by David Daniel
He turned. “Hello, Mr. Rasmussen. I’m just waitin’ on Nicole. Here she comes yonder.” She was leading a troupe of dogs, the greyhound trotting along a little apart from the rest but looking healthy. Seeing me, Nicole waved. “Kind of like traveling with the band,” Moses said, and laughed: a deep, throaty chuckle. It was a good sound to hear. I asked about Sonders, and he pointed. “Captain of the ship. He’ll be the last man out.”
We chatted a moment more, then shook hands, and I went over to where Pop Sonders was coiling a rope. Inside a red-and-black-checked hunting shirt, the collar turned up, he looked smaller than he once had. “Hoping I’d see you,” he said. “Wanted to say good-bye before we pulled out.” I appreciated that he didn’t ask if I’d received payment (which I had). Farewells and money mix poorly.
“Where to?” I asked.
“We’ll catch the last three days of what would’ve been a week in Providence, then on to a harvest fair in Bridgeport.”
“Robert Mitchum’s hometown.”
“I didn’t know that. I know the citizens there once elected P. T. Barnum mayor, and that’s where John Ringling hooked up with him for their circus. From there we’ll swing west through New York state—Utica, Rome …” He went on, mentioning destinations, like an old sailor naming ports of call. While he talked, I kept looking to see if Troy Pepper was around. I hadn’t seen him since his release. Of course, there was no reason I had to; I’d done my job, collected a week’s pay. Soon the remaining workers conferred with Pop, confirming that the caravan planned to gather at a food plaza on I-95 in a couple of hours and make the rest of the trip together from there.
I walked with Pop to his motor home, both of us moving at slower than our usual speed. Beyond, at the edge of the unmowed field, gold finches were darting among clumps of Canadian thistle, loosing little bursts of thistle down that drifted past like early snow. Sonders opened the driver’s door and turned to me. “What I told you before about having a hometown—I meant it. Maybe if I’d had some place to go back to, a place to hang my hat, lick my wounds … I’d have gone. But I don’t. We don’t.” He gestured at what remained of the caravan, waiting on him. He stuck out his hand. “I appreciate what you did, son.”
I wanted to say to hell with that, wanted to tell him, Stick awhile. In all the confusion of the past few days, we didn’t get much chance to talk. I’d like to have sat with him, and Moses Maxwell, in the mellowing autumn sun and hear their stories, learn from them. I’d been hung up on seeking facts and had gotten far too many of them. Now I wanted wisdom. But there’s never a discount on that commodity, no closeouts or clearance sales; we all had to get it the same way, in installments, paying over time with the hard coin of experience. I shook his hand, then watched him and the others draw into the light afternoon traffic on the boulevard.
As I walked back toward my car, a black 4Runner with tinted windows climbed the curb and moved across the field to pull up five feet from me. Louis Hackett climbed out of the passenger side and looked around the vacant field. He cleared his throat and spat. “Sooner or later Pop’ll get his ass in a sling again, and there won’t be a bozo like you around to save it.”
“And there you’ll be.”
“Time’s on my side.” He chased a bit of thistle fluff with his hand.
“Squisher, though, that’s another story. He never was a good loser. Not back in his wrestling days and not now. Only thing that’ll make him feel better, he figures, is a little payback, for that busted store window.”
I tried to see inside the Toyota but couldn’t make out anything through the smoked glass. I hoped he didn’t have a gun pointed at me. I shifted position slightly, to put Hackett between the SUV and me. “Tell him not to get his tights in a twist,” I said. “I’ll take care of the window.”
Hackett reached and rapped on the hood, his gold pinky ring winking. The driver’s door opened and Spritzer got out. “He says he’s going to pay for that store window,” Hackett told him. “He says he’s insured.” And to me, “You’re cute, you know that? Isn’t he cute, Bud?”
“Oh, he’s a fuckin’ cutie, all right.”
“That again.”
“Unfortunately it’s a long ride home without the brass ring.” Hackett lifted his shoulders. “Squisher’s got another kind of payback in mind.” The big man was flexing his fingers, his knuckles making a sound like corn being popped, and the pit of my gut churned.
“Look,” I said reasonably, trying to ignore the churning, “climb back in and drift, and that’s the end of it. We’re clear.”
“Hear that, Bud? He’s gonna give us a chance.”
“What’s the point now?” I said.
“Hey. I said it ain’t my idea. But partners got to stick together.”
They weren’t to be reasoned with. I could make a run for it, but on my knee I wouldn’t get far. Or I could take my chances and hope to get in enough licks to keep things even. Maybe a passerby would get on her cell phone and the police would show up with a meat wagon in time to get whoever of us needed it most to a hospital. No, I would haul out my weapon, though I really didn’t want to. I was sick of guns.
Behind the pair, a dusty gray pickup hauling a camper drew off the boulevard and came across the grass. We watched it draw to a stop twenty feet away. The driver’s door opened.
Out of the bright county jumpsuit I didn’t recognize him at first, but the long wooden mallet with the black friction-taped handle gave him away. Troy Pepper carried it lightly, letting it dangle from his good hand. He considered the two men for a moment, and then he walked over and stood beside me.
“These are the guys who wanted to kick Pop when he was down,” I said, by way of introduction. “Gentlemen, Troy Pepper.”
I didn’t see it coming. The Rag Tyme boys didn’t either. There was no buildup, no working himself into a frenzy, no wild karate cry. Pepper swung the hammer in a big looping arc and brought it down onto the hood of the 4Runner and rang a dent into the metal that splintered paint.
“Holy shit!” Spritzer said.
I jumped, too.
“That’s your death warrant!” Hackett snarled.
The second blow smashed a headlight housing, spraying glass onto the ground. Pepper raised it for a third time and stopped, holding it overhead, ready.
I drew the gun then and cocked back the hammer, just to add a second vote. No one moved. “The offer stands,” I said. “Breeze while your rig still runs.”
Hackett looked as if he were calculating odds, wondering what the fight would be like now, then shook his head disgustedly. Spritzer just appeared bewildered, his big pocked face as barren as a distant moon. Hackett trudged to the 4Runner, and Spritzer followed. Climbing in seemed a labor. They wheeled a U-turn and drove off in a cloud of bitter dust. I holstered my gun.
The action over, Pepper seemed suddenly out of place, like an actor thrust onstage without any lines. He lowered the mallet. He’d been inside, what, less than a week? And yet he seemed changed. He still wore the expression of a man who’d just missed being hit by one falling piano but who fully expected there’d be another somewhere, it was only a matter of when. His eyes had a kind of stunned look, and the crows had trod deeper at the corners of them. I was glad to see him, and I said so.
“I was out to the cemetery,” he said quietly. “She got a nice spot, Flora. The trees and all.”
“It is nice.”
“I wanted to say thank you.”
Thank you. Words with as many meanings as “I’m sorry”—which phrase I had tried an hour ago at All Saints. I probably could have waited, but I owed Duross that. The three other officers standing in the private room let me in without a word. Duross sat in a high-backed padded chair, an IV stand beside him, with a single bottle suspended from it. He was pale, his shock of dark hair standing out starkly against a white bandage, his whiskers blue, but he looked only a little the worse for wear. He motioned for the officers to wait in the corridor. I fell back on small talk for a minute, and then I said
, “I let some past get in my way. A past that had nothing to do with you. I was wrong.”
“I’ll be clear with you, Rasmussen,” he said, his voice a dry whisper. “I’m not ready for that yet. What’s between you and the department, you and Frank Droney, that’s not for me.”
“You’re right.”
“In time, after I get out of here … maybe we can sort this out.”
I nodded. “You’ll let me know.”
And that was that.
“Thank you,” Troy Pepper said, and it sounded right and set something straight for me.
“You’re welcome.”
For a moment we looked at each other, then his gaze slid away toward his vehicle and some horizon that perhaps only he saw. We walked across the yellowing grass, through the first fallen leaves, to the gray pickup, with its camper in tow, and I wondered if it would ever be possible to open the man up, to get him to turn some of his inside out for others to see. Maybe Flora Nuñez had done it and that was why he’d wanted to be with her, but her dying had sent him scurrying back inside, the way that groundhog is said to do when it sees its shadow. I didn’t know. I stuck out my hand and he shook it. Then, with a shy, ducking motion, he reached into the truck and brought out a stuffed animal and handed it to me. A parti-colored teddy bear.
“I think it’s the one your girl had her eye on that night.” I didn’t tell him she was my ex-girl; it was the thought that counted. I said that she’d appreciate it.
He drove back to the boulevard, and when there was a break in the traffic he pulled out. He’d be heading to join the others, all bound for southern New England and then points west. In my mind’s eye I could see the painted wagons, and the whirling, lighted rides, could hear the barkers’ cries and smell the cooking sausages and fried dough and the sweet scent of spun sugar. Carnivals were all the things Pop Sonders had said they were: throwbacks, reminders of something, their histories unfurling vividly behind them like pennons; endangered in some way, too. But carnivals weren’t going to fade from the landscape anytime soon, any more than battered old cities were, or PIs, or people doing bad or good, either; or summer or fall. There’s a rhythm to the flow of things, grand events and small, and each has its season and its reason, and that was about the extent of the wisdom I possessed. I watched Pepper’s rig roll west along the river toward the last bridge, picking up speed and growing smaller, and for just one instant I wondered what that would be like, living on gypsy wheels, moving as part of a group, knit by struggles and bonds as complex as those of any family. Behind me I could hear the city, and feel it, too, tugging me with its own gravity. At the bridge, the camper turned, the sun winking on its windows, went around a corner, and was gone.
At the Registry of Deeds the teddy bear got through security without tripping any alarms or being eviscerated in a body cavity search. Phoebe was out, but her friend Janelle was there. She gave me a tender-eyed look. “I heard. It isn’t you, you know. I think our girl needs time. She’s not ready for a lot of yang in her life right now.”
I asked her if she’d get the bear to Phoebe. “Of course. Good luck, Alex. It was nice to know you.”
When I got home to my small house, which remained in serious need of a balancing touch of yin but would have to wait for it, I put Ed St. Onge’s gift-wrapped housewarmer on the coffee table. Time for a wee dram. God knows I’d earned it. Moses Maxwell’s LP was still on the turntable, which I switched on. In the kitchen, as the music began—“In My Solitude”—I got a glass, plonked in some ice cubes, and carried it into the living room and set it at the ready. Sitting on the couch, I listened for several moments to the young Mr. Maxwell’s nimble fingers soulfully striding the piano keys, his bass man and drummer and horn player working, too, each musician telling his own story, yet weaving them into one larger tale. Finally I plucked the red bow off the tall box, peeled away the gold paper—and gawked.
Something to bring me cheer in the coming winter, St. Onge had said. The box held an amaryllis bulb, in its own decorative pot, with soil and growing instructions, and the promise of a beautiful, living companion. What was there to do but laugh?
Other Books in the Alex Rasmussen Series
Goofy Foot
The Skelly Man
The Heaven Stone
Other Books by David Daniel
Ark
The Tuesday Man
Murder at the Baseball Hall of Fame (with Chris Carpenter)
White Rabbit
THE MARBLE KITE.
Copyright © 2005 by David Daniel.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
www.minotaurbooks.com
eISBN 9781466822689
First eBook Edition : June 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Daniel, David, 1945–
The marble kite: a mystery / David Daniel.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-32351-4
EAN 978-0312-32351-6
1. Rasmussen, Alex (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Private investigators—
Massachusetts—Lowell—Fiction. 3. Women—Crimes against—Fiction.
4. Lowell (Mass.)—Fiction. 5. Carnivals—Fiction. 1. Title.
PS3554.A5383M37 2005
813’.54—dc22
2004058534
First Edition: April 2005
