Death in the Polka Dot Shoes

by Marlin Fitzwater

  Vinnie’s car was known throughout the county for being disguised as a moving billboard. Every conservative political slogan and country music phrase ever put on a bumper sticker was part of Vinnie’s Chevy station wagon. Some of the stickers were twenty years old, as old as the car, and faded beyond readability. My favorites were Agnew Is Innocent, I Love Hilda Mae Snoops, and No More Kennedys. Agnew was faded; most people didn’t recognize former Maryland Governor Donald Schaefer’s girlfriend Hilda; and the Kennedy sticker was an all purpose statement against wealth, power, entrenched Democrats and outsiders in general. None of the stickers were particularly clever, but they all had a purpose. Vinnie was a man who stood for things, and his car told you what. His seatbelts were wedged between the seatbacks and encrusted with cracker crumbs, French fries and spilled coffee. The danger of dying in his car from food mold was probably greater than from a car crash.

  The car leaned to the rear left corner, for reasons Vinnie never explained. Most people thought it was due to a failed shock absorber. And passengers usually found some way to anchor themselves, perhaps just a finger through the door latch, to keep from sliding across the seat. But Vinnie noticed it had been some time since anyone had volunteered to ride with him. He smiled at the thought of how well his “no maintenance” plan was working.

  Vinnie and Velma lived in a typical community of small frame homes, built in the 1940s as summer cottages for the middle class of Washington to escape the high humidity of the city. No heating or air conditioning and not much insulation. The western shore of the Bay, from Annapolis to the Solomons, is crowded with villages called Silent Waters, or Restful Beach, or Clift Haven, or some name signifying the aspirations of their residents. The streets were narrow, and the lots were small, divided by chain link fences often purchased at discount by the community associations to ensure that no one remained unfenced. In recent years, almost all the houses had been winterized and renovated to the point they looked like faded lego blocks, going in all directions with floors that often meant stepping up or down as you moved from room to room. Vinnie bought his house in 1971 for twelve thousand dollars, added a bathroom, oil heat, window air conditioners, and the back porch. The house wasn’t on the water, but it was across the street from water, and when Vinnie backed out of his driveway, he could see the sparkling early morning waters where the sun was beginning to burn off the fog. He reached the Bayfront Inn in less than five minutes.

  Margaret “Simy” Sims was putting a filter in the big silver coffee-maker behind the bar. The bar and the restaurant were side by side, but separate operations under the same roof. The owner, Mabel Fergus, knew this was not efficient, but it was practical. She didn’t want a bunch of drunks pushing into the restaurant for coffee, whether it was to sober up or to fill their thermos jugs for a day on the water. And she didn’t want food in the bar, at least partially so Simy wouldn’t have to pick up dishes and take food orders. The bar was for drinking.

  Simy was making the second batch of coffee of the day, her supply depleted by the first round of crabbers who headed out about six, just after she opened. Vinnie was in the second tier, mostly captains and mates on the fishing boats that would meet their charter parties about eight. The Bayfront fleet was changing. Maybe a dozen crab boats still operated out of Jenkins Creek, at least five of them from berths at the Bayfront. But another half dozen captains had given up the crabbing altogether, and had transformed their boats into “charter fishing” vessels, forsaking crabs for Rockfish. Along the Jenkins and most of the western shore of the Bay the water is shallow, often two or three feet with huge splotches of sandbars that show solid green on the charts. The somewhat narrow shipping channel from the Atlantic to Baltimore may be ninety feet deep or more, but most of the Bay is closer to twenty-five or thirty feet deep. Nevertheless, “deep sea fishing” is the brand name people recognize from fishing fleets along the Carolinas or Florida coasts, so there was a move afoot to build a new sign on the pier that said “Charter Fishing.”

  Most of the charter captains were charging three hundred dollars a day for a party of six and doing far better than they had as crabbers, with a lot less effort.

  Vinnie figured Neddie would move toward charter fishing, if he stayed in the business long enough. Ned was already trying to do two things, crab and law; he might as well add a little Rockfish fishing. But it was too soon to know.

  Vinnie moved around the bar, tapping a couple of the boys on the shoulder and saying hello.

  “Simy,” he said, “coffee black. Have you seen Ned?”

  “No Mr. Vinnie,” she said, often using the formal prefix for old friends. She took a wide lipped porcelain mug from several stacked on the bar, flipped the black lever, and steaming coffee gushed out, spilling just a bit over the edge. She wiped the excess with a dish rag stuffed in the pocket of her jeans. Simy had been at work a couple of hours but hadn’t applied her make-up yet, and her hair was pulled back and pasted to her head with several pins. Her dark green tee shirt said “Spoil Me” on the front, prompting Vinnie to wonder where she got it. He didn’t wonder what it meant. He knew that just about every waterman on the Bay had tried to spoil her at one time or another, and for some it was a lifetime project. In fact, one of the most troubling aspects of his association with the Shannons was the knowledge that Jimmy had been interested in Simy himself, although Vinnie wasn’t sure much had ever happened. Still, he was careful what he said whenever Martha was around...

  Vinnie turned to Captain Petey on the next stool, and asked if he had a full charter.

  “I got a hot one today,” Petey said, rubbing the mermaid tattoo on his left arm. “A bunch of politicians from the State house. And that guy you saved, the Blenny Man.”

  “No kidding,” Vinnie said, surprised. “He has his own boat. Why is he chartering?”

  “Boat’s broke,” Petey said. “Something about the gas line. And he had these guys lined up for a fishing trip, so I got em.”

  “Politicians are lousy tippers,” Vinnie said. “Plus they want to tell you how to do everything.”

  “I don’t care what they say, as long as they pay,” Petey said. “And nobody around here tips anyway. I remember Jimmy took these guys out last year and they gave him fifty dollars. So maybe they’re changing.”

  “Jimmy took out the Blenny Man?” Vinnie asked.

  “Yeah, I think it was him,” Pete said, screwing up his face as if it hurt to force his brain to recall. “The Blenny Man and four or five others.”

  “You know that scrawny little guy never said one word to us on the boat, after we had saved his life…and his boat,” Vinnie said. “No thank yous. Nothing. Just shivered, told us to save his boat, and walked away.”

  “That’s more than one word.”

  “Right,” Vinnie said. “Still seems strange.”

  The bar was almost empty as Petey retrieved his jacket from a hook on the wall and started for the door. Simy started cleaning the counter, an easier process after everyone was gone. She picked up the remaining glasses, gave them a wrist rinse in the dishwater, and set them aside for the washer. Even early in the morning, her dish rag was wet from wiping the counter. But she pulled it from her waistband and gave the counter a quick swipe. Simy didn’t start many conversations. Usually the customers urged her into them, but Vinnie was alone at the bar and the two television sets perched in opposite corners of the room were off. They were on for soap operas in the afternoon and all sporting events, but not in the morning when hangovers were common.

  “Vinnie,” Simy said, “how’s Velma?”

  “Fine,” Vinnie said. “She’s at the shop. She said she saw you last weekend at the craft fair at Wesley Methodist.”

  “I went with Mom,” she said. “Mom’s been going to that craft thing for twenty years. She always buys something. Sunday she got a piece of plywood painted like a dandelion and stuck it right in the middle of her yard. Can you believe that?”

  “Your mom’s a good woman, you know that?�
� Vinnie said.

  “You know the first thing I do every morning when I get up. I call my mom just to see what she’s doing.”

  “That’s nice,” Vinnie said. “I thought you still lived with your folks?”

  “No, I moved out when my son was born. That’s about six years ago,” she said, “I live down the street in the old Graves house. Just renting.”

  Vinnie knew that Simy had a son, but not much else. Velma didn’t think she had ever gotten married, but Vinnie didn’t know how to ask without prying, so he let it drop. He sat staring at his beer. Simy realized he was out of conversation, so she moved around the bar to get the beer chest ready for chipped ice. That meant emptying two or three inches of water left over from yesterday. Several years ago Mabel Fergus had hit on the idea of iced beer as a gimmick for competing with the other bars in town. And it worked. Something about ice on the bottle was a special treat, especially in the summer when the boys would pour off the boats hot and sweaty, beet red from sun burn, and tired to the bone. They would often ask, “Gimme one of those iced cold beers.” So Mabel moved the beer freezer over to the restaurant for steaks and hamburger, bought a five-foot long ice chest, and put it right in the middle of the bar so everyone could see it. Then she bought an icemaker from some industrial supply store in Baltimore, and every morning filled the chest with domestic beers. Simy carried a case of beer from the back room and lined up the bottles in the chest. Then she covered them with ice, heaped it up, and laid several bottles at various angles on top. That was her invention. A little creativity. Something about seeing those bottles laying on top of fresh ice was an open invitation to drink.

  Simy went to the back room for a bucket of ice when the phone rang. Mabel kept a private phone in back for the staff, out of sight of patrons, and beyond the use of anyone not on the payroll. The payphone was out front by the door, and Simy was instructed to give anyone with a hard luck story a quarter for the payphone, but never let anyone in the back room. It was me on the phone. I don’t think she recognized my voice, but I called her by name, and asked her to tell Vinnie that I, Ned Shannon, wouldn’t be coming to the boat. She said, “I’ll do it,” and hung up.

  I figured Vinnie would be worried, but at least he knew I called. And by noon everybody in town would know where I had gone.

  Chapter Seven

  Ever since the drowning, I have had two recurring dreams about my brother. The first was of his body rolling around in the waves, being gently tossed and turned by every spasm of the ocean until the seaweed and foam finally drew back and left him anchored on the beach. The second was of his unrecognizable body after it had been nibbled, and dibbled, and dabbed by every little fish in the sea. I read that description in a novel once and it froze in my mind like a song from childhood.

  The Sheriff of Hatteras, North Carolina had called at daybreak to say that Jimmy’s body had washed ashore during the night, and he asked that I come immediately to help make arrangements. Identification might take some time. Somehow I knew that.

  I didn’t look forward to the days ahead, except for the somewhat quizzical comment by the Sheriff that there were some strange aspects to his discovery. I packed a small bag with some underwear, a shaving kit, socks, one pair of blue jeans, two shirts and a dozen cigars, which I could live on for a couple of weeks if necessary. I tossed a tie and blue blazer in the back seat of the car and headed for Hatteras, a place I had never been, but a name with some intrigue.

  Driving, for me, is a mystical experience. I daydream, never watch the signs, spend a good part of every trip lost and turning around or asking directions from convenience stores, and never remember where I’ve been. But I’m a safe driver, even with a convertible, and will set off for any destination with the certainty that sooner or later I will get there. But often it’s later. After about three miles, I realized there was no hurry in getting to Hatteras. Jimmy wasn’t going anywhere. And even after I satisfied this identification business, and arranged with the local funeral director to ship his body back to Parkers, there still would be no hurry. Maybe this is what Jimmy intended to do for me in his will, take away the hurry. Life was now a process, not a series of ambitious goals. And there was no boss to please.

  On a long stretch of road through Virginia, I remembered Jimmy once telling me that he liked taking the boat out alone because no one was there to say return. And sometimes he didn’t. Once he left Mom a note that said, “Back soon,” but he didn’t return for five days. He took a small sailboat down to Crisfield, an island off the eastern shore of the Bay where the remnants of a waterman culture live in quiet and diminished circumstance. He tied up at the town dock, and was actually angry when Mom called the Coast Guard to report his disappearance. Even after his return, he was silent on the details of his trip, fearing an inquisition about the many disasters that could have befallen a small boat in stormy seas. “I’m home,” was about all he said.

  When I found the Hatteras Sheriff, he was leaning against the counter in his reception area, talking to a young female deputy in a starched brown uniform whose hair was pulled back and held in place by a headphone. Her eyes caught me coming through the door. When the Sheriff turned, I held out my hand and introduced myself.

  “Come in Mr. Shannon,” he said. “We’ve been expecting you.”

  He nodded to his deputy in a way that put the phones on hold, and led me into his office, a spartan affair with a couple of pictures of fishermen standing beside their tuna on the local dock. He motioned me to a wooden captain’s chair, and lowered himself into a slightly larger chair that rocked back.

  “I hope my call didn’t reach you at a bad time,” the Sheriff said. “I’m very sorry about your brother. We found him down on the beach yesterday by PJ’s Bait Shop. I don’t know if you can identify him or not, but we’ll go over to the medical examiner’s in a minute. He’s just across the street.”

  I thought I had a lot of questions, but didn’t know where to begin. I decided to start with the present and work back.

  “Is his body… can it be shipped home?” I asked.

  “Well, we need to do an autopsy,” he said. “That will take a couple of days, but I’ve asked Doc Winters to start today, knowing you’d be coming down. There are a number of hotels out on the highway. I assume you’ll want to stick around.”

  “I’ll stay as long as necessary.”

  “Good,” he said. “We do have a lot to go over.”

  “You said on the phone there were some strange aspects,” I said. “What are they?”

  My memory of law school training was remarkably short on criminal law and long on torts. But even if I did know the law, I had no idea about dead bodies or drowning, or what people look like after weeks in the ocean. Furthermore, it was an open question just how much I wanted to learn. Even if it was my own brother, I didn’t relish the prospect of identifying his body.

  The Sheriff kept flipping through some papers on his desk, presumably about my brother, but it looked like he might be trying to decide how much to tell me. So I figured a well directed question might let him know that I expected to get some answers.

  “Any foul play?” I asked, not exactly scaring him with ferocity. “You know, some of the watermen back in Parkers think this ‘tuna did it’ business is a little far fetched. What do you think?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” he said. “First of all, your brother spent a couple of months in the water. Good that it was ocean, because the salt keeps the skin from decomposing. Fresh water, he would have split open like a ripe watermelon. And it wouldn’t take long either.”

  I almost got sick. I told myself to buck up, get some steel in my gut, think of this as a police report, a piece of paper, not a description of a real person. But I wanted to know, and I feared the Sheriff would censor himself if he saw I couldn’t take it.

  “Was my brother recognizable?” I asked.

  “Not to me,” the Sheriff said. “But maybe to you. Anyway, identification isn’t
really the problem.”

  The Sheriff shuffled the papers some more until he came to three or four photographs that I could see were of a body laying on the sand. I couldn’t help myself, and looked away.

  “The autopsy isn’t done yet, so I shouldn’t be going into this. But knowing you’re a lawyer, and a brother, I think I have to tell you that it looks like the boy’s death might not have been an accident.”

  “You mean on purpose!” I exclaimed. I reached for my forehead, and planted both feet on the floor. “You mean somebody killed him.” That’s about as far as I could reason.

  The Sheriff clearly was uncomfortable with this part, even though he had done it several times. He didn’t like describing the injury. The medical examiner had explained to him once that in order to examine possible brain damage, he cut an incision across the top of the corpse’s head, then peeled the face right off the skull. The image was so strong the sheriff could never shake it.

  “It looks like your brother has taken a pretty good lick on the back of the head,” the Sheriff said. “But we won’t know for sure till the M.E. looks at the skull.”

  My body went limp. I slouched in the chair, without feeling in my legs or arms, simply numb. This had happened once before. I was visiting Aspen, Colorado in the summer and rode one of the chairlifts to the top of Highlands’ mountain. I had skied there before, and never had any fear of heights. But in summer, the lift would sometimes swing wildly, and would rise over deep gorges and blind rims on its path to the summit. What looked like a smooth climb upward over peaceful snow in winter now had a menacing quality of varying heights over jagged rocks. The final lift up the mountain disgorged its passengers about thirty feet from the top of the mountain. One could get off the lift at that point, and cover the final distance to the pinnacle on a winding cow path of a walkway that circled the summit to a concrete platform at the very peak. With a handrail around it, the perch allowed tourists the final spectacle of mountaineering, standing at the summit and surveying the world. But I never made it that far.