Ladyfingers

by Shepard Rifkin

  "Do you want me to explain the coincidence of our meeting today?"

  She seemed to want to tell me about it, so I said sure.

  "I parked down the block. I saw you go in and when you came out twenty minutes later I followed you around the corner. I wanted to see if you would jump when I hit the horn. Boy, did you!"

  "Don't you ever get tired of looking for games to play?"

  "Oh, damn you!"

  She drove silently for a while. Then she said, "I keep the conversation in the air like a soap bubble and you come on like a lead balloon."

  "Sorry."

  "Come home. All is forgiven. Catarina."

  I smiled.

  "It smiles! The corners of its mouth move upwards! The unused muscles creak with the unexpected strain!" She was quiet for a while. When we reached the New England Turnpike she said, "You have good reflexes. You really took off when I leaned on that horn. Your jacket flapped open and you looked like you were actually flying. I could even see your police .38 just as plain as day in your shoulder holster."

  "How do you know it's a .38?"

  "I spend too much time looking at TV. If you hold up a martini glass in front of the screen the pretty boy faces of the boy detectives get blurred and rough and then they look like you. Which I've been doing lately. You're not pretty. You're not even handsome. But I like to look at your face."

  It all made me feel foolish and uncomfortable.

  "How's your hand?" she asked.

  "All right, I guess." It was funny, but I hadn't been aware of it since I gave my now famous three-hundred-and-seventy-four-dollar talk.

  We missed a stalled truck by inches.

  "The bandage looks filthy."

  "I just put it on. Kindly look at the road."

  "Did another woman put it on?"

  "No, I did."

  She didn't believe me. "I'll put on a new bandage. I'll be very tender about it. I once had a cat who had its two front legs broken by a kid on a bicycle. I beat up that kid and I set the legs myself when the vet said he would put the cat to sleep. 'Put it to sleep'! Isn't that a nauseating phrase? 'Put it to sleep'!"

  "Yes. How old were you?"

  "Seven. Jezebel lived to be fourteen and she ran perfectly. If you're good I'll show you where I buried her under an apple tree in an upstate farm my family owns. Then you know what I did? You know how Indians used to kill horses so that their dead chiefs could ride in the Happy Hunting Grounds? I trapped a sparrow and killed it and I buried it with Jezebel. Do you think that's cruel?"

  "It depends how long you took to kill it and whether you took pleasure in it."

  "It took one second. As soon as I held the sparrow I twisted its neck."

  "No. You're not cruel."

  She took my hand and pressed it against her face. Her cheek was wet.

  "You meet cruel people in your business," she said. "I used to wake up at night for years afterward thinking about that sparrow. Was I cruel? I think you are the most honest person I ever met. When you say you don't think I was cruel I believe you. So I'm crying in gratitude."

  "Keep your wet eyes on the road."

  She laughed and wiped her eyes. We didn't talk any more as the red Maserati flashed along the green lawns and the inlets and coves filled with the white hulls of the Connecticut summer coast.

  22

  AT THE EDGE OF ROWAYTON I THANKED THE trooper. He said he was glad to oblige. Did I need him any more? But my hunch was so thin I didn't want to be embarrassed if it didn't pan out. I thanked him for the offer and said, no, that was all. He called in and pulled away. The Duchess said he was very handsome and didn't I miss wearing a beautiful uniform such as the trooper was wearing?

  "No. Keep your eyes on the road."

  "Where do I go?"

  "Stop at the first boatyard."

  The first one was the Perkins Marina. She drove in through an enormous lilac hedge and shut off the ignition. I took a deep smell of cool salt air. An old man with a wrinkled tanned face under a baseball cap was sitting on a battered milk crate. He was sanding down a hull and gently whistling. I thought he sure was lucky. The yard had several boats pulled up on the marine railways. A few discarded propellers had weeds growing through the shaft openings. There was the smell of shellac and paint and the sound of little waves slapping against the dock pilings. Shackles lay scattered everywhere and fragrant woodchips and discarded hawsers. The narrow channel was full of boats and sea gulls wheeling and circling and screeching. I picked up a woodchip and smelled its perfume. The sun was warm.

  I could have looked at it all day.

  "Did you ever sail?" the Duchess asked.

  "No."

  "I'll teach you."

  I let that one go. I walked towards the old man.

  "Good afternoon," I said. "Can I get some information?"

  "Mebbe." He was as cautious as a slum kid.

  "I'm looking for the Lively Lady."

  "Um." His face had no expression. "You a friend of the doctor?"

  "No."

  He relaxed. "You a feller that's thinkin' of buyin' her?"

  "No."

  He looked me over very sharply. "No," he said. "You wouldn't be buyin' her. Leastwise, not for yourself."

  "How do you know?"

  "Your hands ain't got callouses. You ain't tanned and your nose ain't peelin'. You spent some time lookin' at things in the yard like old hawsers and rusty shackles no boatman would waste a second on."

  This guy was good.

  "An' besides, you're a cop."

  "How can you tell that?" Now he had me really interested.

  " 'Cause when you bent over to pick up the woodchip I saw the strap of a shoulder holster through your jacket. You better wear thicker material, mister."

  He should have been on the case instead of me.

  "Are you Mr. Perkins?"

  "Hell, no. I just help out when he's busy. I used to capt'n a dragger out of Stonington up the coast, but I busted my hip bad so I can't go draggin' no more. I s'pose you know about Henley?"

  "A little."

  "He come in here once lookin' for a storm jib. He was takin' the Lady down to Antigua in September. Know what that means, mister?"

  "No."

  "That's the hurricane season down there. An' bad weather off Hatteras too. He knew it. He got a couple of crazy kids from here an' he sailed her down."

  "He made it all right, didn't he?"

  "He come back, yeah. He got dismasted off Antigua. He got a new mast put in at Nelson's Dockyard down there an' it cost. Mebbe he learned a lesson. But I don't think so. He's the kind can't learn. Like I was sayin', he come here for a storm jib. It was rainin' when he walked in. Walter here, Walter Perkins, he's the fourth Perkins to own the yard, told me to sell him the nice second-hand one we had in the sail loft. Walter cut it himself. It was perfect. Cut out of Dacron. Secondhand but like new. Henley looked at it and made a face like it was horse manure an' asked me how much. I said half-price. He said it was used. I said sure, that's why it's half-price. You don't sail, mister, but half-price is a danged good price. So Henley offers me a quarter of the list price. I jus' look at him. All I have to do is offer it to anyone ten dollars off list and they'd snap it up. So I says, 'Doc, the price is fair.' People like him can't stand bein' called Doc. 'It's fair, take it or leave it.' An' he rolls up the jib an' he throws it out the window into the mud. That means I got to dry it an' wash it good and dry it again careful 'cause of mildew. I says 'I don't care if you are a doctor, pick it up, you son of a bitch!' He says, 'If you wasn't an old man an' half my size I'd break your goddamn nose!' An' I say, 'Try it, you tub of guts, you stupid bastard,' an' he walks away. So any friend of his ain't no friend of mine. You want the Lively Lady, she's at Sebanah Simpson's yard, four blocks down there."

  "Thank you, sir," I said. We shook hands. I saw right away what he meant by calloused.

  "An' your name?"

  "Pablo Sanchez."

  "Portygee?"

 
"No. Puerto Rican."

  He grinned. "My name's Sam Welles. Here's me, whose people come in here about sixteen thirty-seven, an' here's you, whose people came over pretty recent, goin' after someone whose people come here in between."

  "It's a pincers movement."

  "Jus' make trouble for him, son, that's all I ask."

  I got in the car again. She slid beside me. "One reason I like sailing," she said, "is because between drinks you meet people like Mr. Welles."

  We pulled into Simpson's yard. It had the same casual but busy atmosphere. As soon as she parked I found Sebanah Simpson sitting at a rolltop desk in his office, which was on the second floor of an old wooden structure built on a long dock. He was a fat man whose stomach spilled over his belt in a double roll. A big fan was creaking and grinding away in a corner of the office.

  I stepped inside the room and asked, "Mr. Simpson?"

  "Hmmm." He wasn't committing himself to anything yet.

  "Mr. Welles told me-"

  "Your name Sanchez?"

  "Yes." I had no idea that Welles could move so quickly to a phone.

  "Sam said you were a cop from New York looking around for Dr. Henley."

  "Yes."

  "I don't have to talk to you if I don't want to."

  "I realize that."

  "Good. Might I see your identification?"

  "I showed him the badge. He wanted more. I produced the I.D. He bought that one.

  "What's he done?"

  "Possible homicide."

  "Arrest the son of a bitch. And the sooner the better."

  "He doesn't seem to be popular around here."

  "The second you told me he was wanted for possible homicide did you see my face? It didn't show any surprise, did it?"

  "No. Why?"

  "You heard about the storm jib, if I know Sam Welles."

  I nodded.

  "You don't get to be captain of a dragger without bein' able to lick the whole crew. I don't blame Henley for backin' off. Sam doesn't look like much, but when he gets wound up he's a cross between a mad grizzly and a buzz saw."

  He smiled regretfully at the thought of missing that almost-started battle. "It would've made the Battle of Midway look like a water-pistol fight between two old maids," he said.

  "Did you ever see Henley with a woman doctor?"

  He gave up his regrets at missing that classic engagement at the other yard.

  "Women, yes. Women doctors, I don't know. He wasn't the type to introduce his guests to the help. He acted as if I and everyone else in the yard were some kind of necessary scum. The most infallible sign of the nouveau riche. What did she look like?"

  "Thirty-five or so. Not good-looking, not plain. Middle of the road."

  "Yes. I think she was here. Either the women were very attractive, upper-class or lower-middle, or that one was along."

  Upper-class would be the mothers of some of the patients. Lower-middle would be the nurses.

  "How did he and the woman doctor get along?"

  "You ever balance a dog biscuit on a well-trained dog's nose and walk away? Until you give the word that dog will die a thousand deaths. That's the way she always looked with him. Waiting for him to say she could have the biscuit. And he always looked as if he took a lot of pleasure in not saying, Go."

  Simpson watched a ketch tack in to her mooring through a crowded waterway. "Nice," he said. "She's coming in all under sail. If I had my way I wouldn't let no one learn how to sail unless they acted like we were all back in the seventeenth century. Nothing but a compass. No radar. No fathometer. No radio. Maybe a flashlight for coming into a mooring at night in a strange harbor. That'd make all those weekend bastards read their charts carefully! No margin for error." He suddenly grinned. "And a lot more money for the yard pulling them off the mudflats and raising the ones that stove in their hulls.

  "I've run this yard all my life. Started when I was six, after school. Went to Webb School of Naval Architecture. Outside of the last big one when I commanded a subchaser, I've been here. And my father before me. This past spring a big storm knocked over a tree near the water and a broken branch punched a hole in the Lively Lady's transom. I presented him with the bill for repairs and mooring fees. He came upstairs here, yelling that I had faked the bill. When I took him out and showed the big bastard the nice careful joint my boys did with the Siamese teak he said the bill was excessive. He probably thought I would then produce comparative figures from the other yards. I just said, 'Pay it and get out.' He said he'd sail her out that afternoon and he wouldn't pay a cent."

  He wheezed up to his feet and waddled across the floor to a closet. He opened it. Nestled on a gun rack on the back wall was a 12-gauge shotgun.

  " 'Mister,' I said-I never called him 'Doctor' and that burned him up fierce-'Mister,' I said, 'you just do that. I got a mechanic's lien on that vessel, and if it leaves that mooring without your paying your bill, and that mooring is exactly sixty-four feet from this window, I'm going to take that shotgun off the rack. I'm going to put in one of the shells I keep in another drawer. Only one shell. Because that'll be all I'll need. I keep the shells for people who come round here at night trying to pick up my brass fittings. The shells are filled with lead slugs. Not buckshot. Repeat, not buckshot. I am going to sit down because my feet will begin to ache about this time, I got so much weight to carry around. I am going to sit down in this nice oak chair with the casters. I am going to hitch it over to the window. I am going to rest this number twelve on the window sill. And I am going to lead her only a little because you will be a nice big target at the wheel, and the Lively Lady won't be doing more than one or two knots at the most. And I am going to take an awful lot of pleasure squeezing the trigger. And I don't mind my shoulder getting bruised from the recoil. And the best part is, it's going to be perfectly legal.' "

  I had my doubts. But all I said was, "What happened?"

  "He paid. By check. I said thanks and told him he'd be welcome to take her out as soon as it cleared. He didn't like that, but he didn't have any cash with him, and so she stayed there. I told him to take her out as soon as the check cleared; I didn't want his business."

  "He didn't."

  He shrugged. "For the next couple days, in case he came back ugly, I kept that shotgun across the extra chair, the one you're sitting on."

  He looked up at the sky visible through the window. The corners of his eyes were all crinkled from looking at weather and sun all his life. "We're going to have a storm after all this fine weather," he said.

  "How do you know?"

  "The gulls are crying louder, for one. The wind has shifted from west to northeast and it's thickening up to leeward. And it's getting smoky-like overhead."

  He sat down again. "I've seen lots of people in my time. And I've been in some rough ports. I tell you Henley is unpredictable. I've even been thinking of packing a handgun, same as you, in case we met outside my office. And I'm no nervous nellie."

  No, indeed, he wasn't.

  "Were you wanting to go aboard her?"

  "If I might."

  "Sure you might. It isn't legal without his permission, unless it's an emergency to save the vessel, but anything he'd hate I'd like."

  "If he's aboard he could shoot you for trespass and say he didn't recognize you."

  "By damn, you're right. But it's a chance I don't mind taking." He went back, took the shotgun, broke it open, and shoved in two shells.

  "And then I can say I heard strange sounds coming from her, and I went out to investigate and suddenly this hand comes out with a gun in it, so I assumed it was a river pirate, so I fired first. How's that sound?"

  "Everybody'll be shooting everybody else, and everybody will get off on the grounds of reasonable doubt."

  He grinned. We went downstairs. I liked the way he kept the gun broken. It would be awkward, a man of his size rowing out and getting up on the high deck of the Lively Lady, and I didn't want to be anywhere near a man with a closed and loaded shotgun.


  "I don't think anyone'll be on her," he said, as he lowered himself into a big rowboat tied up at the dock. The boat squashed down until only three inches of gunwale were above the water. I stepped in very easy and sat down the same way.

  "But where am I going to sit?" demanded the Duchess.

  "You stay here."

  She opened her mouth to complain but I was in no mood to argue. I looked at her and she shut up. She stood staring resentfully at me as I rowed away.

  I asked Simpson why he was carrying the scatter gun if it didn't look like anyone was aboard.

  "Because," he said wheezing noisily, "he's smart. A boat alongside would mean he's there. No boat alongside means he's not there. So maybe he stole a boat, went aboard, and shoved the boat off and the tide took her out to sea. Or maybe he swam out and forced the lady to swim out in front of him."

  I hadn't mentioned any lady being with Henley. "What lady?" I asked.

  "I figured the lady doctor is involved. Else why so many questions?"

  I rowed out to the Lively Lady. Simpson sat on the stern thwart, bringing the aft end down very close to the water. As we neared the yacht he locked the gun. "He isn't going to like us visiting," he said.

  "If he starts on us," I said, "make sure he means it. But don't let him get in the first shot."

  "I hear you, sonny," Simpson said. "When I give the word you go flat."

  We came up on the offside of the yawl. I saw no sign of life. I tied the painter to a cleat on her deck and climbed aboard while Simpson covered me. Once on deck I took out my Cobra, reached out, took his shotgun, and helped him aboard. The companionway door had a padlock on it, but that didn't mean anything. Henley could have pulled out the hasps, opened a nearby porthole from the inside, and pushed the hasp screws in again, so that the padlock looked solidly in place. I wasn't taking any chances with this guy.

  I stood to one side of the door and pulled at the hasps. Bullets go through doors. But the hasps were screwed in solid.

  "I don't think he's aboard," Simpson said.