by Doug Burgess
“For God’s sake, shut up,” I hiss furiously. “You’ve got a phone? Call the police department. Tell them I found Wally Turner, and he’s dead.”
“Dead?” She still hasn’t moved.
“Murdered.”
The word sounds ridiculous, as if I were Professor Plum in the billiard room with the candlestick. But by now Mrs. Rosen has taken stock. “I should get Barry,” she whispers. “He’s up at the clubhouse.”
“Get whomever you like,” I whisper back, “but get the police first.”
“Barry will know what to do,” she muses, just as if I haven’t spoken. She’s still staring at the body. “We’ll need…”
“The police.”
“Yes, yes. Of course.”
Nevertheless she comes back a few minutes later with Barry Rosen in tow. He is in tennis shorts and a Members Only jacket. But he has already assessed the situation. “This man is dead. Shot right through the throat. Somebody ought to call the police.”
A crowd is starting to gather. The Boy and Lobster sits just above the pier, and people are coming out to take a look.
“Is that Wally’s boat? Good God, is that Wally?”
“Drunk as a skunk, it’s a wonder he made it back into port.”
“Looks like he hit that other boat, though.”
“What’s that all over the front of him? Puke?”
“Somebody should tell his wife.”
Apparently somebody has. Mrs. Wally appears on the dock, weaving unsteadily in high heels. Her face is a brilliant crimson. “Wal!” She is almost shaking with anger. “You dumb, dumb son of a bitch. You’re coming home this instant!”
“Stop her,” I whisper fiercely to Barry. “Don’t let her get any closer.”
He moves, but is too late. Mrs. Wally is leaning over the My-T-Fine. “Wal?” A sudden intake of breath that seems to last forever. “Get her out of here!” someone yells, but her mouth is open, a perfect round red O. Renee Rosen takes her arm, someone else tries to pull her back. But she breaks free of them all and falls into boat. Screaming, screaming, tearing through the November air, and all pretense is gone with the sound of ugly grief.
Here, at last, is officialdom, in the form of Billy Dyer and his notebook. He takes me aside almost at once. “You’ve been drinking,” he informs me. Accusingly.
“I’m fully aware of that.”
“What were you doing out there, anyway?”
“That should be obvious, Billy. I was getting drunk.”
He sighs. “I could cite you. Operating a vehicle under the influence. I could lock you up for that.”
“Oh, shut up and get me a hamburger from the clubhouse. And some hot coffee. Black. Two sugars.”
Amazingly enough, he does so, and we sit on two bollards staring down at the My-T-Fine, waiting for the Tiverton police. Billy sent the crowd home and taped off the area. Renee took charge of the widow—strange to call her that, but true enough—and now it’s just us, and Wally. “How’d he look when you found him?”
“Pretty much like he does now. Any idea how long he’s been gone?”
He shrugs. “I’m no coroner. But well over a day, by the looks of things. That lets you out, anyway.”
My stomach gives a nasty jolt. “I never thought of that!”
“Didn’t you?” He smiles a little sadly. “I’ll tell you who did. Mrs. Wally—Mrs. Turner, I should say. She asked me when we were going to lock you up.”
“What?”
Billy sighs. “It’s just shock, Rosie. None of us are acting normally right now.”
That must be true, since he is too tired to realize what he just called me, and I’m too tired to correct him. “I’m not a murderer, Billy. I don’t even eat red meat.”
He looks up, startled. “Really? Is that new? ’Cuz I remember you used to do a really great steak au poivre…”
“What about the bullet?” I ask, cutting the flow of reminiscence.
“Weird angle. I figure the shooter stood about four feet above the victim. That means a dock, or a bigger boat, or—”
“Or someone standing on the My-T-Fine’s stern,” I finish.
“Yeah. Could also be one boat riding the crest of a wave, while the other dipped down. So, all kinds of scenarios.”
“What was that smell?” I ask in a whisper.
“Bodies often void themselves after death. Something about the sphincter loosening.”
A wave of nausea fills up my gullet, and I choke it back down. “There’s something else. His sails were both set, and he was going at a damn good clip.”
“Like he was trying to run away?”
“Exactly. Not hard to imagine a boat chasing after him, putting a shot across his stern. Still doesn’t answer the question of why, though. What if he found the Calliope? But that’s crazy. And even if he did, why would Marcus…?”
Billy winces at the name. “I don’t think I’d be surprised by anything that guy did,” he growls. “You should hear the FBI boys talk about him.”
“Oh? Tell me.”
He raises an eyebrow. “That’s police business.”
“Never bothered you before.”
Billy opens his mouth to make the obvious retort, closes it again. We are like diplomats after a civil war, trying to find the peace, trying to find the lost common ground. “Tell me about Marcus Rhinegold,” I press him again.
“We’re still trying to figure out the early part. Don’t even have a real name yet. But once he shows up in Texas, that’s pretty clear. He started working for the Molinaris when he was about fifteen. Told them he was a runaway, gave his name as Kevin Wales.”
I ponder the name for a moment, but it suggests nothing.
“They found him in Texas,” Billy goes on. “Got picked up in Austin for rolling drunks on State Street—that’s the first record we have of him. But after that he drops out of sight, doesn’t emerge until about a year later. By then he’s in El Paso, working construction. That was his cover. He’d take his truck across the border all the time, supposedly looking for crew. In reality he was the Molinaris’ point man with Mexican law enforcement. You know, the guy they send over the border to smooth things out, hand out bribes. Pretty soon he’s the chief negotiator for the whole Molinari family. Kind of like an ambassador, or a secretary of state. They sent him in to deal with rival families, or the drug barons in Mexico.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
“Hell, yeah. Then the Mexican police started getting tough, blew up one of the Molinaris’ pipelines, and the gangs started fighting against each other. But the Molinaris kept sending him out, like a canary into a coal mine. Marcus must have figured he was gonna end up dead sooner or later. So the next time they sent him to Mexico he packed two suitcases full of records and took a connecting plane right to Washington. Turned himself in at FBI headquarters with enough info to indict half the family, and six other families besides.”
“Jesus.”
“That’s the story the FBI tells. They leave a lot out, though: like the yacht, the fancy wife, the new name. My guess is Marcus was planning this for a while, and probably in contact with them the whole time. He cleared out a bank account, dropped off the files, took the new identity courtesy of the United States government and set off on his yacht as Marcus Rhinegold, wealthy dilettante. The FBI probably told him the North American coast wasn’t too safe, and he was glad to keep away. For a while. Dunno why he came back. Chances are, it probably killed him.”
“What about the wife, Alicia? Where does she come into it?”
Billy looks satisfied. “No mystery about her. Her real name is Crystal Gronkowski. Born and raised Secaucus, New Jersey. Worked in one of the brothels the Molinaris ran on the border. My guess is Marcus offered her a better life if she became his—what do you call it?”
“Beard,” I supply autom
atically.
“Yeah, that. But then the next thing you know he’s a fugitive—a very rich fugitive, but whatever—and she’s chained at the ankle. She had no income without him, and he couldn’t let her go for fear she’d blow his cover. Must have been hell for both of them.”
Poor Marcus, I see his cockeyed destiny. A smart kid with no advantages, but a deep and cynical understanding of human nature. How could he rise? Not by any usual means. So he let the Molinaris claim him—or think they had. But all the while he was stockpiling, trading on his charm, waiting for the day to free himself from these wretched goombahs and strike out on his own. “Could he really still be out there?” I ask aloud, looking toward the bay.
Billy shrugs again. “It’s a clear, sunny afternoon, and we’ve had a patrol boat out all day. Not to mention the initial search. Even used a helicopter, then. He’s gone.”
“But think about what that means, Billy. If it wasn’t Marcus who shot Wally, who the hell did? And what about Emma?”
He looks up at me. “What about her?”
“Do you still believe she was murdered?”
“I think so. But I’m no closer to proving it. All I’ve got is a frying pan and a witness that thinks, maybe, Rhinegold’s car was there.”
“You’ve got more than that,” I remind him. “You have two dead bodies and a missing person. That’s a hell of a lot more than a little old lady lying under her pots. You know, I never really thought she was killed—not before. It seemed so, so unnatural. This is Little Compton. Nothing happens here for two hundred years, then Marcus Rhinegold shows up in his sub-chaser yacht and all hell breaks loose. There has to be a connection.”
We stare at the bay in silence, each wrapped in our own thoughts. It’s only just past four but the sun has already dropped low on the horizon. The Tiverton police are taking a long time to come. “I’m sorry I didn’t invite you to the wedding,” Billy says abruptly. “Debbie wanted me to.”
I’ll bet she did, I think to myself. I’ll bet she played that scene a hundred times before the mirror. Clutching her bridegroom’s arm with one hand and her meringue of a dress in the other. “Oh, David, we are both so happy for you! You make such a handsome man!” I may have changed, but she hasn’t. Debbie Antonelli has been a bitch in high heels since elementary school. “It’s okay,” I tell him, “I wouldn’t have gone anyway.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. But I just wanted you to know there’s no hard feelings. I was angry then. I said a lot I shouldn’t have. But now when I look at you, you know, you’re different and all, but I can see it’s really you. Like, the real you.”
From Billy this is quite a speech. I wish he had said it then. But I can hear the question hovering at the back of it. “I was the real me then, too, Billy. Just inside the wrong body. But if you’re wondering if I actually loved you, the answer is yes.”
He gives a slight shudder, but his body leans toward mine. “But you don’t like guys.”
“I liked you. Attraction and love are two different things. I wish I could say I was wildly attracted to you. I should have been. You were dead sexy—you still are. I thought I was going crazy. I loved you, I wanted to be with you, but I knew I could never give you what a woman should. There was something missing. I’m sorry, I wish I had known enough to tell you before it was…”
I don’t know how to finish the thought. Billy does it for me. “Too late. Yeah.”
On the night before I left for grad school, Billy drove me over the bridge to Newport. We had dinner at the Black Pearl—lobster and French fries—and then he took me down to the rocks at Rugged Point. And proposed. So, yeah, I should have come out to him a bit earlier. We said a lot to each other that night, but not the right things. Too much was left behind, a trunk full of memories and neither of us has the key. “So when we were talking earlier about Marcus Rhinegold,” Billy says slowly, “was it like that for us, too? Was I your beard?” He chokes a little on the word.
“Oh, God, no.” The suffering in his face is terrible to see, and for one moment I want to take it into my hands, like I used to. I stop myself just in time. “Look, I don’t know why we’re having this conversation with a dead body ten feet away, but since we are, you need to know: what I felt for you was real. You weren’t some trophy to convince my family. I loved you. I truly, truly did. If that had been enough…” Again, the words carry themselves to a dead end. I take a deep breath and try again. “It’s not enough, though. When I looked at you then, it’s like how you’re looking at me now. Can you understand that?”
But he is looking at me now in a way that I hadn’t expected, and suddenly we are too close to each other. I can feel his breath on my neck, catch his scent, familiar and sad. L’Homme. I bought it for him for Christmas one year. He still wears it. His hand is on my knee, and dead Wally is rocking gently below us.
“David…”
A blaze of sirens comes to the rescue: the Tiverton police are here. “You’d better go talk to them,” I tell him.
Billy leaves me without another word.
There are several reasons why getting blind drunk before noon is a bad idea. One is that it leaves you the entire rest of the day to sober up and enjoy the hangover, without the merciful interval of a night’s sleep. But not even a masochist would add a corpse and six hours of grilling by the Rhode Island State Police. By the time I get home I’m carrying my head in a wheelbarrow. And of course Grandma is waiting to tell me all about her day, which involved a quick trip to Paris to have chicken salad sandwiches with General de Gaulle. “He was very polite,” Grandma insists. “Not snooty like the French. He asked about you.”
“That’s nice of him.”
“But he thinks you need to clean your pores better.”
By now I’m literally pawing the bathroom cabinet for aspirin, of which we have exactly two, one of which slips through my fingers, bounces off the rim of the sink, and lands next to the toilet. I swallow it anyway. Grandma’s voice drones through the door.
“…they say you can only bring one carry-on but that woman had three suitcases and a potted plant and they let her on, me I just had that coloring book you always liked and a couple bags of groceries but the main thing is they make you watch the movie whether you want to or not and they keep the library locked…”
Finally I put her to bed with two Benadryl and a hot water bottle. Then, because all I want is sleep and silence, Aunt Irene calls, full of news. Arabella Johnson, Emma’s long-lost daughter, has been found. In a manner of speaking. “Died in a car crash back in ’77,” Irene announces breathlessly into the receiver. “Somewhere in Brooklyn. They found the death certificate. So that’s that.”
There is a sharp pain behind my left eye that throbs with every word. “The cousins will be thrilled.”
“Yes,” she sighs. “Mr. Perkins already told them. But there might have been a child born out of wedlock in 1974. Bill Perkins is looking into it. It’s tough going, apparently. Arabella sounds like a drifter. She was in some New Age compound in Bensonhurst, where they have committee meetings on who washes the dishes every night—”
Aunt Irene prattles on. No one’s told her about Wally yet. Aside from the headache it’s strangely comforting hearing about this domestic little mystery, like watching one of those old movies where the characters swan around sipping martinis and solving missing wills and no one knows there’s another World War waiting for them in a couple years. “Don’t kid yourself, friend,” Nick Charles tells his high-living chums, “these are the good old days.” Too right, Nick. Even as I’m half-listening to Irene, I’m thinking of one of Grandma’s favorite games when I was a kid. I called it The Death Star. She could tell you how any actor—big or small, male or female—died. We’d be watching The Thin Man and she’d sigh and shake her head slowly. “William Powell,” she’d say, “heart attack. But you know, he was ninety-one!” As if living to see the second Reag
an inaugural was a kind of victory, as if Powell was somehow less dead than poor Adrienne Ames: “Cancer at thirty-nine! Could have been a big star!” Still, I think Grandma derived a certain smug satisfaction from outliving her favorite actors. She hovered like a deathwatch beetle above their movies, counting down the fallen with each late-night viewing. “Oh, Karl Malden,” she’d sigh, as we watched The Streets of San Francisco, “he just died.” Olivia de Havilland was a sore trial for her.
“Irene,” I break in finally, “there’s something you need to know.” In a few short sentences, I tell her. The line crackles with static.
“That dumb, dumb son of a bitch,” she breathes finally.
I nearly drop the phone. Irene customarily uses words like “fudge” and “jiminy.”
“Jeez, Irene,” I say finally. “I didn’t like Wally either, but that’s pretty cold.”
She sighs vastly, sending a sibilant shriek up to the satellite and into my ear. “Why couldn’t he have stayed home? What the hell was he doing out there?”
“Looking for Marcus. I wonder if he found him.”
“He sure found something. Oh, damn. You say you actually ran into the body? On the water?” There’s a pause as she considers this. “That must have been pretty horrible. How are you holding up?”
“Not great,” I admit, shivering a little. It’s just after ten. I’m wrapped up in a blanket on the couch, dreading the hours ahead and wishing I hadn’t used all my Ambien on a stupid head cold last month.
“Want me to come over and sit with you a bit?”
It’s tempting, but I tell her no. The days when I could curl up in someone’s lap are long past. “I’ll just make myself some tea.”
“Jasmine!” she insists, “not English Breakfast! That’s got caffeine in it.”
“Okay, Aunt Irene.”
After another five minutes of solicitous advice, she hangs up. The house settles itself to sleep. I can hear Grandma snoring upstairs, long soft percussions of air. A log in the fireplace cracks, sending up a shower of sparks. Absentmindedly, I wad up some newspaper and toss it onto the flames. The headlines curl at the corners:
