Old Haunts

by E. J. Copperman

  “No, she told me about it,” I told her, in the unusual position of defending Maxie to her mother. “But she still had feelings for him, I guess. And when she heard how he died…” My voice trailed off.

  “I don’t care how he died,” Kitty spat out. “All I can tell you is that I’m glad he’s dead. If I’d had the kind of nerve I wish I had, I would have killed him myself.”

  Eleven

  “She actually said she wished she’d killed Big Bob?” Luther Mason asked. “She was that mad at him?”

  We were driving in my Volvo wagon because I don’t sit on the back of a motorcycle (especially in this get-up), holding on for dear life against a guy, unless I at least get dinner and maybe some flowers first. I’m an old-fashioned kind of girl, I guess. It was still hot and humid, and the Volvo had amazingly not grown an air conditioner, so we both had our windows wide open, pretending that was going to do some good.

  “Well, you saw her a few days ago. How did she react when you mentioned Big Bob?”

  “I didn’t mention Big Bob,” Luther told me. “I knew how she used to feel about him, and I figured she knew he was dead because it had been in all the papers. But I get your point. She really didn’t like him.”

  “She didn’t mean she would kill him,” I said, defending Maxie’s mother. “Big Bob hit her daughter, and that was all Kitty needed to know.” The thought of it, frankly, was pretty powerful in my mind’s eye as well. Melissa was only ten, but if any future boyfriend of hers ever thought he could get away with something like that…

  Let’s just say I understood where Kitty was coming from.

  “It only happened once,” Luther said.

  “That’s one more time than it should,” I told him, and we were quiet for a while.

  There wasn’t much traffic on this part of Route 35, but it was, after all, New Jersey, and it was the shore during the summer, so there was still some traffic. There always is. I was always dismayed at the proliferation of fast-food places and ATM machines along this route these days. When I was growing up, much of this area was still underdeveloped, at least by Jersey standards. Now you couldn’t swing a baseball bat without hitting a drive-through.

  After about ten minutes, Luther broke the silence. “Are you sure this is what you want to do tonight?”

  I gave some thought to the minuscule black leather skirt and somewhat, um, restrictive T-shirt I had on, and said, “Why, is the Moscow Ballet in town? Because I sure am dressed for that.”

  Luther grinned and shook his head. “You look…fine. I just don’t want you going in there thinking that you’re entering enemy territory. These are people just like you and me, and they’re here to meet and have a good time. That’s all. This is not the Hells Angels with the Rolling Stones at Altamont.”

  “Wow, you’re schooled in rock history—I’m impressed,” I said, and the big surprise was that I meant it.

  “I’m just saying, these people didn’t just touch down from Mars. They’re not hostile to you, and you shouldn’t be hostile to them. It’s just that a good number of us like to ride motorcycles. That’s the only difference.”

  “I’ll try to stay on my best behavior,” I said.

  Following Luther’s directions, I pulled into the parking lot at the Sprocket, made up to look as much like a log cabin as possible. There were plenty of motorcycles in the parking lot, but pickup trucks were well represented, too, and there were some older cars and a few newer ones in attendance. Nothing from Lexus, Mercedes-Benz or BMW, so my Volvo wagon didn’t feel especially intimidated as I maneuvered it into a parking space and turned off the engine. I took a deep breath.

  “One last chance to back out,” Luther reminded me. He took a good look at my outfit. “We could go to a really dark restaurant instead.”

  “No. If I’m going to find out what happened to Big Bob, I have to gain some trust among the people who knew him. These are the people who knew him, right?”

  The grin returned. “Yeah. That’s who these people are.”

  The Sprocket was divided into two large rooms: In the main bar, where there were tables and some TVs, all tuned to sporting events (mostly NASCAR races), there was loud music playing. A small stage was set on one side, but no band was playing at the moment; the music was piped in through massive speakers hung from the ceiling.

  There was a corridor, which had doors to the restrooms (marked “Guys” and “Not Guys”), and that linked to a second, smaller room bearing a sign that read “Gear Box,” in which there were two pool tables, a few actual working pinball machines, and a bowling machine (the kind where you rolled a little puck over mechanical sensors that determined which of the pins—really lightweight plastic faces in the shape of bowling pins—were “knocked down”).

  The people, I noted, were dressed mostly in jeans (some cutoff jeans on the women) and T-shirts, none of which bore slogans. Mine (Maxie’s, on loan) had lettering that read “Oh yeah?”

  There were no World War I helmets, no chain mail belts (besides the one I was wearing) and no toothpicks in mouths. Maybe Luther had a point when he’d suggested I was thinking of bikers as an alien race.

  After a quick tour of the place, during which at least six people shouted hello to Luther and at least as many eyed me up and down as if trying to figure out how I’d slipped past security, we came to rest at the main bar, where I asked Luther to order for me, as long as it was beer. He—surprisingly—went with a ginger ale, saying that he might have to drive home if I got drunk. Which I found both kind of sweet and kind of insulting.

  We had been standing there perhaps twenty seconds when one of the men who had waved to Luther from across the room approached us and nodded his head at me in greeting. He was one of the older bikers in the room, probably in his late fifties, with gray hair and a face that had clearly been out in the sun for a good portion of its adult life. He said his name was Rocco Palenty, which sounded to me like a name a nineteen-forties screenwriter would make up for a prizefighter or a racetrack tout. It fit him.

  “Didn’t realize you were doing business with the working girls these days,” Rocco told Luther, with what could only be described as a twinkle in his eye.

  “Easy,” Luther warned him. “She’s a friend of Maxie’s. Helped her with that house she was fixing up. Remember? Big Bob told us what Maxie was doing just before he disappeared?” That was the story I’d told Luther—that I hadn’t just happened into the house, but that I’d known Maxie and was helping her with the improvements on the house, then bought it after she was killed.

  Rocco’s face immediately became serious, and he lowered his head. “My apologies,” he said to me. “I was just joking with Luther. I should have realized; that’s the kind of thing Maxie used to wear when she first showed up here.”

  I began to feel a Maxie trap spring around me. “When she first showed up?” I asked.

  Luther nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah, that’s true. When Maxie first started coming around, even before she was with Big Bob, she wore that kind of outfit. You know, that’s what she thought bikers were like. It didn’t take her very long to realize she was dealing with a Hollywood stereotype, and she looked pretty normal after a little while. So I guess you’re a lot like Maxie.”

  Grrrrr…

  But that didn’t mean I couldn’t dig for a little ammunition while I was here. “What was Maxie like in those days?” I asked Luther and Rocco.

  Luther looked at me a little strangely. “Didn’t you know her then? It wasn’t long before she died.”

  “Well, I get the feeling she was one way when I knew her and another when she was with you guys and Big Bob. Tell me—it’s really all I have left of her.” I would have thrown in a poignant catch in my voice, but the music was too loud for it to have been detected.

  Rocco actually scratched his head in thought. “You know, she was kind of funny in the beginning, acting like it was some sort of strange culture and she was…What’s that woman’s name ran around with the Samoans
all that time?”

  “Margaret Mead,” Luther volunteered.

  “That’s right.” Rocco pointed a finger at him to acknowledge it. “But you know, having come out of design school only a few years before, Maxie just didn’t have this kind of lifestyle in her head yet.”

  Wait a second. “Maxie went to design school? Like, college?” It had never occurred to me. Maxie seemed like the polar opposite of a person who would actually have continued her education after high school.

  The slit-eyed scrutiny I got made me realize I wasn’t exactly convincing in the role of Maxie’s friend, but it would have been difficult—if not impossible—to explain to these two that I’d only gotten to know her after she’d been murdered. I wasn’t sure I could explain it to myself. Telling them I’d only known her a short time should have been covering my lapses, but I wasn’t selling it well.

  “Maxie never talked about school, or anything from her past,” I said, heading off their inevitable questions. “She didn’t seem to want to talk about anything except the house she was fixing up. It was so sad when she didn’t get to finish it.” Sad especially since it would have meant so much less work for me when I bought the place. But I could talk intelligently about the house.

  I figured the best thing to do was to deflect their questions about my relationship with Maxie and concentrate on the reason I’d come to the Sprocket in the first place. “Do you really think Big Bob was going to try to get back together with Maxie before he died?” I asked Rocco.

  He shrugged. “I only knew Big Bob from riding with him,” he answered. “We didn’t talk that much. Little Bob would probably know.”

  “Little Bob?”

  “Yeah,” Luther said, smiling a little embarrassedly. “Little Bob and Big Bob used to pal around together a lot.” He motioned to the bartender, who walked over. “Hey Lou, is Little Bob around tonight?”

  Lou nodded. “Saw him in the Gear Box just a couple minutes ago.”

  “I think we should introduce Alison here to Little Bob,” Luther told Rocco.

  Rocco smiled. “Wouldn’t miss it,” he said.

  I wasn’t crazy for the way they were grinning at me, but I didn’t think anything especially worrisome would happen under Luther’s watch, so I followed them into the Gear Box. The sound system was less insistent in here, so my ears stopped ringing a little. Once we were inside, looking at the five or six patrons playing pool and the one man on the pinball machine, I spotted the guy who must have been Little Bob. And I came to understand the grins.

  Little Bob must have been seven feet tall and resembled, more than anything else, the Chrysler Building. He was playing the bowling game, and he had to practically bend at the waist just to reach the face of the table.

  “Robert!” Luther called from the doorway, and Little Bob stood up to his full height and waved his hand. For a second, I thought he was wearing a catcher’s mitt, and then I realized that was just Little Bob’s hand. “Come on over.”

  “Luther,” the grizzly bear rumbled in return. Little Bob’s voice was so deep that I was amazed the floor didn’t quiver when he spoke. “I’ll be right there. I got a perfect game going.”

  Rocco and Luther couldn’t help it—they were watching my face for a reaction to their very, very large friend.

  “Okay, I get it,” I said. “Big Bob was little, and Little Bob is big. Stop looking at me like I’m going to burst into flames.”

  “Maybe it’s just enjoyable to look at you,” Luther said, and a moment passed where we exchanged a look. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but it wasn’t unpleasant.

  “Or maybe it’s funny because Little Bob is so big,” Rocco jumped in. Yeah, that was a possibility, too.

  The apparently bottomless depth of this hilarious fact was mercifully left unmined because the subject of our awe trundled over in our direction, holding a pint mug of beer. It looked like a shot glass in his paw. “Who’s your lady friend, Luther?” the basso rumbled.

  “This is Alison, a friend of Maxie’s,” Luther explained. “She’s here because she read about Big Bob in the paper.” Luther and I had agreed to tell the guys that much, because he didn’t want them to know he had hired me—they’d equate a private investigator with the police, and the cops weren’t tops on most bikers’ fan club lists.

  The tremendous person in front of me looked like he might cry. “Oh, it was a shame what happened to him,” he rumbled. “I figured he’d just ridden out of Jersey, you know, to California or Montana or someplace. He was always talking about doing something like that. Never occurred to me he was right there in the ground at Seaside Heights.”

  “What do you think happened?” I asked. Maybe one of these guys could provide some insight.

  Little Bob blinked, as if trying to understand some hidden meaning in my question. “Somebody hit him real hard in the back of the head,” he said.

  “I know, but who would do that? Why would somebody do that?”

  Rocco and Little Bob made the exact same face, flattening out their bottom lips in expressions of total bafflement. “Beats the pine tar out of me,” Rocco said. “I never even heard about Big Bob so much as having a loud argument with anybody.”

  I looked around the room; there were only a few people back here. “Would anyone else here know Big Bob? Any ideas where we could find someone who might have talked to him right before he vanished?”

  Luther gave the room a look, and shook his head. “Nobody in here, and not that many out in the main bar,” he said. “It’s been a couple of years, and this isn’t the most grounded bunch ever. Bikers by nature tend to move around a bit.”

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  Luther nodded. “The only other person I can think of who was around at that time was Wilson Meyers. You remember Wilson?” he asked Little Bob.

  The huge statue of a man pondered the question a moment, and I started to get a sense of where Rodin got the idea for The Thinker. “Little guy? Curly hair?” he asked.

  Luther and Rocco laughed. “Everybody’s a little guy to you, Robert,” Luther told him after they contained themselves. “Wilson’s probably about five ten. But yeah, that’s him. He was part of the club used to ride with Big Bob and the rest of us. But I don’t remember the last time I saw Wilson.”

  “Come to think of it,” Little Bob said, “it was probably around the time Big Bob disappeared.”

  The other two thought about that, and nodded.

  Twelve

  “So that guy at dinner last night—that was your husband?” Luther sat back in the passenger seat of my wagon and pushed his baseball cap over his eyes to show (1) his weariness and (2) his nonchalance. I wasn’t buying either one. Luther had agreed I could drive based on the fact that I’d had exactly one beer and he was “dog tired.” So I wouldn’t need his services as a designated driver. Besides, it was my car.

  “Ex-husband,” I said. “Why do you ask?”

  “How long you been divorced?” he said without opening his (so nonchalant) eyes.

  “Have you ever noticed that you tend to answer questions with other questions?” I said.

  “Do I?”

  “We’ve been divorced about two years,” I said. There was no sense being coy about it; he’d just ask me more questions. “And before you ask, yeah, he cheated on me. Anything else you want to know?”

  Luther smiled just a little and opened his eyes just a slit. “You seemed fairly cozy for a divorced couple. You guys getting back together?”

  “Cozy? What’s cozy?”

  “Now who’s answering a question with a question?” I didn’t respond, so Luther chuckled and went on. “Cozy, like you were a nice little family, you and him and your daughter. He put his arm around you at one point.”

  “Yes, and because my daughter was in the room, I very politely didn’t gnaw it off to discourage such behavior in the future. What are you getting at, Luther?”

  “Have you been dating since the divorce?”

  “A couple o
f times.” Okay, three, but I wasn’t being precise at the moment. “Why?”

  His voice softened a bit. “I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t muscling in on another man’s territory,” he said.

  Well, that was an interesting statement, on several levels. “Let’s take this point by point,” I began. “Are you asking me out? On a date?”

  “Yeah.” If Luther had been chewing on a long blade of grass, he couldn’t have been a more perfect picture of a farm-boy gentleman. (Is that even a term?)

  “Then ask me out. Don’t ask me if my ex-husband will approve. I don’t care if he approves; he’s my ex-husband. I get to choose; he doesn’t.” And while we’re at it, equal pay for equal work, and other sisterhood principles. Hail to thee, Gloria Steinem.

  Luther sat up straighter in the seat and pushed his baseball cap back to a normal height on his head. “Alison, would you go out on my bike with me Wednesday?” he asked.

  “Well, that’s better. I’d be happy…What?”

  “Thought I’d take you out for a ride,” Luther said, grinning just enough that I knew he was enjoying my sudden discomfort. “Let you see what this whole alien ‘biker’ thing is all about. Turn you into a real biker chick, maybe.” I shot him a look, then looked back at the road. “Or not.”

  I had never been on a motorcycle in my life. I was, what’s the word? Chicken. That was it. I was a big, feathery chicken afraid of driving somewhere without the rest of the car around me. I was a wimp, a wuss, a scaredy-cat, a marshmallow—feel free to stop me anytime.

  “A ride on the hog, huh?” I said. Had I spit out the window, I still wouldn’t have been able to project the kind of toughness I was pretending to have. “Sounds like fun.”

  “So you’ll go?” I wasn’t sure if Luther’s surprise was a good or bad thing.