Eureka

by William Diehl

Nobody spoke above a whisper, if they spoke at all.

  Rusty led me down a long hall, which was to our left and at right angles to the lobby. On the left side of the hallway, more French doors leading to the tennis courts. On the right were the rooms. The hall ended in a T, which was Culhane’s suite. Rusty tapped on the door, then opened it with a key, and ushered me in. I heard the door close quietly behind me and I was alone.

  A large room. New carpeting, expensive hotel furniture but hotel furniture nonetheless, more French doors facing the ocean. A fireplace in one corner, with a copper screen, and over it a large piece of what appeared to be a hunk of very faded, red driftwood mounted on the bricks. Beveled paneling stained the color of sun-blanched wood. Light-colored curtains and drapes. Against the right wall, an old rolltop desk with three framed photos on its flat top. A deep-piled white sofa about eight feet long, with matching chairs on both sides, facing the ocean. Bedroom and bath to the right and back toward the lobby. On the left, an alcove with a wet bar facing the living room, and behind it, a small kitchenette. A floor-model RCA radio in the corner adjacent to the desk with a record changer on top of it, which was playing Edith Piaf’s “L’Etranger.”

  It was a bright, cheerful suite of rooms with a spectacular view, and a surprise to me. I was expecting dark wood and masculine furniture, with a stuffed marlin over the fireplace and a gun rack in the corner. I was expecting a dirty shirt thrown over the sofa, ashtrays running over with cigarette butts. A glass ring or two on the wooden table. Then I remembered it was a hotel, decorated by the hotel’s interior designer. The few personal touches and the photographs were as out of place as a waiter’s thumb in a bowl of soup.

  I walked over to the desk and saw what was apparently part of a leg cast. There was a small gold lieutenant’s bar pinned to it. It was the only visible souvenir of his remarkable war record anywhere in the room.

  I checked the piece of driftwood. It appeared to be off the stern of a boat. The black lettering, which was cut off by the shattered wood, said Dool . . . and under it Prin . . . Both were faded by sun and sea, and were barely legible.

  “That’s what’s left of my old man’s fishing boat,” Culhane’s voice said behind me.

  I turned. He was standing in the doorway that led to his bedroom, wearing a dark blue terry-cloth robe and scrubbing his hair with a white towel. He threw the towel over his shoulder and went behind the bar.

  “Irish Mist suit you?”

  “Doesn’t get any better.”

  “Straight up, one cube of ice?”

  “That’s a good guess.”

  “It’s my drink.”

  He filled two highball glasses with more than generous slugs and dropped one ice cube in each. It was a little early for me but I wasn’t going to pass up a glass of Irish whiskey.

  “Tommy was a fisherman,” Culhane said, handing me my drink. “He and Kathleen Brodie came over from Doolin, County Clare. She was fifteen when they married.”

  “When was that?”

  “Eighteen eighty-four. They raced the stork all the way across the Atlantic. They were determined I’d be born on American soil and they just made it. I was born on Ellis Island in the physical examination clinic.”

  “How’d they end up out here?” I asked.

  “No fishing in New York City. So they bundled me up and headed across the country to this ocean. Fishing was all he knew. He hired out until he saved enough money to buy his first boat, called her Doolin Princess after my mom, and painted her bright red, Mom’s favorite color.”

  “I mean how did they end up in San Pietro?” I asked.

  “Back in those days this was a fisherman’s community. The natural bay, great fishing waters ten miles out there.” He waved vaguely toward the Pacific. “Hell, there used to be an icehouse just about where you’re sitting, ice to keep the fish fresh until they got back on the Hill. So this is where they settled. We lived in a little shack up in the village, when it was called Eureka.”

  “And you use your mother’s maiden name instead of your father’s first name?”

  “That was his idea. He said one Tommy in the family was enough.”

  He turned and held his glass up to the piece of wood.

  “Here’s to both of you,” he said.

  “They’re both dead?” I asked, joining the toast.

  “Yeah. Tommy went out one day with his three-man crew. A heavy blow came up and we never saw him again. Couple of months later a guy down in Milltown who knew me saw that on the rocks. That’s all we found. No other wreckage, no bodies. The Pacific has an ironic name. It can be damn unforgiving.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “He was okay, Tommy Culhane was. Good husband, good father, and one hell of a fisherman. Nothing breathing scared him.” He chuckled, and added, “Loved a good brawl as long as it wasn’t over anything serious.”

  “How old where you?”

  “Eleven. My mom died two years later. In the state hospital, of pneumonia.”

  I knew about institutions like that. My mother had spent two years in and out of such dismal places, ending up in a state hole jokingly called a hospital. No matter how you dolled them up, nothing changed. There were always the smells of Lysol mixed with feces lingering in the halls and rooms; always burly men in sterile white pants and shirts, who called themselves “attendants” and resolved “incidents” by bending fingers back or hitting places that did not bruise easily; who slaughtered the King’s English but used long medical terms as casually as a preacher throws around cynical hypotheses like “God” and “Christ.” My mother’s fingers were permanently crippled and her dementia was so deep that lethargy was a generous way of explaining her state of mind. She lay comatose for a month before she died of what was wryly diagnosed as pneumonia. I knew she was not comatose, I could tell by the way her eyes flicked briefly toward me. There was a momentary hint of recognition in that glassy stare when I went to visit her. I think she found some semblance of comfort in retreating into her own troubled and chaotic psyche. The last time I saw her she was skeletal and her gnarled fingers lay limp and useless at her sides. Truth be known, she died of starvation, which I learned is not an unpleasant way to die. For a few years after her death, my dreams were often haunted by the sudden intrusion of her mummified look and by the way her hand felt when I held it, like a bunch of twigs. I would awaken squeezing my own hand. Eventually these troubling images became less and less frequent but they never fully vanished.

  And I thought about Brodie Culhane; about a thirteen-year-old kid left alone in a rough-and-tumble waterfront town like Eureka, a town without laws or morals; a kid growing up with a strong sense of justice in spite of it all, a sense of justice possibly tempered by expediency.

  “What’d you do?”

  He took a hard sip of his drink, let it roll around in his mouth for a second or two before swallowing it, and smiled. It was a fond smile, a good-memory smile.

  “I became a stableboy.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. “But I was the Gormans’ stableboy,” he said rather proudly. “After the funeral, Ben took me up to meet old man Gorman. Mr. Eli took me by the shoulder and said, ‘I’ve got a job for you,’ and led me to the stable. I had a small apartment over the stalls. I’ll tell you, the old man could be a real pisser but he looked after me like I was a gold nugget. I was treated like family, rode to school every day in the shay with Ben, ate dinner with them at night. I even had a yarmulke for meals and holidays, but he had the buggy take me down to the Catholic mission every Sunday for mass.”

  “How come he treated you so well?” I asked.

  “My mom was their washerwoman. And I was Ben’s best friend. Still am.” He went back into the bedroom. “I’ll be about five minutes,” he said.

  I walked over to the rolltop and looked at the photos. One was a tintype, obviously Culhane with his mother and father. Culhane looked to be about seven or eight, a tough-looking little boy in a ha
nd-knit sweater and a cap pulled down above one eye. He was wearing knickers and one leg sagged down around his ankle. Even at that age there was defiance in his wary smile. His father was a big, hefty, dark-haired man with a robust smile, his arm resting on Culhane’s shoulder, while his mother was a wisp of a woman no more than five feet tall, dressed in a long skirt and a sailor’s pea jacket. In the background was the Doolin Princess.

  The second photo showed Buck Tallman in the saddle of a big Appaloosa. Culhane was standing in front of the horse holding its bridle. A good-looking kid in his late teens or early twenties, whom I assumed was Ben Gorman, was sitting behind Tallman, his hands around the big lawman’s waist.

  The last picture was of Culhane standing with a young man who had one arm around Brodie and his other around the waist of a small woman. She looked to be in her early thirties, striking and beautifully groomed, with the dark hair and sharp features of a Jewess. Next to her was Ben Gorman. I assumed the woman was Ben’s wife, Isabel, and the young man their son, Eli, who had died in the car wreck. From their dress, the picture appeared to have been taken in the early twenties. It was an intimate photograph; they were all hunched together and smiling warmly at the camera.

  He returned to the room dressed in black pants and a lightweight plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up halfway to his elbows.

  “Nice photo,” I said, nodding toward the picture.

  “Isn’t it though,” he said, and led me toward the French doors.

  “Give you a start, brother?” Ben said. The two men rushed together, hugging and laughing like children. They walked briskly back to the house, both chattering away, cutting each other off with one story after another. Ben didn’t talk about the future. He didn’t have to.

  “Eli and Isabel will be home in the morning,” Gorman said. “The kid’s dying to meet you. You’re his hero, Brodie.”

  Culhane dreaded the meeting.

  He was edgy when he and Ben had breakfast but tried to conceal it. They joked about the past, about kids who had grown up and moved on, about Delilah O’Dell and her infamous club. Ben drove them out to end-o’-track, and Brodie strolled back and forth trying to appear casual. He tried to roll a cigarette but his left hand was still stiff from a shrapnel wound and the tobacco fell out and was whisked away by the wind. He balled up the paper and stuck it in his mouth.

  “Here comes the train,” Ben said gleefully. “Come on, come on.”

  He took Brodie by the arm and they walked up to the makeshift station as the train rounded a bend and appeared through a thicket of pine trees. As the big engine hissed and puffed to a stop, he saw the kid on the platform between cars, looking through the steam, seeing his father and waving, and then, behind him, the tiny, dainty figure of Isabel, one hand holding her hat to keep it from flying off. The kid helped her off the train as Ben and Brodie went to meet them.

  Time had been more than generous to her.

  Or perhaps his memory was tainted.

  He remembered Isabel as a tiny voice in the dark, the words chiseled in his brain. “First love is forever.”

  He smiled at her, stepped close, kissed her on the cheek, and gave her a hug. He could feel her heart quicken the way it once had so long ago and for a moment he was swept back to the greenhouse with her beside him in the dark on a horse blanket.

  He stepped away from her. “You haven’t aged a minute in twenty years,” he said in a voice that the years and the Marines had toughened.

  “Irish blarney,” she said with a smile and, turning to the youth, said proudly, “Brodie, this is Eli, your godson.”

  He was taller than Brodie and shorter than his father. A husky kid in good shape: dark hair, brown eyes with a touch of mischief in them, and a solid grip when Brodie shook his hand.

  “I feel like I know you already,” the kid said, and looked at the bars on the shoulders of his uniform. “We followed the war from the day it started, wondering where you were over there. They didn’t tell me you were a captain.” Brodie could tell the kid was impressed.

  “Last-minute thing,” he said. “They upped me just before I got discharged. The pension’s fatter. You play baseball like your old man?”

  “Football’s my game,” he said. “More action. Baseball’s kind of boring.”

  “Boring, then!” Brodie answered, and looked at Ben. “What have you been teaching the kid?”

  Ben shrugged. “He’s a halfback at the University of Pennsylvania,” he said.

  “One more year to go,” Eli announced. “I took this semester off. Got a busted knee in the Army game so I’m taking it easy.”

  “Then what?”

  “Haven’t decided yet. I may stay back East for a while. I’ve got some friends in Boston.”

  “Male or female?”

  A cocky grin: “Both.”

  “Wanderlust, huh.”

  Eli stuck his hands in his coat pockets and looked down at the ground. “I don’t think I’d make a good banker,” he said.

  “Nothing to be ashamed of,” Brodie said. “Neither would I.”

  The kid laughed, and looked back and forth at his parents as if to say, “See, he understands.”

  “I got a friend from the service who works down in Hollywood making moving pictures. Maybe you and me, we could take a day or two and go down, see how they do it.”

  “That sounds great!” the kid said eagerly.

  As they started toward the car, Ben ran ahead. “Wait there a minute,” he called over his shoulder. He reached in the car and got his Brownie camera.

  “Can you work one of these?” he asked the conductor.

  “I can try,” he answered. Ben handed him the camera. “Just look through here, hold it real still, and press the button.”

  So they stood together: Brodie, with his godson’s arm around his shoulder and his arm around the boy’s waist, and Isabel with an arm around Eli and Ben. And a stranger took their picture and Culhane knew in his heart he was back to stay.

  He opened the French doors and I followed him out to a redwood deck facing the bay. Culhane took my glass and went inside to freshen our drinks.

  “Your partner’s still in the hall of records, which is what we laughingly call it,” Culhane said. “He says he’ll meet you after lunch. I ordered us steak sandwiches and baked potatoes. Sound okay?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  I rolled two cigarettes and handed him one and lit them both. We leaned on the railing and watched a sailboat tacking its way to the mouth of the bay. I was wondering what he was thinking and why we were suddenly getting so chummy. Then he said, “How did you ever get in so deep with Palomino that time?”

  He said it so casually it almost went by me. Then it hit me. I had thought we had finished elbowing each other and were ready to get down to business. Now he was bringing up my old business, a thing that had been put to bed a couple of years ago.

  “Touché,” I said with half a grin.

  “Just curious,” he said with a shrug.

  “I made a mistake in a poker game,” I told him, without taking my eyes off the boat.

  “How’s that?”

  “I was playing on borrowed money. If you don’t have the price in your kick, never get in the game.”

  “You were playing on Palomino’s money, right?”

  “That’s right, and it was his game.” I shook my head. “That was my second mistake. Incidentally, it was never proven. That I didn’t settle up with him, I mean.”

  “Well, killing him did raise some eyebrows,” he said, raising his own.

  “He more than had it coming,” I said, looking at him. “He was holding a fistful of hot diamonds and had left a string of bodies behind to get them, when it all went sour on him.”

  “And three of his hooligans backing him up. That one was right on the edge, taking them all on like that.”

  “I didn’t have much choice,” I said. “They didn’t want to go to the gas chamber and I was the only thing between them and the exit.
We got all the rocks back, you should know that, having brought it up. Two hundred grand in hot ice. There wasn’t an inquiry about the thou some people said I owed Palomino. That’s why I have to wonder where you heard it. Sounds like something Eddie Woods might tumble onto.”

  “Know Eddie, do you?”

  “You know I met him yesterday,” I said flatly. “Until then, I wouldn’t have known him if he’d walked up and kicked me in the ankle.”

  “That thing with Fontonio was unfortunate.”

  After a moment or two, I said, “Is it my turn yet?”

  He smiled back with his lips. His eyes got a little bluer, a little less mischievous, a little warier.

  “You want a look in my closet now, is that it?”

  “It crossed my mind. How come you’re not up at the club playing golf with the rest of the elite?”

  “I have a bar tab in the clubhouse, that’s as far as it goes. Sometimes somebody picks it up. Anonymously. That way it’s not a bribe. The apartment and the car come with the job.”

  “I’ve never been that lucky.”

  “It’s not luck, it’s appreciation.” He looked at me and his eyes had softened again. “Everybody knows I’m underpaid, just like you are. All cops are underpaid and underappreciated. All we get is the dirty laundry.”

  “So ask for a raise.”

  “I don’t need a raise. I do what I do because it’s my job, just like you do. I don’t want any more money. I’d just end up buying a lot of crap I don’t need.”

  The doorbell chimed and Culhane opened the door to a callow young man whose blue jacket was a little too broad in the shoulders and waist. He wheeled in the table, busied himself setting out sterling silver knives and forks, and lace napkins, and a sterling silver pot of coffee, then brought up sandwiches, still hot under stainless covers. Culhane gave him a dollar. There was no check to sign.

  We sat down to eat. The sandwich was an inch-thick boneless sirloin larger than the slice of white bread that provided the sandwich part of the meal. The potato had been cut open, stuffed with butter, and mashed in the skin.

  “What the hell are you really after, Cowboy?”