by Peter Colt
“That and I’d have to ask you a few questions. If the answers pan out, then we would go to the lawyer’s office, and you could submit a claim.”
He took a sip of his coffee and then asked, “What kind of questions, man? I mean, like, personal stuff?” His hippie smile was friendly, but his eyes were like they were in the yard, gauging range.
“No, questions about your parents, where you lived, how long you’ve been here, that sort of thing.”
“Oh, wow . . . um, well, I’m an orphan. I never knew my parents, and I don’t have any relatives.”
“Oh, um, okay, have you ever lived in Colorado, California, Wyoming, or Nevada?”
“Nope, I lived in Oregon, a little town outside of Eugene, but I moved around chasing jobs. I ended up out here as a caretaker for the Cranberry Company about ten years ago.”
“You work for the Cranberry Company? Do they provide this house for you?”
“Yeah, this house is one of the reasons I took the job. They don’t pay much. I think they own it or it is part of a lease of theirs.”
“Were you ever in the Armed Forces?” This was looking less likely all the time.
“No, man, me? No, I have a heart condition that kept me out of the draft. What do they call it, 4-F? Even if it hadn’t, I am not cut out for the army, man. I don’t like people telling me what to do. Plus, I am one of those conscious objectors.” I didn’t correct him. He sipped more of his coffee.
“What about a birth certificate, family papers, or any sort of documents?” I was pretty sure that I knew what the answer was going to be, but sometimes you have to try.
“Gone, man. Lost. I lost everything I had except my driver’s license.”
“You don’t have any relatives on the Cape, do you?”
“I might, but I wouldn’t know them. They didn’t tell us anything in the orphanage. I might be related to you and not even know it.” He smiled again.
“Okay, Mr. Harriet. I should get going. Thanks for your time.” I got up and he rose, too.
“Does this mean I don’t get any of the money?”
“Probably not. We have to be able to establish that you are related to our client. We can’t do that without documentation. That and, based on what you told me, you weren’t in any of the places that we know she had relatives. Thanks for the coffee.” I stuck my hand out, and he took it.
“No problem, man. I am sorry that I couldn’t be more help.” He looked sincere.
“No worries.” I started to turn away and turned back again. “Say, you don’t know a lady named Ruth Silvia, do you?”
“No, should I?” He didn’t pause, skip a beat, or look shocked.
“No, I guess not.”
“Who is she?”
“She is a distant heir of the estate.” I was moving toward the kitchen door. The dog walked over to the door. Harriet opened it for me.
“Hey, man, I am sorry you didn’t find what you were looking for.”
“Thanks. It just wasn’t meant to be.”
“What will happen to the money now?”
“Oh, the lawyers and the probate judge will work it out. It doesn’t make much difference at this point.”
I walked over to the Ghia and got in. She started without protest, and The Band sang about the lights going down on Dixie. I wheeled the car around and watched Harriet in the rearview mirror, watching me from the doorway. He kind of looked like he could be Hammond, but he also looked like a thousand other guys.
He had been my best, last chance, and now it looked pretty much like a dead end. I would have to call Danny and explain that we were absolutely nowhere. Charlie Hammond wasn’t on Nantucket, and I didn’t have any idea where he was.
When I reached the main road, I turned and headed out of town. I needed to clear my head. I followed Milestone Road out until it ended in the village of Siasconset. ’Sconset was made up of lots of nice houses and lots of small cottages. The nicer houses all dated to the turn of the century, and the smaller fisherman’s cottages were even older. The Benchley family had their house somewhere among the older homes, out on the bluff facing the ocean. It was long believed that the Amity Island in Jaws was based on Nantucket.
I turned toward Sankaty lighthouse and followed the tight lanes with their high hedges toward the old lighthouse perched on the bluff. When I got there, I parked in the small lot and walked over to the bluff. The chain-link fence with the Coast Guard sign on it rattled and shook in the wind the way a lifelong smoker coughs in the morning. The bluff was high, and the ocean hurled itself onto the sand below with all the fury of the early fall storm that was gripping the island. I looked out at the gray-blue unending vastness of the sea. It was curling in on itself, and there were white caps everywhere. The wind was strong enough to whip into my face, and if it had been coming from my back I would have gone over the bluff.
I never saw who or what did it. One minute I was standing on the bluff wondering if I could get a cigarette lit in the wind, and then the next I heard footsteps rushing in the grass. I started to turn, but it was no use. Something, someone, heavy and solid, crashed into me. I went ass over tea kettle over the bluff’s edge.
The U.S. Army has its Airborne School at Fort Benning, Georgia. I, like every other paratrooper in the history of U.S. Army paratroopers, went there. They run you every day, everywhere. Almost immediately, you start practicing the parachute landing fall. The PLF is an almost religious thing at Fort Benning. You practice it all the time. You practice it a lot into giant sandboxes. The sand gets everywhere. It gets in your clothes and your shorts. Paratroopers practice the PLF so much that their sides hurt from landing feet and knees together, falling side of the knee, hip to ass, and then onto your back. Your sides become bruised, and you get sick of doing it. You do it in the pits, you do it from the Swing Landing Trainer, and from the 234-foot tower. The advantage of religiously worshipping at the altar of the PLF is the first time, and every time, you launch out of a plane and your chute opens, you hit the ground hard and PLF. You don’t think about it. It is just instinctive.
I was in the air for a second that seemed like twenty long minutes. I hit a lot of sand and rock that was sticking out from the bluff several feet. I did a classic PLF and then rolled the next thirty feet down to the beach. I lay on the beach, listening to the waves and waiting for my body to start breathing again. It did. I hurt, but nothing was broken. Somehow my Colt was still in its shoulder holster. I looked up, but there was no one up on the bluff. I brushed off as much of the wet sand as I could. I had gotten lucky that there had been a collapse and some sand and rocks were sticking out.
I got up. There was no way I was going to climb up the bluff I had just been pushed off of. I looked left and then right and turned toward Codfish Park. I could walk back to the Ghia on the only road I was familiar with. Walking back to the car, I thought about who might have pushed me off of the bluff. The problem was it could be anyone. After the walk, my head was clear and the Ghia was where I left her. I didn’t need the keys; the door was unlocked. Everything was where it should be, and the car was unmolested. I got in the Ghia, started her, and steered her toward town, toward the hotel and the phone. I was driving back closer to Danny and to reality.
Chapter 18
I followed the road back into town and parked in the hotel lot. My room had been cleaned, and there were more messages to call Danny. I took off my coat and poured a slug of whiskey from the bottle. I settled into a chair with the whiskey, my notebook, a cigarette, and the phone. I dialed Danny in Boston and waited on hold, listening to the wind as it whipped outside. Danny came on and was only a little less harsh than the wind.
“Please tell me you have something.” It was more of a command than a question.
“I met the guy. The age is right. In all honesty, I can’t tell much from the picture.” It was hard to tell much from a grainy thirty-year-old picture of a young man in Marine Corps dress blues.
“What did he say?” Danny wasn’t a fou
ntain of patience.
“Not much. I didn’t come right out and ask him if he was Charles Hammond, who had deserted his wife and child almost thirty years ago.” I took a sip of the whiskey and felt it slide down into the center of me.
“What, did you give him some bullshit story about an inheritance?” Danny sounded a little disgusted, and I felt my face flush.
“You know, counselor, I don’t ask about how you defend your clients, so don’t question me about how I do my job.”
“Okay, okay, killer, so what did he say?”
“Nothing. The guy I spoke to is an aging hippie out here just dropping out of life. That being said, let me give you some information so that you can have some dirty cop make a little money getting it for you.”
“Hey, come on, you used to get me information, but no one could accuse you of being dirty.” He sounded almost sincere; then I remembered he was a criminal defense attorney.
“Yeah, but I did that because we were friends, and back then you didn’t have two nickels to rub together. I knew you before you were trying so hard to be respectable. I need you to check a name and a license plate for me.”
“Isn’t that your job? What am I paying you for?”
“I can check on it, but you can get it done a little faster than I can. I know that you are in a hurry to get results.”
“Okay, tell me.” I told him Harriet’s name and gave him the plate number to the pickup. He said that he would call me back in a couple of hours. He hung up, and I didn’t bother to tell him about the incident on the bluff. He paid me to take risks. He didn’t need to hear about all of them.
I got up and went to my bag and pulled out the legal pad with my case notes on it, the folder from Pinkerton, a fresh legal pad, and two felt tip pens. I managed to tuck all of it into a brown paper bag. I put on my coat and headed back out into the wind and rain.
The local library was actually the Nantucket Athenaeum. It turned out to be a handsome Greek Revival building with broad steps, big doors, and white Doric columns, across from the post office. If the outside of the building made me feel small, the inside made me feel welcome. In front, at the far end of the building was a large desk/counter affair, with a suitably matronly woman in her sixties behind it. She looked at me as if I had tracked in a smelly dog turd.
To my right were rows of books, and to my left was what I had come for, the reading area. Rows of small partitioned desks and hard wooden captain’s chairs in front of them. A few of them were occupied by old men reading newspapers. I sat down behind an unoccupied desk and took out the folder, my case notes, and the fresh legal pad. I went through it all slowly, taking notes as I went, drawing and redrawing the timeline. I was trying to make the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle fit, and I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t forcing pieces into place. Occasionally I would take a break to go out and smoke a cigarette on the wide front steps or walk around in the small, attractive park attached to the Athenaeum.
I finished up my work knowing that I was no closer to finding Charlie Hammond than when I had started. In fact, I was certain that he wasn’t on Nantucket Island and that I was wasting my client’s money. Why had someone pushed me off of the bluff? It could have nothing to do with the case. I went back to the hotel so that I could hear as much from Danny. He called fifteen minutes after he said he would, and he was terse at best. The truck was registered to the Cranberry Company. Harriet had gotten a Massachusetts driver’s license ten or eleven years earlier. There was nothing on paper for him before that in the Commonwealth. He had a couple of vagrancy charges from the western states but otherwise no record.
I was not sure what I had been hoping for, but Danny was succinct and explicit when he said, “There is nothing going on out there. Get your ass back here and stop wasting our client’s money.” He didn’t sound happy, but I wasn’t sure that I could blame him. He was going to have to explain to his client how I had gone on a vacation on her dime. Most private detectives have cases that don’t come to a neat, end-of-the-TV-show-hour conclusion. Missing persons cases are usually the ones that don’t. Sometimes they don’t get resolved. They are almost as bad as when someone hires you to look into a homicide that happened years ago. Time is the detective’s enemy; the more time that has passed, the less likely one is to solve a case. Knowing these things doesn’t make the failures any easier to take.
“I’ll get the next ferry to the mainland. There has been a pretty big storm out here, so things might be backed up.”
“All right, just don’t have too extravagant a vacation on the Swift expense account.” He sounded more uptight every time I talked to him.
“No, I won’t. Danny, I really thought I had a lead that the Pinkerton boys didn’t. You know, a shot at solving this thing.”
“Andy, you know better than I do that sometimes leads dead end, that trails go cold, and that cases don’t get solved. You gave it your best shot, and that is all that matters.” He knew I hated losing.
“Okay, I’ll be home tomorrow or the next day. It all depends on a boat at this point.” Saying it tasted like vinegar and ashes in my mouth.
“Come into the office when you get back and I will settle your bill. On the plus side, if you and Pinkerton can’t find her father, then he doesn’t exist. If he doesn’t exist, then there is no scandal waiting to happen.”
“True. Still, I would like to think that I could have found him. Fuck. This was a pretty thin lead.” I took another sip of whiskey, shook a Player’s out of the box, and lit it. The smoke worked its way into my lungs, sending off chain reactions in my body. It had been a pretty thin lead, but I was sure that it was going somewhere.
“Andy, don’t worry about it. You tried your best. Now come home.” He hung up, and I finished my drink and my smoke listening to the wind howling outside. I still hadn’t bothered to tell him about getting pushed off the bluff. Now it almost didn’t seem real.
I spent another hour and a half going through my notes and the Pinkerton folder. I went through it beginning to end and back again. In the end, I was no closer to finding Charlie Hammond. When I couldn’t take much more of it, I decided to get cleaned up for dinner. I showered and dressed in my normal clothes: jeans, white button-down, and corduroy blazer. The Colt .32 went back in its shoulder holster, and the parka was now dry. My beard and my hair were as neat as either could be. It had taken a Herculean effort to get the sand out of my hair.
I walked out the door of the hotel and down the steps. The wind whipped around and pulled at me. I could hear the branches of the large elms moving and swaying, and wondered if I would hear them crack. The weather suited my mood. The wind was slapping wet leaves against every surface that would hold them. I wound my way through the old, sometimes cobbled streets of the quaint New England island, former whaling capital of the world, until I arrived at Shelly’s apartment. I went up the wet, slippery steps and knocked on the door.
She opened the door and ushered me in. “Hiya, Tomcat.” She held her face up to be kissed, and I was not one to say no. She was wearing a long peasant skirt, with low-heeled riding boots and a denim work shirt. Peasant chic. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she smelled softly of lilacs. “Are you hungry, Tomcat?” She was smiling and pulling on a sheepskin coat.
“I could eat. What do you have in mind?” I enjoyed watching the way that she moved; she was comfortable in her body in a way that spoke of high school cheerleading or dance lessons. She would hitch her shoulders when she thought I wasn’t looking.
“You are going to take me out to a place called The Club Car.”
“I am indeed. Why is it called The Club Car?”
“There used to be a steam railroad out here about a hundred years ago. It ran from town to ’Sconset. It folded when cars became commonplace. The old club car is literally attached to the restaurant. It is now the bar, and there is a charming old rogue who plays the piano and sings raunchy old songs.”
“It sounds like my kind of place. How is the food?”
“Pretty good, but we are mostly going for the bar and the raunchy songs.”
“I would expect nothing less.”
We left her place and walked down the steps. We walked down the alleyway that made up Old North Wharf. The wind was just as fierce, and describing the night as raw just didn’t seem to do it justice. I understood why she had chosen a sheepskin coat. We were walking arm in arm, and it felt nice. It had been a long time since I had walked anywhere with a woman walking pressed up against me for warmth and companionship. We turned onto Easy Street, and the wind snatched at us, whipping wet leaves and generally reminding us of how small we were.
We stepped out of the rain and the wind into a world of warmth and soft light. The restaurant was nice, with a dozen or so tables with white linen tablecloths. One wall had a few large booths. Every table had a tea candle in a glass chimney providing a soft pool of light. There was a door to the left that led to the old club car. The hostess came and led us to a small table by a window.
“It is a mess out there.” I was master of the obvious.
“I know. It looks bad. The ferry probably won’t run tomorrow if it keeps up like this.” She was looking out the window and watching the leaves blow by.
“That is good.” She looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t find the man I was looking for. My client’s lawyer wants me to go back to Boston as soon as possible. He told me to stop vacationing on his client’s dime.”
“Tomcat, I thought you were making up some story about being a detective. You really are one, aren’t you?” She was looking at me with large, round eyes.
“I am, but not a very good one, according to the lawyer.” I could hear Danny’s voice in my head telling me not to vacation on the Swifts’ money.
“He sounds like an asshole.”
“He is. He is also one of my oldest friends, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t an asshole.” She laughed, and it was nice to hear.
“Tell me more about him.”
“Danny . . . well, Danny and I grew up together in South Boston. Southie.”
