The Off-Islander

by Peter Colt

  “Mr. Webster?” He nodded. “I’m Andy Roark . . . Deputy Chief Blount said I should talk to you.” I left it at that. He looked me over, and I, in turn, saw a man who was once physically powerful but whose body was betraying him with its age. His hands were big, with tobacco stains on his thumb and index finger, and his face was ruddy. He had the small starburst of veins in his nose and cheeks that comes from a lifetime of too much drinking.

  “Call me Web. Only the damned Jehovahs call me Mr. Webster.” He stuck his hand out and we shook. “C’mon in.” I followed him inside. On one side was a table, and to the right I could see a couch and a TV in another room that seemed to run perpendicular to the one I was standing in. In front of me was a kitchen. All of it was done in knotty pinewood paneling. Not the fake laminate, but real pine boards, lovingly fitted tongue and groove, stained the color of good single malt scotch. All of the artwork was nautical in one way or another. Seascapes in dark oils on the walls, a sailor’s valentine in the corner, bits of driftwood that had been turned into lamps, braided rope for frames or around colored glass lamps—it was all there. There wasn’t a feminine touch anywhere that I could see.

  “This way.” He led me around to the room on the right, which was low and long, taking up half of the first floor. There was a stairway off to the left leading upstairs, and old Persian rugs covered the floors. The room had two couches, two chairs, and a big console TV. I followed Web to a door at the far end of the room and into an enclosed sunroom.

  “I don’t get to sit out here once it gets cold, so I spend as much time out here as I can.” He pointed me to one of the two leather wing chairs that were backed up against the house and flanking a small bookcase. There was a glass of amber fluid with a couple of ice cubes in it, sweating slowly on top of the bookcase. The top of the bookcase was covered with numerous concentric circles, where other glasses of scotch on the rocks had sat time and again over the years.

  “Phil Blount said that you were interested in an OD out at the Silvia place?” It was a question any way you put it. The porch had the same nice paneling as the inside of the rest of the first floor. The windows were screened and were made up of a series of glass panels that opened outward at the bottom of each panel. The view outside of them was of the harbor, where the ferry would leave for Nantucket. I could see the occasional fishing boat going by.

  “I am. I am working a missing person case, and I think that the subject may have been at the Silvia place around that time.” I settled into my chair with the view of the harbor.

  “I worked that case. It was kind of a dead end. Kid took too much H and didn’t wake up. Not much to it.” He was looking at me.

  “I understand. Do you mind looking at a picture and seeing if you recognize the person in it?” He was packing a pipe with Captain Black and looked up at me with his watery eyes.

  “Sure, you came all this way.” He put the pipe in his mouth, lit it, and drew on it until it was going. The rich smell of pipe tobacco quickly filled the room. I pulled the picture of Charlie Hammond out of my pocket and handed it to Web.

  “Does this man look familiar? By the time of the OD, fifteen years would have passed.” Web held it up in the light and squinted at it. He puffed on his pipe, unleashing thick, rich clouds of smoke.

  “I wish I could say for certain, but I can’t.” He shrugged and handed the picture back to me. He reached over and took a sip from his glass. “I know I didn’t see anyone with short hair and pressed clothes. I wish I could be more help, but between the age difference and the hair, I just can’t say.”

  “I understand. Who did you see there?” I slid the picture back in my pocket.

  “Well, Ruth Silvia was there. She was different then. She had this spark. She was the type of woman who didn’t give a damn about what people thought of her. She was older, but men, even men ten, fifteen years her junior, chased after her. Ruth was the type of woman that the good churchgoing women talk about in loud whispers after services on Sundays. That woman seemed like pure, carnal sin on legs. She’d look at you and suddenly you had an itch you needed to scratch.

  “There was always talk that her place was like Sodom and Gomorrah. Every night there were parties, some said orgies, and if the wind was blowing right, you could smell the pot smoke from the road. We got called out there once in a while, but nothing came of it. Whatever was going on there was never enough to get us interested in it. In the winter, the place quieted down.” He took a sip and pulled on the pipe and seemed to be in the memory of it inside the confines of his own head.

  “Was there more to it, or was it just talk?” I didn’t want the flow of memories to dry up.

  “Oh, there was plenty to it. I don’t know if they had full-blown orgies, but they definitely were into Free Love. There were plenty of drugs. Pot, pills, acid—that sort of thing. Hell, they kept a package store in town in business for two or three years by making weekly runs in that blue pickup truck of hers.”

  “Any real trouble before the OD?”

  He turned a watery eye to me, looking at me over the smoldering bowl of his pipe like he was aiming a rifle at me.

  “Nope, no real trouble. Occasionally someone would get drunk in town or one of the locals might get in a fight with one of the hippies, but that was about it. Mostly they liked to stay out at the farm and smoke, drink, and fuck.” He turned to look out at the water.

  “Did they make much art or sell much?” I wasn’t sure of where I was going, I just didn’t want to lose him.

  “Art . . .” He coughed or maybe laughed. “The only one of them with any damned talent was Ruth. Have you seen her paintings?” I shook my head. “She was like New England’s version of Georgia O’Keeffe. Rest of them were just there for the free ride and the good times.”

  “What were they like?” He was drifting a little and staring out the window.

  “They were hippies, mostly middle-class kids. College kids, the types who thought that burning draft cards and marching around meant something, but they couldn’t be bothered to actually get out and do it. Instead they drank and smoked and fucked. I think that Ruth liked to have them around so that she could feel like their mother. Or their prophet or something. She definitely didn’t mind having beautiful boys around.”

  “They didn’t have a lot of get up and go, then?” Web just snorted. “Who did the maintenance around the place? Did Ruth hire someone from in town?”

  “Dunno, I always thought that she was happy to let the place fall down around her ears, but when we were out there for the OD, the place looked pretty good. Someone had definitely been taking care of it.” He stared off at some unseen memory and sipped more of his drink.

  “Someone from in town? A handyman?” I asked the obvious question.

  “Nope, people in town didn’t like Ruth. No wife would let her husband go out there to work. They were all afraid that Ruth would use her feminine wiles on their husbands.” He all but snorted it at me.

  “You said that they were into pot, pills, and acid? I saw in the report that the kid who OD’d did it on heroin. Did that strike you as odd? Was there anyone else there doing it?”

  “No, heroin wasn’t really big out here.” He took a sip of his scotch and pulled on the pipe.

  “How come the body of the OD was never ID’d? Even in 1968, they had teletypes and missing persons bulletins.”

  “Kid didn’t have any identification on him. There were no flyers or bulletins matching his description. Kid didn’t even have much in the way of personal effects. His old grungy clothes, Mao’s Little Red Book, a small amount of H, and his works. That was it, all of it in an army surplus duffel bag. No jewelry except a shitty rope bracelet like you can get in the shops in town. The kid was just a blank. No one was even sure of his name. No one was going to look really closely at an OD. No tattoos and no scars, he was just generic, like an extra in a movie.”

  “He just appeared out of nowhere, didn’t stay long, and died at Ruth Silvia’s place?”
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br />   His head started to nod, moving toward his chest, and eventually staying there. He answered the rest of my questions by snoring at me for five minutes. I stood up to go, and his pipe fell out of his mouth and he woke up.

  “Was I out for long?” His voice was thick with sleep.

  “No, Web. I was just letting myself out. Thank you for your time.”

  “Sure, sure, sorry I couldn’t tell you more.”

  “No problem. Thanks again.”

  He pointed to my chest with one thick, stained finger and said, “You ought to get rid of that thing.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That little Colt .32 popgun. You’ll just get yourself hurt with something that small.”

  “Thanks.” No one ever likes having their gun criticized.

  “Seriously, get a gun you can put a man down with. At least a .38.” He then laughed or coughed, and I was not sure which. I heard it rattling in his chest as I made my way through the house. The last thing I heard was the gentle, bell-like tinkling of ice cubes in his glass.

  Chapter 12

  I let myself out of his house and sought comfort in the Ghia. It was late afternoon, and if I left now, I would be in time to sit in traffic outside of the city and feel frustrated. Instead, I started the Ghia and headed for a restaurant near The Steamship Authority. It sat on a hill and overlooked the Steamship terminal and the dock. When a ferry wasn’t in, there was a pretty good view of the water. It was the type of tourist trap that was decorated in lobster pots, fish nets, and nautical items, and counted on being close to the ferry to provide business.

  The waitresses all wore tight shirts with horizontal blue and white stripes and little black captain’s hats. The drinks came with a lot of ice and a little bit of booze, and the cocktail napkins had red lobsters in the corner. The menu featured every possible variation of deep-fried seafood in the Western world, as long as you wanted fried clams, fried shrimp, fried scallops, fried oysters, fried haddock, fried cod, or fish and chips. They also offered clam cakes, but everyone knows that the best clam cakes come from a small clam shack in Narragansett, Rhode Island, named after somebody’s aunt. Tonight, they also had a lobster roll on the menu as the special. It is a well-known fact among the three or four people who know me that I am trying to become the world’s leading authority on lobster rolls and eat them almost whenever they are offered.

  I sat at a small table with a green tablecloth and candle in a red glass holder. I had a view of the harbor and could see the bright sun begin to ebb across the last bit of blue sky. The waitress with blue and white stripes stretched tight across her ample breasts brought me a Cutty Sark on the rocks. There was just enough whiskey in the glass to moisten the ice cubes. I ordered a lobster roll with a side of coleslaw. When in Rome and all that. The Cutty tasted harsh and good all at once. That first sip of whiskey is always a mixture of iodine and astringent, but when the ice starts to melt, the flavor and sweetness of the whiskey opens up. After the first few sips, I felt warm and less tense.

  I had a yellow legal pad on the table in front of me and was trying to make sense of what I had just learned. Had I just learned anything? In the 1960s, it was common knowledge that Ruth Silvia had a commune of sorts. Mostly a drug-fueled orgy out of which only she seemed to produce art. According to Web, most of the people who were there were privileged losers, the types who could afford to drop out of society and drink and smoke and screw. They mostly kept to themselves and went into town when they had to.

  According to Web, they weren’t into hard drugs, so where did John Doe get his heroin? How come the kid didn’t have any ID? If the people at Ruth’s were as ambitionless as Web said, who was doing the maintenance on the place? The waitress came and saw me scribbling on the pad.

  “You want another drink, hon?” Her accent was what could be charitably called local.

  “Please, a double this time?” I had to compensate for the unfair ratio of ice to scotch.

  “Sure. What are you doing, work?” Her voice wasn’t as bad as the sound of the gulls.

  “Something like that.” I smiled at her, but it was as good as their ice with a trickle of scotch cocktails.

  “What are you, a professor or something?” She was chewing a piece of gum with an aggressiveness that reminded me of a police dog going at someone’s leg.

  “No, I write children’s books.” My smile was starting to hurt my face.

  “Oh, huh . . .” She did an about-face and walked away.

  She came back with my lobster roll, coleslaw, and scotch. She set them down in front of me and left without asking if I wanted anything else. The lobster roll was served right, tons of meat and enough, but not too much, mayo, heaping out of a buttered, grilled hot dog bun. I finished the meal fairly quickly. I decided to have one more scotch and watch the lights of the darkened harbor. I didn’t have much more to add to the legal pad and couldn’t eat any more if I had wanted to. I paid and tipped her more than she deserved, but the lobster roll was good.

  In the Ghia, cutting through the dark night, I felt full and warm. Life wasn’t bad. I was listening to jazz on the radio and smoking Luckies. The Ghia hummed up the road, and I was impressed as I always was when the night sky started to get purplish; then the skyline of the city loomed, well-lit, in front of me. I could see the Prudential and the John Hancock towering above the rest of downtown. I took the off-ramp and started making my way through the maze of one-way streets that define driving in Boston.

  It took a little bit longer because the streets were full of half-sized cowboys, ghosts, Stormtroopers, and princesses. The other assorted pint-sized professions were represented, too. They moved about in slow-moving packs, wielding flashlights and carrying pillow cases. It made for slow driving.

  My parking spot in the back of the building was more or less the same as I remembered it. I parked and got out. I could hear little kids moving in the streets. In the alley behind my building it was dark. The light on the side of the building was out. Either burned out or enterprising thieves had preemptively smashed it as they had done in the past. Sometimes the light just went out until it felt like coming on again. I could hear someone shuffling in the dark.

  My eyes weren’t adjusted fully to the dark. There were inkier pools of it farther back in the alleyway. I pushed, rather than slammed, the car door shut. I heard a muffled cough in the darkness. Someone was there. I stepped deeper into the darkness away from my car. I was feeling my way against a low iron fence, on the other side were trash cans. I could hear breathing. Was someone waiting for me in the dark? I started to sweat, as my hand, with a mind of its own, snaked into my jacket and pulled out the Colt .32. I tried to take the safety off quietly, but it sounded like a sledgehammer on pavement to me.

  I could hear his breathing. He wasn’t far. I could hear the rustle of clothing. Then the Arc Sodium light kicked on and I was staring at Death. Black robes, scythe, skull for a face. I almost put two bullets into the skull.

  “Hey, man!” Aggrieved. “Hey, I just came back here to get sick. I had too much to drink. I’m sorry. Please don’t shoot me.” He was a college kid. Just a fucking kid whom I had almost shot in the face.

  “Screw.” I waved the pistol as my hand began to shake. The kid didn’t need to be told twice.

  I let myself inside the building and away from the cool fall weather. Upstairs and inside the apartment, nothing had changed. There were no messages on the machine. There were only half the books, records, dishes, and furniture. There was no Leslie, no woman with the honey-colored hair, not even a buxom waitress in a silly sailor’s outfit. I had no plants and, unless you counted the dust bunnies under the furniture, I had no pets.

  Maybe I should get a cat or something to keep me company. Instead, I settled for jazz on the radio, scotch with ice in a glass, and more detective stories on the couch. I couldn’t see myself with a cat. I have nothing against them, but I just couldn’t see one sitting on my lap while I read.

  I woke up the next m
orning when the rude man with the jackhammer started to tear up the sidewalk. I rolled over and tried to pull the pillow around my head, but the man with the jackhammer was a professional, and I had to give in and get up. There was nothing left to eat in the house, and the jackhammer was making life less than bearable. I showered, dressed, and decided on breakfast out at the greasy spoon around the corner.

  It was sunny out but chilly, and I was glad to have remembered the scarf I was wearing. People were starting to wear scarves and gloves when they were out. You could see your breath as you walked, but it still was chilly only in the morning and night. Empty candy wrappers fluttered by, reminding me of last night’s packs of marauding midgets.

  I thought about the kid in the alley. I had almost shot him. It wouldn’t have taken much. Was I cracking up? Leslie always wanted me to go talk to someone. She was worried about my dreams about the war. Was it catching up with me? Was I imagining the NVA, the Cong in my parking lot now? Was I reacting and thinking like I was back in Vietnam? Back on the trail? How the fuck could I function like that? Even I knew that pulling a gun on a drunk college kid was not an appropriate way to act here.

  On the way to the greasy spoon, I stopped to buy a Globe and a pack of Luckies. I stepped into the greasy spoon and sat at a free seat at the counter. I went there often enough that the waitress didn’t have to ask me if I wanted coffee. I ordered a cheese omelet, potatoes, bacon, and toast. I read the paper until she brought the food. It was all depressing, and I was glad when I was able to eat and not worry about the state of affairs in the world or in the Commonwealth. I paid and left.

  Back in my apartment, I spent the rest of the morning making phone calls and travel arrangements. I set up a reservation on the ferry to take the Ghia and myself out to Nantucket. Next came a call to a hotel that I remembered in town. It wasn’t far from the ferry, and it was nice and clean. I couldn’t afford it in the summer, but in the off-season it was reasonable enough. It certainly wouldn’t raise eyebrows on the expense account. I called Danny’s office to talk to him, but he was in a conference, so I just left a message with his secretary about my going to the island in the morning and where I would be staying.