by Steve Amick
He still looked pissed, but now he also looked a little scared. Janey looked away. This guy Starkey could have, in fact, filed a small claims case. It was sort of a low blow, dragging him into district court. That kind of expense meant something to a guy like Kurt Lasco, as it would to anyone from around here.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Sorry. I just serve the things.” She gave him a weak smile and turned to leave again. “Just the messenger . . .”
“Wait a minute! Janey! Hang on.”
She turned and waited for him to catch up.
“I want to show you something.” He led her around the back of the patrol car to the edge of his neighbor’s driveway. She thought he was about to get into a whole explanation about the property line, a thing that was none of her business—he could explain all that in court, not to her—but it wasn’t the property line. It was Starkey’s sign, the big blue Charlie the Tuna with their name painted up to look like the StarKist logo. Kurt wanted to know what she was going to do about it.
“Uh . . . try not to look at it if I can avoid it . . . ?” she offered.
“But I mean, this has gotta be illegal, Janey! Right?”
“You mean like a village ordinance, residential zoning rules . . . like that?”
“Yeah.”
“No,” she said. “Unfortunately.”
“Really?” Kurt scrunched up his brow. He looked like he wanted to pick something up and swing it at the thing. “Yeah, but Jesus. Come on. It’s so big and ugly and . . . stupid.”
“Agreed. And very ironic, because it’s in very bad taste. Which means he doesn’t really remember the ads. But it’s not illegal.”
“What about trademark infringement? That’s not illegal?”
She explained that that wasn’t really her area. If the StarKist people had a gripe, they could fly their highfalutin lawyers in here and sue away, but that wasn’t the kind of thing the village taxpayers expected her to pursue. Purely in terms of signage on private property, it was plenty legal. More and more, these kinds of vanity signs were popping up all over the village, to the point where Akins DeWalt, a guy she dated briefly in high school, back when he had all his fingers, now operated a sign store that specialized in hand-carved or hand-painted driveway signs. Just up the street, there was the one that said Crash Landing—as if that actually sounded pleasant—and featured a carved duplicate of the owner’s Piper Cub. There was one a street over that said Bea’s Nest and was owned by a woman named Bea something. A lot of them were cutesy names like that, but most of them included the family name. You could argue there was a practical application in that most of these summer people’s friends were out-of-towners, too, and so they needed a little help finding the place when they drove up to visit. But really, it was just bragging, putting your brand on a big showy house.
“Sorry, Kurt,” she said, getting into the cruiser. “I can’t help you here.”
If she were sheriff, she thought while heading to the Daisy June for a black-and-white soft swirl, she could have some deputy out doing this sort of thing for her, serving frivolous complaints and writs and being burdened with inspecting the neighbor’s driveway signs.
Or . . . if she lived in an apartment right on Broadway, within walking distance of Central Park and her job, writing for David Letterman. Then, too. Then she wouldn’t have to do such things, either.
22
THE LETTERMAN THING actually started with Noah Yoder.
This was back in May, during his first days in the house for the season. He’d arrived in a real panic about all the costs attached to the house, having been beaten down all winter by the alarming market slump. There were unexpected expenses waiting for him—improperly installed “scuppers” (whatever they were) needed to be replaced already and there was a bill for the snowplowing done to his driveway all winter when no one had even been around, and suspicions that all the glass had been improperly sealed. He’d actually spoken the thought out loud to his finance guy, Tony, that he might have to think about unloading the place.
He was standing in the gleaming metal kitchen, staring at the complicated-looking espresso machine, trying to remember when he last had to make his own—probably not since he was last in this house—and hoping he could figure it out, when he saw the firewood guy’s red pickup pulling into the turnaround, arcing wide around the outbuilding to unload, and he thought, Shit and golly. More cash I gotta hand over . . .
He’d forgotten about the standing order of firewood. The firewood guy and his son were supposed to keep it restocked throughout the summer, a combination of ash, hickory and black cherry in an agreed-upon ratio they’d determined would produce the optimum color, flame and endurance. But it wasn’t the firewood guy, just his son, some pipsqueak still in high school probably, and so Noah snatched up his cell and started making calls, trying to appear busy. This was a problem in this house, with all its glass. If you were home, it was hard to pretend you weren’t. He was planning to pay them, of course. Eventually. He’d just rather it wasn’t that afternoon. He just wanted to stall, not stiff them, and if he could present himself as a busy dot-com millionaire on the phone, the kid might come back later.
There weren’t many calls to make, unfortunately—sure, tech support in Tacoma wanted to talk about layoffs and he knew he should also probably get the latest abysmal news from his broker, but these weren’t calls he relished making just then. So he hit speed dial to his sister in Minneapolis and got the nephew, David, and they discussed the game David was playing at the time, Lara Croft—Noah explaining how hot she was and David saying gross! but listening (he’d get it soon enough). Then he called the Weneshkeen Identifier and told the editor he wouldn’t be placing any ads this year, sorry.
There was a bang from outside, the kid slamming the tailgate shut. He knew he’d be coming up to the house to tell him the wood was all in, and collect his money, but Noah had run out of excuses to be on the phone.
The kid was on the deck now, foot-dragging to be polite, to serve notice he was approaching the house. He wore a smashed Gap cap, red with a G, and he took it off now, wiping at his nose. He looked sweaty. Lately, Noah found himself noticing sweat all the time. It made him uncomfortable.
Punching the speed dial, he called his own voice mail and pretended he was talking to someone. He knew the kid could probably hear him through the glass. It just wasn’t as insulated as Mishuki had claimed it would be.
There was a copy of TV Guide on the kitchen counter, Letterman’s dopey grin drawn in caricature, so he threw that into the conversation, “. . . when David Letterman’s coming . . .”
There was a knock on the side door.
“Well, Dave’s not real sure yet how long he’s staying. They don’t give him much of a hiatus . . . No . . .” He opened the door, the phone still to his ear, open hands thrown wide as if trying to communicate with the guy, trying to show he was caught off-guard, that he had his hands full. The kid actually stepped back a few feet, nodding like he understood. Noah gave the kid an apologetic smile and stepped half out of the door. He kept nodding to the imaginary person on the phone, saying, “Uh-huh . . . uh-huh . . .” but shrugging to the kid, holding up one finger as if he wanted him to wait, to stay. But the kid kept backing away, wincing, nodding that he understood, whispering, “Sorry!” and pointing out back where he’d stacked the new cords of firewood.
After the kid left without getting paid, Noah sat out on the deck and thought about this crazy house of his. Even if things got really bad and he did have to sell, the problem would be, of course, that he’d created such a white elephant. There were few who could afford a summer house like his, and he wasn’t about to take a big loss. The idea came to him that if he was going to sell it, it might help if he spread a rumor that someone rich and famous was interested in buying. Someone like David Letterman. And hadn’t he just started the ball rolling?
Because that firewood kid was, after all, a kid. In a backwater town. He’d be bursting to t
ell someone. Soon, Noah figured, news that Letterman was coming to Weneshkeen would be all over town.
JUNE INTO JULY
23
UNTIL WENESHKEEN GOT ITS FIRST dot-com whiz-kid millionaire, the ritziest estate was, for years, Cliffhead—more often generally referred to as “the bootlegger’s”—a veritable castle perched above nearly half a mile of Lake Michigan frontage. When he first started poking around, most everyone just assumed he would be buying the crazy old heap because it had been on the market for nearly fifteen years now with no real takers and it wasn’t like he’d get into a real bidding war over it. If anyone seemed in a position to buy it and fix it up, it was this Noah Yoder kid. But he wasn’t interested. Instead, he built a brand-new monstrosity all his own, and so this one continued to enjoy its slow decline on the high bluff along Fifel Drive, where a deep woods of birch and beech had grown thick around it, shielding it from the indignity of onlookers.
It was built in 1910 by three dozen Italian stonemasons, using tricky, idiosyncratic rocks gathered from scattered sites all over Michigan, including the Upper Peninsula. It was said the owner actually turned away an entire barge of flawlessly cut Indiana limestone the builder had ordered, claiming it wasn’t the stone of a true castle. There was no doubt the owner was eccentric, but he did have money to burn. This was three years before anyone had to pay federal income tax, when you could still be crazy-rich.
The owner was a man named Fifel, known in newspaper circles in his day as “The Rumbleseat King.” That was hardly the extent of it. At the height of his run, he held a mutually exclusive contract to provide Henry Ford with automotive upholstery. His main residence was down near Detroit, but Cliffhead would be his summer home, all thirty-two rooms, horse stables and swimming pool (the first pool in the county—this one was made of those same eclectic stones, to match the house—a jigsaw puzzle of rustic rocks).
Though now a little rough around the edges, Cliffhead is still impressive, mostly because the scale seems so odd for that type of rustic architecture. It truly is a cottage-castle, with the bumpy cobbled lines of its massive wraparound porch, all stone, and the square watchtower. The tower is one area that needs significant work; almost a century of easterlies whipping straight off Lake Michigan have rendered it wobbly, the mortar crumbly and cracked. And compared to the almost overbearing tower on Weneshkeen’s newest eyesore, the summer home of Noah Yoder, this tower seems quaint, a sandcastle. But at the time of its construction in 1910, the now defunct Weneshkeen Proctor-Venerator referred to the structure, mockingly, as “the Fifel Tower.” There are old-timers around who still call it that.
In the mid-twenties, Fifel was forced to sell, after Henry Ford spent a weekend there, took in the opulence, and decided then and there to begin manufacturing all his upholstery himself. Some felt the automaker did this because Fifel was a Jew (which he wasn’t—the Fifels were Polish Catholics from Malva—the Fifelskis, originally). But Henry Ford sometimes took a lot of convincing.
The more likely scenario is simply that he saw a way to cut corners: why pay this man to provide a component he could easily provide himself? Still, there is a photo in existence recording Ford’s visit to the estate. You can see it in the Weneshkeen Heritage Museum, which is a small bay-windowed bump-out in the public library (space recently made available by the removal of the old steam radiators and the computerization of the old card catalogue files). Teachers on field trips point out the framed photo on the wall and explain who they are: Mr. Fifel, his wife and kids, and some unidentified guests in the pool, all in full-body bathing suits, waving. Henry Ford is perched on a wrought-iron deck chair, smiling rigidly, hands clenched in a tight little ball in his lap, his straw hat clamped on his head like a lid on a jar. Clearly, he does not want to get in the water with these people.
The next owner was the bootlegger, or the man purported to be a bootlegger. Ironically, though this is the owner most locals associate with the estate, very little is known about him. It’s said his name was Rump Johnson, but no record exists confirming that and no one still alive seems to know what he looked like, where he was from or what kind of name that is. There are rumors he kept an old circus tiger in the vast basement, and let it out to prowl the grounds at night, at times when he was worried about his safety. But again, there remains no proof of this tiger’s existence, no news photos of the tiger, and no one living today can personally vouch for seeing anything out there larger than a raccoon.
Most folks take, as evidence enough that he was a bootlegger, the fact that there was a lot of “ruckus” out there and loud parties and the occasional gunshot and the fact that Al Capone supposedly visited in the summer of 1926 and that, eventually, the place no longer seemed to be occupied. Somewhere in the early thirties, the bootlegger, or whatever he was, disappeared. (If there ever was a tiger, he left, too.)
In the forties, the estate was quietly commissioned by the War Department to temporarily detain certain prominent and well-to-do German- and Japanese- and Italian-Americans living in Chicago, Cleveland, St. Louis and, especially, Detroit—due to its high vulnerability as a prime industrial center in the war effort. Because of the government’s shaky legal ground in this—and the fact that these were wealthy families of import, not those stunned and penniless fishmongers and greengrocers roped into pens out in California—every effort was made to provide for the comfort of these special “guests” of the government. It was sort of a combination upscale jail and five-star detainment center. There was shuffleboard and croquet and warm moist towels after the high tea. No one griped. (Reenie Huff, who is sixty-something, remembers getting underfoot in the kitchen there, “helping” her dad bake bread, and claims that the G-men in charge referred to it, among themselves, as “the Hush-’em-up Hotel,” because it really was effective in this regard.)
Still, most people continue to call it “the bootlegger’s place.” Even in the fifties, when it was briefly owned by a Christian educational association that conducted youth retreats and religious leadership seminars on the grounds, but was later disbanded when it was revealed that certain members of the board (to be fair, only a scant two board members out of nearly a dozen—and their colleagues were shocked and horrified) were in fact members of unsavory fringe groups: one was in the American Bund, the other in something called American Purity Eventually (A.P.E.) (Even in the fifties, that sort of thing didn’t fly.)
And always, throughout these times in which the estate was ping-ponged from owner to owner, it was available for rent. Few could afford such a vacation, but occasionally, mysterious visitors would fly into town on a chartered plane, and they’d be spotted, in their European-looking sunglasses, being whisked through town in the local pilot’s station wagon. Not often, but it happened.
Briefly, in the late sixties and early seventies, various music promoters tried holding rock festivals on the grounds. No one seemed to be able to turn a profit at this, because they invariably had to forfeit the exorbitant deposit to the owner or holding company, besides paying out a settlement to some kid, usually high on mushrooms or acid, who would climb up on some part of the house, shinny up a tree or downspout for a better view of the stage, or totter along the stone wall leading down to the beach, and fall and break something and suddenly become far less groovy and free-and-easy and much more respectful of the American legal system and its abilities as a conduit of justice.
For six months in 1978 it became a disco called Zebra’s. No one in town ever met anyone named Zebra and there weren’t any zebras installed on the lawn for grazing purposes, so this one had everyone stumped. Zebra’s closed its doors after a small fire in the women’s restroom was revealed to be caused by someone freebasing cocaine. No one was hurt in the fire, but after everyone was evacuated, and all the customers were milling around in the yard, rubbernecking, watching the volunteer fire department secure the building, a cross-dressing nail technician from Montreal fell into an old cement birdbath in the rock garden and drowned. The village council d
ecided they didn’t need any more of that nonsense and reverted the zoning back to residential.
In between all these times, the place fell into the hands of various real estate companies, holding companies, banks and mortgage companies. It still changes hands like the lesser stock in some Far Eastern trading company, lost in a large portfolio—passed through wills and company takeovers from people who briefly own it and don’t know it to people who barely know they’ve inherited it—because they’re certainly not going to live in it, they’re not going to sink money into repairing it. The result is that the average townsperson couldn’t tell you on a bet who owns it at any given moment. But if you asked them if it’s for sale, they’d be certain it is.
And they’d look at you funny, like you’re not from around here, like you’re either peculiar or filthy rich or probably both.
Still, despite all this, Weneshkeenites are proud of the big rambling heap. There’s always a float in the Sumac Days parade that’s supposed to resemble the famous old house, using half-dead mums for the brown stones. In any store in town where they sell souvenirs, you’ll find postcards of the grand old pile. Perhaps this is more personal nostalgia than true civic pride. Because it’s said that if anyone ever invested seriously in the place again—cleaned it up with the idea of moving in—they’d first have to rent a backhoe to gather up all the virginity lost all over the grounds.
24
HE’D NEVER BEEN SO CLOSE to the old gangster castle—the bootlegger’s place, people called it—and certainly not in the dark, trying to be cool and not stumble and look like a fool in front of maybe the hottest girl who ever set foot in this weird little town. But now that they were there, the sheer size of it filled Mark with misgivings. The place looked like some sort of gloomy fortress. Size-wise, there wasn’t anything like it around for miles. This wouldn’t be like breaking into a toolshed—the only other thing like this he’d ever really done.
