to my hospital room then opened and Felix came in, with a woman I hadn't met before, which wasn't surprising, considering Felix's sweaty track record. Felix had on a soft black suit with a white shirt and no necktie, and if I had been feeling better, I'm sure I would have said the woman was beautiful, so beautiful that she could have easily made some fashion photographers in New York City swoon. She had long dark hair and lightly tanned skin, and wore a light blue two-piece woman's suit with ruffled white blouse that was both executive-looking and something that should be worn with a teddy underneath. He smiled and nodded and sat down in one of the room's chairs, crossing her legs. .

  Felix said, "How's it going, Lewis?" and I whispered back, "Doing better," as he bustled about my room. He had another bouquet of flowers, which he put on the windowsill, and another bag of books. I remembered once telling him that as a high school student I had loved the novels of John D. MacDonald, and with each visit he had brought a couple more paperbacks with him. The books remained on the windowsill, out of reach. I was still not all together since the surgery. The body rebels against being put to sleep and cut open, and mine was no different. I was drifting in and out of sleep, I was sloggy with constipation, and I felt greasy, since all the nurses could do for me was a sponge bath. You try sponge baths for a couple of days in June and see how good you smell.

  Felix sat on the arm of the second chair and said, "This is a good friend of mine, Lewis. Christy Gunn. We were going to do some shopping at Faneuil Hall today and thought we'd stop by."

  She smiled at me and said, "Nice to meet you, Lewis."

  I nodded back, too tired to say much, and then Felix smacked his palm against his head and said, "Damn it, hon, did you put money in the meter?"

  "No, I thought you did."

  Felix laughed and said, ''Any more tickets, it's the Denver boot for my car. Hon, you stay here with Lewis. I'll be right back."

  He left, and I think I was even too tired to feel shy at being alone in a hospital room with such a beautiful woman. Yet if Christy felt equally uncomfortable, she hid it well. She smiled at me and deftly took off her jacket and slung it over the back of the other chair. Even with the ruffles in the blouse, it was easy to tell that she was quite well proportioned.

  Christy said, "The both of you seem very interesting."

  "Really?"

  "Really," she said. "Felix told me a lot about you on the drive over here. About how the two of you met, the places you've both gone to and the things you've done. He called you a holdout, one of the last ones left with any sense of duty and responsibility."

  That was getting a bit too deep for me, and I tried to change the subject by saying, "How long have you known Felix?"

  She smiled again, wider. "Oh, we've been friends for a while. Occasionally business associates. In fact, he asked me to come over today and visit with you."

  "He did?"

  "Unh-hunh." She got up from her chair and sauntered over; and then touched my cheek for a moment, and I closed my eyes, enjoying the touch. Christy said, "He asked me to do something special for you. Felix has arranged everything, and we have an hour together. We won't be disturbed."

  I closed my eyes, conscious of the throbbing pain in my side that the codeine pills couldn't quite mask, and of the smell of my skin and the sheets and that cloying perfume that Christy was wearing; my mouth was still dry. I opened my eyes. She was still there, breathing and smiling. Oh, to be whole again.

  "I would like a drink of water," I finally said.

  She nodded, went to the tiny bathroom, filled up a cup and came out again. While the sight of her was something that I'm sure would have stirred me at any other time, on this day the taste of the cool water upon my dry tongue was all that I lusted after. She held the cup, and while I drank, she touched my cheek with her free hand.

  When I was done, she put the cup down on a counter and then washed my face with a wet towel, and I looked up at her and said, ''And what exactly has Felix arranged?"

  She smiled again. "What do you think?"

  "I'm not sure."

  She laughed and touched my cheek again. "Oh, stop looking o stunned." She went over to the windowsill and began rummaging around the book bags. "Felix knows you love these books, and he also knows they haven't been touched since he's delivered them. So. I'm here to read to you, if you'd like."

  I shifted, grimaced some as the pain blossomed a bit on my side. "I would like that very much." She pulled out a couple of books. "The ones here are all by the same author. Is there a special one you'd like?"

  "The one that has the color blue in the title," I said. "That's the first one in a very good series."

  She took out the right paperback from the bag and pulled the chair close to my bed, and she opened up the book and started reading. She read with one hand and held my hand with another, and for the next fifty or so minutes, I was intoxicated with so any things: the sight and smell of her, sitting so very close to me, the warm caress of her hand upon mine, her quiet and s
trong voice, and the words themselves, written so many years ago by a craftsman who knew the power of phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Not once did she pause or stop for a rest or a drink. She kept on reading, and I wondered how much longer she could keep on going.

  Then came the knock upon the door. She looked up, disturbed. Then she looked over at me with another smile and she leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.

  "Felix is fond of you, Lewis," she said, and then she got up and put her jacket back on. There was another knock and Felix came in, an innocent look upon his face, and said, "Well, I got caught up in something. I hope you don't mind."

  "Nope," I said. He looked at his watch. "Well, it's getting late. Tell you what, Lewis, I'll come back in a couple of days for another visit." He winked. ''Alone.''

  "That would be fine," I said.

  As they left, Felix turned to Christy and said, "I hope everything went all right."

  She touched my cheek as she left. "He was a perfect gentleman," and Felix said, grinning, "Of course he was."

  Christy had left the book on my bed. I picked it up and resumed reading where she had left off. The book had her scent upon it for the rest of my stay there.

  It was late on Friday afternoon after a wonderful lunch and I had a headache. I had spent a lot of last night's hours reading and rereading the files that Diane Woods had provided me with, and on this day I had gotten to work. Earlier this morning, when it was finally a reasonable hour on the West Coast, I had talked to Dennis and Owen Martin, the sons of Ben Martin, the former Manchester police officer who had been on guard duty that night at the Scribner Museum. Dennis lived in Seattle and maybe that city's rainy weather had something to do with his mood, for when I started talking to him, he had just two words in reply before hanging up on me and those words weren't "Merry Christmas."

  His brother Owen --- living in Los Angeles --- was only marginally better. He had listened somewhat patiently to my lying spiel: I was doing a follow-up story on the theft for Shoreline magazine, and I was wondering what could he tell me about his father and his museum job.

  Owen had said, "I really can't answer that question, Mr. Cole."

  I was in my upstairs study, phone to my ear, pen and pad of paper in hand, bare feet up on my desk. "Excuse me?"

  “You see," he said, his voice clear over the thousands of miles, "I was already living out here before he retired from the police department. All I knew about his job at the museum was what he told me in his letters. It was just a job, something to help out with his pension plan, and it kept him busy. He worked a lot of years as a cop, and that was all he knew. He was scared of staying home during the day --- I think he would have worked just as happily at McDonald's, serving burgers and fries, so long as he made a buck and felt like a wage earner. He was not one to take it easy and loaf. With Mom being dead, I think being alone in that house would have driven him crazy."

  "What happened after the theft, then? Do you remember that?”

  Even three time zones away, I could make out the sigh of despair in Owen Martin's voice. ''A lot of strange things can happen to you because of the little choices you make, Mr. Cole. I found out in school that I had a knack for engineering and so I'm out here working for Lockheed. My brother Dennis can make things with his hands, beautiful pieces of pottery, and so he's up in the Pacific Northwest. My dad, he needed a job after retirement and was happy as a museum guard, and that choice killed him."

  His voice was stronger. "You see, my dad kept clean in his years on the force. Even piddly shit like taking free lunches or Cokes during the day, he wouldn't do it. He was always proud of the uniform and the badge, even if some of the guys he worked with weren't. So imagine what it was like, after retirement as a cop, to be a suspect in the biggest art theft in New England's history. To be interviewed by detectives you knew, who you worked with. To be grilled and followed by the FBI. It broke his heart, and it killed him."

  I doodled a bit on the pad. "The news reports said that your father thought he recognized one of the fake cops over the video monitor and that's why he let them in."

  "Why they let them in," he corrected me. "There was another guard on duty that night, and maybe my dad recognized someone and maybe he didn't. He was getting to be an old man, and his eyes might have played tricks on him."

  "Do you think he did recognize someone? And then later changed his mind?"

  "I don't know. He never said much about this whole crappy thing afterward."

  "Did your dad have any interest in art at all?"

  "No, not at all." "Did anything unusual happen after the theft, like visitors, odd phone calls?"

  ''Jesus Christ," he said, exasperated, "you mean shit-ass phone calls like this?" and then he hung up on me, which was probably a reasonably good idea out in California.

  Later that morning, I had started work on tracking down Craig Dummer, Ben Martin's partner that night, who hadn't left much of a trail since he had moved out of that duplex in Bainbridge. The police records that Diane had pulled for me still listed Bainbridge as his address, and still gave DiskJets as his place of business. I called DiskJets, pretending to be the New England Savings Bank, wanting to verify his place of employment for a car loan. A bored clerk at the other end said he had left on his own nearly four weeks ago, and there was no record of a new job. No relatives listed in his job application. No other information of any use. Previous place of employment? At that question the bored clerk seemed to perk up a bit, and she said, "Um, can you hold for a second?" and when she did that, I hung up, not wanting to have to explain myself to her nosy supervisor.

  Calls to the Bainbridge town hall were of equal use, as well as a call to the Bainbridge post office. No change of address had been filed. Nothing else was available at the State of New Hampshire's Department of Motor Vehicles in Concord. You can do a lot with phone work, but this Friday wasn't one of those days.

  Craig Dummer was on the move. I rubbed at the base of my aching head. I didn't like the coincidence of Felix Tinios receiving those postcards at about the same time Craig was leaving his home in Bainbridge. I also didn't like Justin Dix, the museum security head, not having a better handle on Craig Dummer's location. When I had met him and had gone over the painting theft, he implied that he and other police officials always knew Craig's whereabouts. But he had been wrong, either through oversight or on purpose. Then there was Cassie, and her odd reactions. The tiff yesterday, was that real or manufactured? And earlier, she had said that Justin had problems and secrets of his own, and in looking through the information Diane had gotten for me about Justin Dix --- including his credit history --- I thought I had something.

  The security director of the Scribner Museum had trouble paying his bills, and the year he suffered the worst was the year the Winslow Homer paintings had been stolen. I fired up my Apple computer and in another hour or two of info-surfing --- including a couple of not very legal entries into the data banks of some credit bureaus --- I found that among his overdue bills, Justin had also suffered a car repossession, along with a partial garnisheeing of his salary at the Scribner Museum, the same year, the thefts had occurred.

  "Who will guard the guardians, eh, Justin?" I whispered, while looking again at Diane's handwritten report. And for the benefit of any Roman ghosts haunting this particular stretch of the New Hampshire seacoast, I repeated myself in Latin: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

  For lunch I had a lobster roll, French fries and a salad, which I ordered from the kitchen at the Lafayette House, my hidden neighbor across the street. To get to my home means traversing the parking lot of the Lafayette House, but I reached a mutual agreement with the management of Tyler Beach's most famous hotel when I first moved here. They've left me alone, and I've kept an occasional eye on the parked cars of their guests during my comings and goings. Though I've never eaten or stayed at the Lafayette House, I have reached a slightly illegal agreement with the head chef. In exchange for ordering meals right out of the kitchen, I pay t
he menu price in cash, right to the chef's pocket, plus 10 percent. Both of us think we're getting the better deal --- he gets extra cash in his pocket that goes unrecorded, and I get great meals that I don't have to cook and clean up after.

  But lunch and an hour or so of relaxed reading didn't make me feel any better. I went upstairs to the bathroom, took three aspirins and tried to convince myself to improve.

  When I came out of the bathroom, I went into my study, past the ceiling-high bookshelves and to my desk, where the Apple Macintosh computer was still on, humming quietly away, its electrons doing a tremendous dance that made so much work and information gathering so easy. I sat down, letting the faint squeak-squeak of the chair work its way into the knot of my brain. I was still trembling a bit with energy from all that I'd done this day, and I felt a stirring of success. I had done well. I had learned a lot. I was on a roll, and I knew I shouldn't walk away yet. I knew from my past work at the DoD that there were days ---we called them Gold Star days --- when everything went right, when all the codes were broken, all the information fell together, all your calls and inquiries were answered. On Gold Star days, you worked until your eyes rebelled and your fingers trembled with exhaustion, because you were never sure when another bout of luck like that would happen again. From the files on my desk I picked up the one marked Petro Star, searching until I found the printout of Cameron Briggs' business interests, and got the number I wanted, for his main office in New York City. I looked at the time. It was just past two in the afternoon.