Port City Black and White

by Gerry Boyle

  “Those people conjure up all sorts of hoodoo and voodoo. It’s part of their nature.”

  “And they’re good dancers,” Brandon said.

  She looked at him.

  “You think we should be concentrating on Chantelle’s friends and acquaintances?” Kat said.

  “No,” Annie Young said. “You find him, her dysfunctional drug-addicted family will just drag him back down. I think wherever he is, most likely he’s better off.”

  The conversation paused, the rain falling steadily and dripping from the overhang onto the steps. Annie Young said, “Well, I guess—”

  “Your neighbor, Mr. Cawley,” Brandon said.

  “The fornicator.”

  “Yeah. Have you ever heard him or seen him behave inappropriately toward Fatima Otto?”

  “The man wouldn’t know appropriate if it hit him in the head. I’ve felt him looking me over.”

  Now that’s inappropriate, Brandon thought.

  “Did he say something?” he said.

  “No, but women can sense these things.”

  Annie Young looked at Kat for confirmation.

  Kat smiled. “Men,” she said. “They’re animals.”

  “Anything else about Fatima that you can think of?” Brandon said.

  Annie Young hesitated, looked up and down the street, as though someone might be listening out there in the dark and the rain.

  “I’ve seen her talking with the white boy,” she said. “Down the street. And you know how these people are about their daughters. If they’re not virgins—”

  “Was she talking with him or having sex with him?” Kat said.

  “One leads to the other,” Annie Young said, tightening the belt on her robe. “Maybe he tried to force himself on her and she was so ashamed that—”

  “Small guy, artsy-looking?” Brandon said.

  “I don’t know about artsy. I just remember he looked dirty. Clothes all raggedy, hair hanging down on his face. I said to myself, ‘Oh, dear. They come all the way from Somalia—’ ”

  “Sudan,” Brandon said.

  “Whatever. They come all this way and think they’re going to get a piece of the American dream, and this is what this poor girl ends up with? This raggedy mongrel? It was really kind of sad.”

  “Oh, it is sad all right,” Brandon said. “It’s sad all around.”

  If it had been TV, they would have pounded on Lil Messy’s door, told him paint from his apartment had been found on Fatima, interrogated him until he confessed, Lil Messy in tears, saying he didn’t mean to kill her. But if he couldn’t have her, nobody could.

  As it was, Brandon and Mia sat in the cruiser in the 7-Eleven parking lot, wrote up their interview with Annie Young, e-mailed it to Perry and O’Farrell, and spent the rest of the night answering calls.

  They arrested a guy at Longfellow Square for public drinking, added an assault charge after he spat beer in Brandon’s face.

  A traffic stop on Sherman Street brought in a guy wanted for failure to appear in court in Bangor, his girlfriend for being a fugitive from justice in Massachusetts, where she’d jumped bail on a heroin possession charge. At 2 a.m., they stopped a pickup on State Street for a taillight out, found a two-year-old without a car seat, the driver drunk but not as drunk as her boyfriend, who was sitting in the passenger seat covered with vomit. At 3:45, a domestic on Sherman Street ended with the guy arrested for possession of a firearm, a loaded shotgun, by a felon.

  Writing the stuff up took until just before six, when Brandon and Kat stepped out into the gray rain and headed for the parking lot. Kat said she was going for a training swim off Scarborough Beach. Brandon said, “You know Lance, Chantelle’s boyfriend.”

  “Yeah,” Kat said.

  “I saw him with another guy, delivering something to a restaurant in the Old Port.”

  “Lance got a job?”

  “Would he?”

  “It’d be a first. What’s the restaurant?”

  He told her.

  “But that’s your friend there, on the Eastern Prom. The girlfriend—”

  “Right.”

  “Who was Lance with?”

  “Didn’t recognize him. I have a plate number.”

  “Strange, but there’s no shortage of dirtbags working in restaurants.”

  “But there was something weird about it. They brought in this little package, size of a shoe box.”

  “Organic foie gras.”

  “I was thinking more like an ounce of coke.”

  “Be right up Lance’s alley,” Kat said. “Your friend a cokehead?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Dealing out of the place?”

  “I don’t know. Doubt it.”

  “Don’t need track marks to be in the drug business,” Kat said.

  They paused.

  “This isn’t going to help you at home,” Kat said.

  “No.”

  “You going to tell her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Discretion, Brandon,” Kat said. “It’s the better part of valor.”

  “That was Falstaff, in Henry the Fourth. He was a coward.”

  “No getting anything past you, Blake,” Kat said, and she slapped him on the shoulder and started for her car. Brandon walked toward his truck, turned around as Kat’s SUV pulled away, and walked back to the building. He tapped in the code, strode down the corridor, stepped into the dim dispatch center. Two dispatchers on, and one was Chooch. She smiled when she saw him, took a pull on her Diet Coke.

  “Only come to see me when you want something, Blake,” she said, in her smoker’s rasp.

  “Not true, Chooch. I come by to enjoy your company.”

  Chooch said the van was registered to Wyatt Gross, twenty-six, Washington Street address. Record showed a few misdemeanors. Pot. Civil possession. DWI, but only one. Criminal threatening reduced to disorderly conduct. And way back, illegal transportation of a firearm. A loaded rifle in a moving vehicle.

  “Date on that one?” Brandon said.

  “November twelfth,” Chooch said.

  “Deer season.”

  “Nothing for almost a year,” Chooch said. “Been a good boy.”

  “Regular Eagle Scout,” Brandon said. “Or he hasn’t been caught.”

  “Those are the choices, Blake,” Chooch said. She handed his pad back, Gross’s address scribbled in. Sipped her soda. Put it down with a thump. The phone light flashed and she hit the button, winked at Brandon and said, “Call me when you’re single, Blake. I could use a boy toy.” Then, “Portland Police Department. How can I help you?”

  A cold summer rain, the boats in the harbor faded into the mist. This was the real ocean, Brandon thought. Like a gun: gray and cold and deadly in the wrong hands. The sunny days, blue skies, white sails pasted on the glittering bay—that was the illusion, the bait to suck you in.

  He drove slowly, lost in thought as he crossed the bridge. Lance with a guy who knew Winston. The two of them delivering something. But what? Food? Drugs? A gun? Maybe that was where Winston had picked up the handgun Lily used. But why not buy one at Cabela’s or someplace? Because he’s from Barbados? Can you buy a firearm if you’re here with a green card?

  He was still mulling everything over as he came off the bridge. Winston and Fatima, Annie Young and Renford Gayle, Fatima’s ghetto-fabulous brothers, Mr. Otto, inviting the cops to come in and have tea. When your life is pockmarked with tragedy, you come up with rituals to maintain your dignity. Tea. Funerals.

  Out of the truck, across the lot. Another code punched in. Brandon thinking he was going to have to filter his day for Mia—tell her about Fatima, nothing about the gun guy. He scowled at the prospect: half-truths, lies of omission. What sort of relationship was that? Or he could just tell her everything, let the chips fall—

  He saw the dock cart at the stern of the boat. It was loaded up, duffels, backpacks, garbage bags. He stepped around the cart, onto the stern. Mia was at the desk in
the salon, writing. She turned. Her eyes were puffy and pink.

  “Hey,” Brandon said.

  “I was writing you a note.”

  She looked down at the paper.

  “I’m moving back to the apartment, Brandon.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  Mia turned and looked at him.

  “I need a break. I need to think, and I can’t do it here. With you.”

  “Are you coming back?”

  Mia balled up the paper, held it in her fist, stood up from the stool.

  “I’m going home to see my mother. I’m flying out tonight.”

  “Okay.”

  “I need some Mom time. I haven’t seen her in, like, three months.”

  “How long are you going to be out there?”

  “A week.”

  “And then what?”

  Mia crumpled up the note, moved from the desk, picked up her bag from the counter, put the note in.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I’m coming back to Portland.”

  “But not to me?”

  She stood in front of him, far away even in the small space.

  “I don’t know. Like I said, I have to think.”

  “Fine.”

  She took a step toward him. “I do love you, you know.”

  “Right.”

  “I just need to figure out whether this is right. For both of us.”

  “Do I get a vote?” Brandon said.

  Mia took his hand, just one.

  “Please understand.”

  Brandon let her hand fall away, felt himself coiling back into his shell. Everyone left, eventually. And then you were alone. Alone was natural. The rest was like the sunny days on the bay—an illusion. A big con.

  “So why the note?” he said, not looking at her.

  “I didn’t know when you were coming home,” Mia said. “I never know.”

  “I always come back,” Brandon said.

  Mia slung her bag over her shoulder. “What was it this time?”

  Fatima, her nose nibbled by the crabs. Mr. Otto, the weight of his daughter’s death settling over him. Annie Young, cold and callous, like Fatima was a cat run over by a car. The guy spitting in his face, the kid in the car with the drunks. Winston consorting with criminals.

  “The usual,” Brandon said.

  He helped her wheel the cart up the ramp, loaded the bags in the Saab. Good-bye was a peck on his cheek. Mia was wiping her eyes as she drove off.

  Brandon dropped his gear on the counter, peeled off his uniform, fell back on the berth. He lay there and stared, listened to the rain on the deck above him. The tide was out and the damp cabin smelled of mud and fish and diesel and decay. Something big passed out on the harbor, the thump of the engine carrying over the water, and minutes later Bay Witch began to rock. It heaved against the float, fenders grinding, and Brandon thought of Winston and Lily having a romp in the next cabin.

  Violence followed by sex. Were they aroused by the shooting, the killing? Or was Brandon really imagining the worst, playing cops and robbers? Was Mia right? What had he done to drive her away? And why?

  Two hours later, he jerked awake. Footsteps on the float, a knock on the transom.

  “Anybody aboard?”

  A woman’s voice. He staggered to his feet, said, “Wait a sec,” and pulled on a pair of paint-spattered khaki shorts. He stepped out of the cabin, saw a fiftyish woman standing at the stern. Jeans and a red fleece vest. Small, short dark hair, pretty. She turned to him and smiled.

  “Sorry to bother you, but the man out at the fuel dock said you were the person to see about a guest mooring.”

  Brandon said he was, hopped over the transom, and led the way up the dock to the office. She said her name was Murphy, Mary-Ellen Murphy, and she and her husband had motored up from Marblehead. She turned and pointed at the sleek blue-hulled cruiser at the far end of the float. A Hinckley Talaria, million dollars plus. Her husband was puttering on the foredeck.

  Brandon opened the office door and she followed him in.

  “First time in Portland?” he said.

  “Yes, on the boat. Other time we were here was on a cruise.”

  “Really. How was that?”

  Brandon took the clipboard from the hook on the wall.

  “We really liked it. Portland, I mean. Great little city. Good restaurants.”

  “Yes, it’s becoming known for that.”

  “The cruise, well, my husband’s office crew gave it to us. Our twenty-fifth. We were between boats, and they thought we’d like to be on the water. We would have rather stayed home but we didn’t want to hurt their feelings.”

  “I’m sure.”

  He put the clipboard on the desk, began to fill in the date, time.

  “So where’d you cruise to?”

  “It was New York, Portland, Bar Harbor, and St. John, New Brunswick. We flew home after that.”

  “Had enough?”

  “Yeah. But Portland was really our favorite. Bar Harbor was wall-to-wall tourists. St. John was okay, but a little rough around the edges. Some pretty tough sections.”

  “Really.”

  Brandon set the clipboard in front of her. She had her wallet out, was fishing for a credit card.

  “Oh, yeah. Some rough customers, if you got off the beaten track. Robert, my husband, he’s a walker when he gets off the boat. We’ll walk all over Portland.”

  “Lots to see,” Brandon said.

  “The steward warned us about St. John. You couldn’t go to certain parts of the city after dark.”

  She bent over the clipboard, filled in her name, phone, the boat’s name: Flying Fish. There was a big diamond on her left hand, a bigger sapphire on her right.

  “They said a crewman on another cruise ship, he’d gotten killed there. A month earlier, I think. Some drug thing.”

  “Too bad,” Brandon said.

  She handed him the credit card. He put it in the machine, ran it through. He gave her the card back. She stood like she was in no hurry to go back aboard. Brandon figured Mr. Murphy wasn’t much of a talker.

  “You think of Canada, all peaceful and friendly.”

  “I suppose you do,” he said.

  “Well, turns out there’s a lot of pretty unsavory characters there.”

  “Really.”

  “They have biker gangs, drug dealers. I was amazed. The guy who sort of took care of us, he was from Puerto Rico. Sent money home to his family and all that.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Brandon handed her the receipt, $150 for three nights, the form that spelled out the rules for guests, a mooring map.

  “Your cruise ship,” he said. “What was the name of it?”

  “Sea Star,” Mary-Ellen Murphy said. “It really was amazing. A floating hotel.”

  Brandon hesitated, then said, “Ever hear of the Ocean Princess?”

  “Yes. I think Ocean Princess was there when we were in St. John. In fact, the crewman who died came from that ship.”

  Mrs. Murphy folded her receipt, put it in her wallet, the wallet in the pocket of her fleece. “Our fellow, his name was Ramon, he said the crew on Ocean Princess was made up of a lot of Jamaicans. I think there was some sort of resentment there. You know, Puerto Ricans not liking the Jamaicans, and vice versa.”

  “Isn’t that always the way?” Brandon said. “We have Somalis in Portland, other refugees. Some locals don’t like them. Some of them don’t like each other.”

  Mrs. Murphy smiled. “I don’t know why people can’t just get along,” she said.

  “Everybody scrambling for a piece of the pie,” Brandon said.

  She looked at him and smiled. Yup, Brandon thought. Mr. Murphy was a man of few words and it was a big ocean.

  “When was this, that you were up in St. John?” Brandon said.

  “Let’s see. Two years ago in September. I mean, don’t get me wrong. It was a nice city. But Canadian drug dealers—who knew?”

  Munjoy Hill was quiet in th
e rain: a guy walking a couple of terriers, a woman on a bike, groceries in baskets on the back. Brandon drove slowly up Vesper Street from the Eastern Prom, slowed at the corner of Moody and looked right. Mia’s car was in her driveway. He rolled through the intersection, circling the block. Maybe get some coffees, bring them up to the apartment, have a talk. Mia could still go home to her mom, but maybe they’d be one step closer to resolving this thing.

  He passed a guy walking, an OxyContin junkie he and Kat had arrested for burglaries, nasty little bastard, a commando knife inside his jeans.

  The guy spotted him, looked worried. Brandon glanced in the mirror, saw the guy was wearing a backpack and the pack looked full. He reached for his radio, wondered who he could call to roust the bastard. Second arrest in a month—no bail this time, chump.

  Brandon caught himself. He put the radio down on the seat. At Congress, he took a left, headed over the hill to the Starbucks at Back Bay. He bought two large lattes, regular for himself, mocha for Mia, with her sweet tooth. He sipped his on the way back to Munjoy Hill, felt the jolt of caffeine start to override his two hours of sleep.

  She’d be happy to see him. They’d talk. Maybe cry. Hug. Get this sorted out. He took a right off Congress, coasted down the street, the truck rattling over the potholes. As he approached Mia’s building, a Land Rover crossed the intersection. Pulled in behind Mia’s Saab. Lily got out, hood of her red Gore-Tex jacket up, coffees in hand. She closed the door with a flip of her hip.

  Brandon drove on.

  Had Mia called her? Is that who she was turning to, the shoulder she’d cry on while she unloaded about him? Brandon is never home. Brandon puts his job before me. He thinks everybody is a criminal. He even thinks Winston . . .

  Brandon drove on, back downtown. Parked on Congress by Monument Square, eyed the soggy panhandlers and winos, the eccentrics and mentally ill, sitting on benches in the détente of daylight. He saw two street kids approach a third and sit, saw money change hands, an envelope slipped across.

  Maybe I think everybody’s a criminal because most people are, he thought. He made a mental note of the seller, got out of the truck and walked up the block to the public library. A guy asked him for spare change, saw Brandon’s hard look, turned away.

  Jeanine at the circulation desk waved to Brandon, a library regular. Kenneth behind the reference desk saluted, his joke since Brandon had started asking for war books a decade before. No books today.