The Off-Islander

by Peter Colt

  I made it to the Ghia. It was cold inside, but at least it was dry. The motor turned over on the second try, and the windshield wipers began to beat time like Art Blakey. I eased onto the road and slowly made my way back to the center of town and from there back to the ribbon of highway that would take me over the canal and back to Boston and my cold, lonely, half-filled flat.

  The wind drove the rain hard at the Ghia, and when I went over the bridge across the canal, the wind blew the Ghia all over the bridge. The public radio station out of Boston was a mix of static and faint jazz. It didn’t matter, because it was hard to hear over the rain beating against the roof of the Ghia. On the curves, the Ghia hydroplaned a little, and my having been drinking steadily since noon didn’t help. The roads were mostly empty, save for a delivery truck or two.

  I drove slowly through the dark, stormy night. The rain beat against the windscreen, and the wind shook the car, and I drove slowly along the highway back to Boston. I thought of the old lady in the house. She was crazy, or at least on the road to crazy. She had told me enough, assuming she was telling the truth, to tell me that Charlie Hammond could have been there in 1968. Hell, Ronald Reagan could have been there in 1968 for all she knew.

  I made it back to Boston and to my apartment somehow. The driving was scary enough that I didn’t start feeling tired until Milton. When I pulled off the highway and onto the back streets, it was still dark, but the early-morning people were moving around. The rain was steady, but not the downpour that had soaked me on the Cape. I pulled into my spot behind the apartment and pulled my weary self out of the Ghia.

  When I got upstairs, the apartment was still half-empty. Leslie still wasn’t there. The air inside was stale, and I was too tired to realize that had become familiar. I hung my trench coat on the back of one of the chairs at the kitchen table. I locked the door and kicked off my sodden shoes. There wasn’t much to see in the rest of the apartment. I was too tired to sit with a book and a drink, or to sit and brood. Instead I went right to the bedroom. The Colt .32 went on the bedside table, and the clothes went in a damp heap on the floor. I was too tired to take my watch off; instead I crashed into the bed and crawled under the covers to get what rest there was left to have.

  Chapter 8

  I slept close to the surface. The type of sleep where you hear every noise outside, toss and turn and mash the pillow a hundred different ways. I was too tired and too drunk when I went to bed. The sky brightened too soon. I tossed and I turned too much and rolled over a lot. Sleep was never something that came easily to me, and that night, or what was left of it, was no exception.

  In my bad dreams that night, Ruth Silvia was dressed up in black VC pajamas and a conical hat. She chased me across a rice paddy with a giant paintbrush and laughed at me with her maniacal cackle until she turned into a VC with an AK-47. At some point in time, I was hiding in the rice paddy while she hunted me. Then I was drowning in the shit-filled paddy water. Every time I tried to get out of the water, she would cackle and put one bare, calloused foot on my face and push me back under the water. I tossed and turned and fought with the covers and the sheets. I woke up after six fitful hours and had a headache to call the people at Guinness about.

  The bathroom had a hot shower and an Alka-Seltzer. I turned the water on as hot as I could take it, for as long as I could take it, and then turned it to cold. Later, I sat in the kitchen smoking an unfiltered Lucky and drinking a cup of black coffee. When I thought my stomach could take it, I made some toast and ate it as an experiment in holding my food down. When I was sure that I wasn’t going to be sick, I decided that I could make my way out in the world.

  Outside it was windy, and there was a steady drizzle. It wasn’t as bad as the night before, but it was steadier and chillier. My trench coat was still damp, and in no time my shoes squelched with every step. I felt like Philip Marlowe or Humphrey Bogart. The Colt .32 was still under my arm, and walking down Commonwealth Avenue, I could have been in some spy movie set in Paris. Orange and brown leaves had fallen from the trees and were spread out on the sidewalk and the street. There were pumpkins everywhere, and Halloween decorations were showing in windows and doors. It was the type of day that made me want to sit in a wing chair by a warm fire, reading a book and having a cognac.

  I made my way to the Boston Public Library, stopping at Brigham’s only long enough for a cup of coffee to warm me. The John Hancock was all glass and steel and reflected, as it always does, the buildings and sky around it. Today everything looked gray and wet, typical fall in New England. Inside, I made my way to the research section and the microfilm machines.

  The librarian grudgingly let me have the microfilms that I wanted and had me sign for a machine. She was probably a nice lady, but her profession demanded she run the microfilm with all the seriousness of a matron in a women’s prison. After three hours, I had read through back issues of the Cape Cod Times going back to 1946. I didn’t see Charles Edgar Hammond’s name anywhere, and Ruth Silvia’s name came up twice. Once was in 1968, when the police were investigating an accidental overdose out at her commune. A drifter unknown to most of the commune had OD’d on heroin and hadn’t woken up from his trip. The drifter was only known as Angel. The other article was about Ruth’s sister. In 1955, Ruth’s sister, Louise Adler, had died in a car accident. Louise was a widow and apparently owned a pretty sizable chunk of Cape Cod. The property was left to Ruth as Louise’s only living relative.

  I gave the matron back her microfilms, and she looked at me as though I had taken out back issues of Hustler instead of the Cape Cod Times. I just smiled blandly and thanked her. If she only knew. I made my way to the front exit and out into the damp. I walked to Government Center and watched as people were ducking in and out of the rain. A riot of different-colored umbrellas bobbed up and down on the pavement ahead of me as I made my way to Government Center.

  Government Center was the collection of architectural monstrosities that had replaced perfectly sensible and attractive buildings that housed local, state, and federal government offices in Boston. To say that Government Center was ugly was an understatement. It was simply a pile of concrete and brick boxes stacked up on top of each other surrounded by brick pavilions.

  I found the office I wanted in the ugly building that I wanted. A twenty-dollar bill convinced the clerk to stay open a little later than the sign on the office said. The Registry of Deeds in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a simple enough idea. Each county has its own office that records the deeds; then microfilm copies are made and sent to a central office in Boston. The clerk at that central office agreed with me that it would be faster and more profitable for him to take fifty dollars and Ruth Silvia’s name and print out all of the documents relating to her and her property. For another fifty, he also gave me the maps of the deeded plots on the Cape. I took my paper booty and headed outside.

  I used some of the Swift money to pay for a cab back to my place, so that the papers wouldn’t get soaked on the way home. The cabbie was old Boston Irish, but he didn’t try and take me to my apartment by way of Logan. I didn’t get too wet running from the cab up into my building.

  Inside, my trench coat was on the back of a chair facing a wheezing radiator. I had spread the plot maps out and started looking over Ruth’s holdings. Ruth owned a pretty good chunk of Cape Cod. Not so much that they would rename anything after her, and not so much that it looked big on the map. However, when you did the math and looked at the real-estate pricing, she was worth a tidy sum of money. It wasn’t Swift Aeronautical rich . . . but Ruth Silvia was a long, long way from being a starving artist. Looking at the papers, I realized that Charles Edgar Hammond could be living on any one of almost two hundred square acres of Cape Cod.

  I went to the living room and found a red felt tip pen. I started to outline her property boundaries. There was one plot that I couldn’t find. It was a large area, but the number related to the deed wasn’t anywhere on the map. It took me twenty minutes, but I foun
d the answer at the bottom of the map, in a key. The key had two ranges of deed numbers. One set was on the map for Martha’s Vineyard, and the other set was on the Nantucket deed map. Ruth’s other plot was somewhere on Nantucket Island. Little wonder it didn’t show up. Nantucket was thirty miles out to sea to the southeast of Cape Cod. I went to the phone and called Danny’s secretary. After a little back and forth, he came to the phone.

  “I think you should buy me a few beers and tell me how damned smart I am.” I can be a little cocky sometimes.

  “You found something?” He sounded excited.

  “I think I have what is known in the profession as a clue.”

  “A clue?”

  “Yes, in professional detective speak, it is an indicator or piece of evidence.”

  “I know what a clue is. I want to know what your clue is.” He sounded a touch annoyed.

  “How do you like the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe?”

  “I don’t. Most of them look like ugly pictures of ugly pussy. Why, is your guy hiding in one?”

  “Nope, but I think I may know where he is hiding.”

  “Where?” Danny was definitely impatient.

  “Nope, you have to buy me several beers and tell me how fucking smart I am.” I was enjoying it. Being cocky and having something figured out before Danny . . . I was absolutely enjoying it.

  “Okay, the usual place at 6:15.” He was as impatient to hear it as I was to tell him.

  “Okay, see you there.”

  “Andy?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re a prick. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do, you shyster, I do.”

  Chapter 9

  I put away my deed maps, deed information, and the yellow legal pad that I wrote my case notes on. I used a yellow legal pad and blue and red felt tip pens. Later, the notes would get typed up, and the maps, pictures, whatever information that I have, would be packaged into a case file. I will send one copy and keep the original. Most cases were not that complex. Infidelity or insurance fraud were usually a few pictures and a summary. This case would probably run a bit longer. I could now see why the Pinkerton men wrote out a version that looked like War and Peace.

  I slipped the Colt .32 back under my arm, put on a blue sport coat over it and my damp trench coat over that. I changed my wet shoes for a pair of older loafers and would just have to face the weather. I went outside and was surprised to find that the wind and the rain had let up. That was Boston in the fall. I started briskly toward the bar. It wasn’t far, but it seemed it, dodging the puddles and trying to avoid being splashed by passing cars.

  Danny, of course, got there before me. He was wearing a suit of soft gold and green plaid, with a design so fine that at a distance he looked to be wearing a solid, soft green suit. He looked up at me in the mirror as I stood in the doorway. I stopped only long enough to hang my coat on the coat rack by the door. The crowd was the same as always, men and women in business clothes . . . professionals, lawyers, and accountants. Beautiful men and women who made good money and kept regular hours.

  I half danced, half shouldered my way through them to the bar. Danny leaned over and said something to the young-looking office drone sitting next to him, and the kid got up and moved away. It was the lawyer equivalent of a dog pissing on a hydrant. Danny slid a Löwenbräu and a pilsner glass across the bar to where he had been sitting.

  “You’re late.” He said it as he pointed a finger at me around his glass of scotch. It was his signature move.

  “I made progress.” I picked up the bottle of beer and ignored the pilsner glass. It was an old battle in the war of Danny and his wife trying to make me suitable for polite company. I think they wanted me to pass for respectable at their dinner parties with the upwardly mobile set.

  “Progress, as in, on the case?”

  “As in, on the case. As in, I have managed to go where Pinkerton couldn’t.” I was feeling more than a little smug. The beer was cold and helped me feel physically better than I had all day.

  “You mentioned something about a clue.” He was looking me dead in the eye. I was glad that I had never had to be on the stand opposite him.

  “I did. I did.” I was enjoying drawing it out.

  “Would you care to elaborate?” Even Danny had limits to his patience. “Because I am missing dinner with my wife and daughters, and my wife is noticing that after a number of meetings I come home smelling of scotch, cigarettes, and bar. So why don’t you elaborate before my marriage is irreparably damaged.”

  “You’re Catholic. Your marriage can’t be damaged.” I smiled. “I figured out who had the P.O. box that Charles Edgar Hammond got his checks sent to for three months in 1968.”

  “That doesn’t seem that impressive. It certainly is not worth damaging my marriage over.”

  “You are right, that in and of itself wouldn’t be.” He knew when to wait and did so, looking at me and nursing his scotch. “The P.O. box was then and is still leased by a slightly crazy hippie artist named Ruth Silvia.”

  “Relevance?” Danny wasn’t physically in court, but I didn’t think his mind ever actually left it.

  “For a time, Ruth Silvia ran a hippie artist commune. I spent the wee hours of this morning drinking cheap bourbon with her and talking about the wild, wild year of 1968. She says that it is possible that Hammond might have been there in ’68.”

  “Possible? She isn’t sure?” Cross-examining me gently.

  “She described ’68 and the commune as one long party, or more accurately, one long, drug-fueled orgy.” Danny grunted, reminding me that he is Catholic enough to disapprove of the goings-on in 1968. “Lots of acid got dropped, lots of pills popped, lots of grass got smoked. Not only that, but most people there were using first names or names they chose, like Moon or Phoenix.”

  “What makes you think that Hammond was one of them?”

  “Two things. One, she went out of her way to tell me at great length about how anyone could have been there using an assumed name, and she wasn’t sure. She was steering well away from him or anyone definitively being there.”

  “I am not following you.”

  “How would you describe the climate toward the government in 1968, toward the establishment?”

  “Not good at all.”

  “Is it safe to say that someone getting checks from the VA at a hippie commune might actually draw attention? Silvia says they had a system where people went into town to get the mail and then it was left in a communal box.” I was smiling now.

  “You are postulating that those checks would stand out, draw attention?” He was smiling now, too. “That someone receiving a VA check, taking it out of a communal mailbox at a commune would stand out? Is that what you are implying?”

  “Yep, VA checks on a hippie commune in 1968, I think those would stand out a lot.”

  “Do you have anything else?”

  “Yes, an anonymous drifter named Angel died of a heroin overdose there in 1968, around the time that the checks stopped coming to the mailbox.”

  “You think that was Hammond?”

  “No, I don’t. I think if I was trying to lay low on a commune, an OD would bring attention that I wouldn’t want. The police would show up. The coroner would show up. There would be a lot of questions and a lot of IDs being checked. People would be run for warrants, and the police would probably tear the place apart pretty good. If I was trying to stay off of the radar, then I definitely wouldn’t feel comfortable.”

  “And you would leave?” Danny said it the way that the smart kid in class always does, asking the question when the question is really the answer.

  “Yep, I think I would split in a hurry.”

  “Okay, so where is he? Las Vegas, LA, where?”

  “Nantucket.” This time I got to be the smart kid in class instead of Danny. I smiled and ordered another Löwenbräu on Danny’s tab. I looked up at the mirror behind the bar and noticed the woman from before with the honey-colo
red hair. Tonight, she was dressed conservatively in a gray business suit. The skirt went down past her knees, but she definitely had great calves. She had a brooch, but I couldn’t make out what it was other than shiny. The guy with the perm was talking to her, and I wanted to believe that she looked bored.

  “Nantucket Island . . . off of the Cape?” Danny didn’t like curve balls.

  “Yup, small island, shaped like a shoe. Former whaling capital of the world, setting for Moby Dick. ‘Call me Ishmael’ and all that.” I enjoyed being a little smug with Danny.

  “I am familiar with it. Why do you think he is there?”

  “Ruth Silvia had a sister who died on Cape Cod in 1955. She owned a lot of the Cape, which Ruth inherited.” I was laying it out slowly for Danny.

  “I still don’t see it.”

  “I went to the Registry of Deeds to look up Ruth’s land holdings on the Cape . . . which are substantial.” I explained to him how the deeds were recorded and tracked. “There was one plot that I couldn’t find on the map. It was driving me nuts until I looked at the key.”

  “The plot is on Nantucket?” It did not take him long to put the pieces together.

  “The plot is smack in the middle of Nantucket.” I said it grinning at him.

  “I think I should have had dinner at home.” Danny was not smiling.

  “Why?” I pretended to be hurt.

  “Because this isn’t evidence, this isn’t even a clue . . . this is a hunch. At best, it is solid conjecture,” he added.

  “Danny, most detective work is a mix. The evidence runs cold on the West Coast in 1972. LA or Las Vegas. That is it.” I was explaining it slowly.

  “Yes.” He was skeptical, and the economy of words was evidence that he didn’t want to commit much more to my hunch.

  “If you were looking to go to ground or just drop out of society, Nantucket is about as far from the West Coast as you can get. It gets a lot of tourists in the summer but is pretty slow and desolate in the winter. It is small enough that you will know if anyone comes looking for you, but big enough that you can stay out of the way.”