Death in the Polka Dot Shoes

by Marlin Fitzwater

  “Vision impairment is normal,” he said. “It should steadily improve. I’ll put some gauze over her glasses on one eye. That should help.”

  “Can you hear?” he asked. One squeeze. “She indicates she can hear, but I suspect there is some loss. Of course, she has bandages over her ears so that has an effect. Hearing loss to some degree is normal in this kind of operation.”

  “One last thing,” he said. “Mrs. Shannon, think you can hold a pencil?” One squeeze. He put a piece of paper on the moveable server and pushed it under her arm. Then he took a pencil from his breast pocket and put it between her fingers. I was surprised that she seemed to grip it with firmness.

  “Can you write your name?” he asked.

  She started moving her hand, but it only left scratches on the pad. When she stopped moving the pencil, I reached over and turned the paper to see if I could read anything. Nothing. Nassif was cool. He said quietly, “That will improve.”

  “We need to get her up as soon as possible, maybe in a day or two, so she can start regaining her balance. She’ll probably need a walker for a while. Once the brain starts to adjust, we should start seeing improvement. Remember, there is now a big hole in the middle of her head, and many nerve ends that have to adjust. But on the whole, her vital signs are good and she’s alert. I think she’s doing very well.”

  “When will you be back?” I asked.

  “Every day,” he said. “Here’s my number to call anytime, day or night. And the nurses can always reach me, so don’t hesitate.”

  “When will Nablani be back?” I asked.

  “In a couple weeks,” Nassif said. “But I’ll take good care of her.”

  I stumbled back down to the waiting room to see our friends. Everyone hushed. Pete got up and gave me his seat on the couch. They waited.

  “Well, I guess she’s OK,” I said. And I started through the tests Dr. Nassif had given her. But Lil started crying, and I almost did.

  “Thanks to you all for coming,” I said. “I don’t know how to thank you. I don’t quite know how we’re going to work things out, but we should be home in a couple weeks.”

  Don’t you worry,” Lil said. “I know Vinnie’s got that boat under control. And Effie’s got the law firm covered. And Mindy is fine with your aunt. God bless you Neddie Shannon. And give Martha our love.”

  After that I only remember a cacophony of voices, and handshakes, and pats on the back. In a few minutes they were gone, vanished like apparitions in the night. I sat alone for a few minutes to pull myself together, then headed back to Martha’s room.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Blenny Man stewed. He was starting his first cocktail of the evening, lounging in dark dress pants, terry cloth slippers of indeterminate style, and a Hawaiian shirt with a large blue palm tree on the back and beach on the front. He was not preparing for turmoil. But Horace’s call reminded him of all the mistakes and anxiety of the last few months as he arranged for Jimmy Shannon’s fishing trip, and Chum’s trip to New Smyrna Beach, and his nephew’s undercover assignment to form a friendship with Chum to keep track of his activities. Hell, he thought, this thing has been falling apart from the beginning.

  He leaned back on the couch, pulled a small black comb from his pocket, stroked his hair and tried to figure out what to do. Then he ran his hands through his hair, as if it might stir a thought, then combed it again. His nerves were on edge and his clothes didn’t fit right, pinching and pulling as he twisted. He stood to readjust, then sat again and reached for the phone on the end table. He started dialing the call he didn’t want to make.

  The phone stopped ringing so he knew it was answered, but no one spoke. Ray Herbst waited silently, then said in a low voice, “Mary Margaret, are you there?”

  “Don’t say my name,” a woman’s voice whispered in urgent tones. “Don’t say my name.”

  “Mary Margaret,” he said, “we have to talk.”

  “No we don’t,” she whispered, but this time in a spitting, angry tone. “They’re listening. And you just said my name. Hang up.” And her line went dead. No click or shuffling noise, just silence.

  Blenny sat with the receiver in his hand, pondering the weirdness of this performance, by a woman he had known all his life. He had talked to her often in recent months and every conversation started in similar fashion. Sometimes the words were different, more urgent, more fearful, and more dramatic. But the message was always the same, she was threatened by unnamed detractors.

  Blenny redialed the call. Again, the phone was answered but no voice came on the line. This time, Blenny concentrated on Mary Margaret’s rules.

  “Hello,” he said, without receiving any return recognition. “We must talk. My friend in Florida has broken out. My nephew is with the police. What do we do?”

  “Don’t talk to me,” the voice on the other end shouted. “They’re listening. They’re taping.”

  “If I can’t talk,” Blenny said, “how can I tell you what’s wrong?”

  “You know the rules,” she said. “Bayfront at seven.” The line went dead again.

  Blenny knew the rules. He put down the receiver, replaced his slippers with black loafers, tucked his shirt into his pants, and walked through the house without turning out lights or locking the doors. He knew to drive to the parking lot behind the Bayfront, a large gravel lot of potholes and pickup trucks with the names of charter boats on their doors. Blenny liked “Stormy Petrel” best, a literary bent. It was evening and most of the fishing parties had long since departed. But a few of the watermen were cleaning up their boats in preparation for the next day’s excursions. Blenny knew that in the middle of these trucks named Nip n’ Tuck or some such thing, a faded beat-up pink 1971 Ford pickup truck would be parked and waiting. Inside, barely able to see over the dashboard and probably smoking a cigarette, would be Mary Margaret McCullough, known in the community as The Pipe Lady, and her two dogs. She was also Ray Herbst’s mother, from her first husband, and possibly the richest woman in Maryland. Blenny had been putting up with her paranoia for years. She refused medication, or even medical attention. But as far as Blenny knew, no one was actually chasing her. Most avoided her, and her only steady mail came from Chesapeake Resorts International. And he thought it also likely that no one at CRI had ever met her. But they knew her as the anonymous person, acting under the name of Harbor Lights, Inc., who began buying their stock until she owned forty-nine percent of the CRI holding company. They sent her letters and all were returned, Address Unknown.

  Yet remarkably, Harbor Lights had voted on every stock issue presented by the Board. The Board had considered sending an investigator to find the person behind Harbor Lights, but someone mentioned the name Howard Hughes and the Board decided to let the matter drop. If she wanted to be a silent stock holder, it was fine with them.

  Blenny got out of his car, catching his shirt on the door latch and leaving a grease stain, so he got back in the car. He had parked as close to his mother’s truck as possible, in case she wanted to talk through open windows. But her window stayed closed. He again got out of his car, closed the door quietly so it didn’t latch, leaned toward her window and motioned her to roll the window down. He muttered, “This is ridiculous.” And the window came down about four inches.

  “That boy, Chum, knows nothing about us,” she whispered.

  “No but your grandson, Horace, does,” Blenny said.

  “He won’t talk,” she said. “Tell him to go home.”

  Before he could argue, the truck started, and began moving forward. Blenny leaned back to avoid the mirror, and watched as only the dogs stared back at him.

  Blenny remembered when his stepfather, John McCullough, died nearly twenty years before and left millions to his mother. That’s when it started. They lived in a large fashionable house on the edge of Parkers, set back from the road on about five acres of wooded property. Mary was never very active in society, but after the funeral she withdrew completely and took to walkin
g the three or four miles for groceries from Flossie’s store. Over the years, she added the Lab and the Mutt and took to smoking a corncob pipe. Her hair became gray and scraggy and no one had ever seen her without tennis shoes. Gradually the paint on her house began to peel and deteriorate into a combination of gray siding, green mold and heavy vines. Her lane to the main road was muddy and almost impassable most of the winter. Sometimes she would push her grocery cart as far as the rusty mail box, then leave it alongside the road and carry her packages to the house. This happened so gradually that people didn’t realize how reclusive she had become. But anyone who noticed her and the dogs walking the highway, and took the time to discover where she lived and who she was, found a forlorn estate completely hidden in the woods, with only the tire tracks of a truck in the lane. And yet, her paperwork was perfect. Property taxes paid. Mail collected. Bills paid, such as they were. And not one plumber or electrician in Parkers had ever serviced her home. The assumption was, she did it herself.

  As she pulled the truck away from the Bayfront, she began her conversation with the Lab and the Mutt. Many people had seen her along the road, smoking and talking to the dogs, or maybe talking to the gods, or to herself. No one seemed to get close enough to hear the exact words. But passing motorists reported her animation in the truck, gesturing with her hands on the steering wheel, pushing her hair from her eyes, and sliding her right hand across the Lab’s head, which rested on her lap.

  “Good boy,” she muttered. “That damn son of mine has always been a coward. You don’t care, do you boy? You only care about mama, don’t you boy. We’ll take care of this little matter as soon as we get home.”

  As her truck passed the new convenience store about a mile from home, she took the pipe from her lips, and holding the bowl, used the stem as a pointer. “See that little halfway store,” she said. “That’s what it’s coming to. That’s Parkers. Overpriced place, only sells bread, milk and day old hamburgers with powdered eggs. People are too lazy to go to Flossie’s. Not us, boys.”

  She drove the truck to the back of the house, and stopped for a moment before entering. She said hello to the finches. Her one concession to public vanity was the bird feeder, hanging on a Bo Peep staff just off the porch. She spent hours sitting on the porch rocker, watching the bright yellow finches flutter out of the sky and onto the feeder poles. They were the most beautiful ornament in the yard, far outshining the red cardinals that beat on her windows to attract their mates, or the robins that looked for hiding places in every nook and cranny of the house to build their nests. The bigger birds would sit on top of the finch feeder, unable to get their beaks into the small finch holes, but angry and intimidating in their possessiveness. The finches simply waited in a nearby tree until the robins and cardinals left, then they glided down to the feeder like globs of yellow paint on the wings of an eagle. It was a marvelous display of patience that Mary admired, but seldom emulated.

  She pushed open the screen door and walked straight to the phone, certain that the phone company was monitoring the call.

  “I want the Governor,” she told the voice that answered.

  “Yes mam,” the voice said politely. “Who may I say is calling?”

  She hung up, waited a few seconds, and redialed the call.

  This time a man’s voice answered. “Is this our friend from Parkers?” the voice asked.

  “Yes,” Mary whispered.

  “The Governor is busy, mam. Can I give him a message?”

  She hung up again.

  The Pipe Lady knew that her message had been sent. The voice would tell the Governor, and he would call her later, at another time and place. It had worked that way for years. She went outside to the little screened porch near the door, sat in the variety store folding chair picked up one afternoon near the Post Office, and lit her pipe.

  The foliage was gleaming, as if a prom-goer had sprinkled silver glitter on the leaves and turned on the blue lights. The recent rain was still fresh, and it lit the yard as straws of light reflected through the trees, some reaching the ground. Mary Margaret loved the old Hickory trees because their limbs were crooked with age and character, but their blossoms were white and fine as lace and hung in the air from sparse branches, looking young and vigorous. Late in the summer, she knew the old limbs would break in the wind, the blossoms long since gone, and the osprey would perch on the high barren branches in the spring, searching for prey.

  Mary Margaret thought God had made a terrible mistake with the gum trees that populate every corner of Parkers, and her yard. She wondered how they started. They grew tall and straight and strong, with every advantage that seemed to ignore the normal threats of root rot or drought or storm, and their leaves were as large as her hand and green as lettuce. But looking at the ground reminded her of the flaws in us all. Large gum balls covered the earth for forty yards from every tree, so hard and gummy in their core that they could not be broken, or even crushed. Worse, they were covered with sharp spikes that defied grasping, or stepping on, or human behavior of most kinds. Maybe it was God’s defense mechanism, like snakes with camouflage colors or turtles with shells. Yet there was also the mystery of where they went every year, covering the ground in fall and winter, then slipping away in summer. The Pipe Lady meant to watch one summer and find their secret, but she always forgot. She imagined hollow trees in her yard, filled with gum balls, hidden by squirrels with tiny gloves.

  She continued to puff the walnut flavored tobacco purchased in a plastic bag at Flossie’s. The lab rose to his haunches when a pair of mallard ducks waddled across the yard. They came every year in early spring, presumably from Canada. Mary assumed they were married, or at least committed, because she had heard ducks mate for life. She didn’t feed them anything but she knew they had plenty of bugs to eat, and they bathed daily in the pools of fresh water that dotted her swampy yard. Plus they could fly. So she welcomed their arrival in April and departure in June, a timetable she couldn’t explain, but which was regular as clockwork. Ducks had their enemies too and Mary figured they beat the hunters out of Jenkins County well before the season opened.

  She stroked the lab’s head until he collapsed his mug between his toes and closed his eyes. “That’s a good boy,” she said. “I wish this Resort business would go away, and I could close my eyes again.”

  Then she started rambling. “Our stupid Governor had to be paid. He doesn’t care about us. He just wants the money for his property. He’s into those Resort boys for millions. And my son, my own flesh and blood, gave that crooked Governor the envelope with the Resort money. I knew the Governor’s mother and I knew he was no good. He was a C student. Became an insurance man, and now Governor. Politics caught him by the throat and now we’re all in trouble.”

  “I should never have given Ray the money to take care of that Shannon boy,” she muttered to no one. The Pipe Lady was shaking her head in disgust.

  The lab never opened his eyes.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  It was early morning on the Intracoastal Waterway and the sky burned red along the horizon, glowing like a computer screen about to flash the news of the day. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Chum had been moving at eight knots most of the night, tracing the red line on his GPS toward Cape Hatteras. The engine was running smooth and quiet, but it was enough to numb his mind during hour after hour of open water. His eyes fluttered as he fought off sleep. He hardly noticed the bow of the boat pulling along side, until he saw the orange stripe. Then he knew the game was over. Every muscle in his body relaxed as he realized that someone else was now guiding his life and he felt relieved of responsibility and burden. He waved to the Coast Guardsmen lining the deck of the cutter and pulled his throttle back to full stop. The bow of the Scatback dipped as if in salute to a higher authority, and Chum awaited his instructions.

  The Bayfront was clanging with silverware and water glasses when I joined Vinnie at a family table for breakfast. The family table designation means thos
e with more than four chairs to a table. At least by eight o’clock in the morning most watermen have come and gone, after pushing tables together and dragging chairs across the linoleum. The dishes are stacked, often by the diners, at the end of the table awaiting delivery to washers. It looked like breakfast was over, but several of the guys were sipping coffee, their caps pushed back and their legs stretched forward under the table. They were waiting for me.

  “Morning Ned,” Vinnie said, with a grin crawling across his face. “How’s your night?” He knew what they all knew, that some development had occurred in the case of Jimmy Shannon, murdered at sea. And they were waiting for me.

  “You know damn well, Vinnie,” I said. “Not much sleep and I still don’t know what the hell is going on.”

  Every table fell silent. Even Pete Wildman said nothing, but looked me square in the face, waiting for an explanation, the kind of response one old friend gives another. These boys were mates of Jimmy and friends of mine. Some had been to Philadelphia and their wives sent them to the Bayfront this morning for answers. The telephones were buzzing as one family after another checked on the Shannon family, and they agreed, Neddie will tell us at the Bayfront.

  Nancy, the waitress who always looked at me with suspicion, which I assumed was a suspicion that I wasn’t a real waterman in the way she was a real waitress. She had earned her stripes with 40 years of cleaning tables, and attending babies and deaths alike. She pushed several strands of artificially black hair from her forehead, and simultaneously wiped a few beads of sweat from her brow. Even at eight in the morning, the stains of life as a waitress had left their mark. She slid a heavy necked coffee cup in front of me, backed away from the table, crossed her arms over her apron and waited for an answer.

  “Well,” she said, “what the hell is going on? Did somebody kill Jimmy, or what?”