“God,” he said. “How can you stand this? You know there’s air-conditioning in your house.”
Sherry put the beer to her lips and sighed with delight. “This, John Payne, is what I live for.”
“Yes, well, take this and double it in the city. If this is May, I can’t wait to see what August will bring. I think I lost five pounds today.”
He grabbed the back of one of the Adirondack chairs and turned it to face her; then he fell into the seat and picked up the beer. His eyes traveled to her stomach and followed it to the swell of her breasts.
He was silent a moment.
“I had a murder on Friday. High-end clothier’s called Carmela’s. You ever hear of it?”
She shook her head.
“Nice-looking lady, middle-aged. Husband home with two grandkids. The daughter and son-in-law were in Alaska on an anniversary cruise.”
“Ugh,” Sherry said.
“Someone walked in and put three bullets in her.” He took another drink. “Nothing is missing, no sex, no motive. Husband’s as clean as they come. Saints, the priest called the two of them. Like Thomas Aquinas and Mother Teresa. Then I call Wildwood, New Jersey, to talk to her father and find out he died from a fall on the first of May. It turns out the father had mob connections back in the seventies. One of them is Anthony Scaglia.”
Sherry would know the name. She listened to New York news radio every day. She turned to face him and raised her eyebrows.
“I know,” he said. “The police down there are calling it an accident. It was in a nursing home: man’s elderly, they say he wandered to an unlocked door and went down a set of stairs in the dark.”
“Except that you don’t believe that?”
Payne sighed. “I guess I’ll have to until someone proves different. Autopsy shows a head injury consistent with a fall. I hate coincidences in homicide investigations, but anything’s possible. Anyhow, he’s their problem for now. Sherry, there’s something about this case. Something tells me I can close this if I just do a couple of right things.”
“Am I one of the right things you need to do?” she asked lightly.
He looked at her with an incomprehensible expression, something on his tongue, but he bit it back. “I think you could help,” he said instead.
Sherry was in a good mood, in spite of, or maybe because of, the heat. She’d been sleeping lately. Her complexion looked good. He’d seen her working out in her gym wearing her karate gi. Sunning herself in dead heat paled in comparison to what she could put herself through kicking air with Sensei Whatever-his-name-was. She probably liked it a lot hotter than this.
“This is a first,” she said. “I thought you told me we should never mix business and friendship?”
“I’ve got four open cases this year, Sherry. Four dead ends with four families I can’t face. Now this one is slipping away, and it’s going to end up as number five if I don’t find out what my victim knew.”
“When is the funeral?”
“I released the body this morning. Some of the extended family needed time to get back into town, so it will probably be Sunday. We could go Saturday night.”
He looked at her legs, crossed, calf bouncing lightly. A bead of sweat ran down her side, a breeze stirred the hair around her ears. He knew she was thinking about Norwich. That she was afraid of making another mistake.
It was hard to read Sherry. She didn’t give out a whole lot, not even to those closest to her. He wondered what she thought of him. He knew she liked him, of course, but how much? When she put her arm around him or when they walked together or even when their hands touched by accident, it was with that same firm, assertive contact that is universal among friends. Nothing more.
He’d sensed in the very beginning that there could have been more, but neither of them had ever acted on it. Now, who knew?
Sweat ran down his temples and into the collar of his shirt. He stripped the shirt off and draped it over the back of the chair. Then he walked to the bulkhead.
He saw the river go white beneath a thirty-foot Scarab, the Scarab’s bow rising like a missile launched for the bridge. She had to know how he felt about her; she was too intuitive not to. Sherry caught vibes like spiders caught insects.
The Scarab skimmed across the river on its stern and he followed it until it disappeared under the bridge. Payne knew the danger of asking for Sherry’s help. Hell, he knew the danger of having her for a friend. One hint around the courthouse that he was friends with the famous Sherry Moore and he’d never again be able to testify in court, not without some smart-ass defense attorney haranguing him about his more intuitive leads.
“Isn’t it true, Detective Payne, that you confer regularly with a psychic—a woman who communes with the dead?”
“Objection.”
“Sustained.”
“I’ll rephrase the question, Your Honor…”
Which, of course, would make him useless as a homicide detective, which of course would put him back in uniform or in some miserable desk job for the rest of his career.
But there was another and far more important reason for trying not to involve Sherry in his work. He had never wanted Sherry to think he cared about her gift. It was the person he had always been interested in, had always loved. Not what she could do with the dead.
“I’ll do it, you know.”
He turned and saw her wiggle her toes. “Thanks, Sherry,” he said after a moment. “That’s very cool of you.”
“Cool,” she repeated, raising the beer to her lips. A drop of condensation from the bottle fell, striking her collarbone, and it slid down her chest between her breasts. She trapped it with a fingertip. “It’s not cool, John. I just like to see you happy.” She turned to face the water again, toes wiggling, and brought the finger to her lips. She licked the drop off.
“So what do we do next?”
Sherry was occasionally asked to do something publicly for law enforcement, usually for the higher-profile cases where the media’s sympathy was a factor: a missing child, a ransom deadline. But most of her work was done in secret. Private organizations and private donors looking for clues from the dead. Generally, these citizens were hunting for valuables or historically significant artifacts. They didn’t want competition or scrutiny.
The few police departments that considered Sherry credible could hardly admit they were contracting out investigative leads to civilians. Especially civilians with claims of paranormal abilities.
Sherry didn’t take it all personally. She honestly believed there was a scientific—not a paranormal—explanation for what she did, but she also understood the difficulty police officers and jurists would have in accepting it.
“You really don’t mind the funeral home?”
“I’ve been asked to be quite creative lately, haven’t I, John?”
She was thinking about children in holes.
11
FRIDAY, MAY 13
WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY
Lieutenant O’Shaughnessy had been staring at her desk, at the note from Clarke inviting her to his home for dinner. He wanted to cook for her, he’d written. Cook?
She left a message on his voice mail, begging for a rain check. She hadn’t given herself enough time to think about where they were headed or what that meant to Tim and the girls. Maybe she was just putting it off because she didn’t want to explore the feelings, but she had to admit she liked him. A lot.
She recalled that night in his car, his breath on her neck, an arm around her shoulders, one hand caught between his thigh and her knee. The feeling she had way down low, wishing for more, wanting his hands to move and hating herself for it.
No, dinner wasn’t a good idea, she told him. There were things that needed to be done at home, laundry for the girls, groceries bought and bills to be paid. And by the way, Clarke, I really can’t come over tonight because if I did I’d end up fucking you, because that’s what people do once the preliminaries are over, isn’t it?
If there was ever going to be other times and they did have sex, her life would have to take a whole new direction and it was a direction some of the other people she loved were not going to appreciate.
“Lieu,” Detective Randall called. She looked out her office glass window and saw Randall holding up three fingers. She punched a button on the telephone. “Lieutenant O’Shaughnessy.”
“Detective Payne again. Philadelphia.”
“Detective Payne,” she said. “You got my autopsy report?”
“Everything, I just wanted to say thank you.”
“So I can take Andrew Markey off the ice.”
“Actually I was going to ask you not to.”
Payne didn’t think it would come to it, but he didn’t want Andrew Markey’s body to disappear if there was a chance his death wasn’t an accident. If there was a chance that he might need to take Sherry to Wildwood after she visited Markey’s daughter in the funeral home tonight.
O’Shaughnessy tapped a pencil on her desk and pushed back in her chair. “I suppose so.” She put the toe of a shoe on the side of her desk. “How much longer?”
“Just a few more days. Just until I know where this case is going.”
12
FRIDAY, MAY 13
WILDWOOD, NEW JERSEY
A breeze stirred the ground, raising hills of brittle leaves in tiny whirlpools that crossed the yard and settled in similar mounds nearer the shed.
It came with smells like ocean salt and something old and timeless and decayed.
Jeremy ran to the window, curtains fluttering in his face. Flat dark nimbuses approached from the east, great barges of doom drifting slowly across the cape. Thunder rumbled in them and leaves rattled on the trees in a gust of wind, something screeched, and he let the curtains fall and backed away.
The house was deathly still; he could smell coffee and bacon downstairs. Was anyone home? They should be calling him for breakfast by now. They always called him for breakfast by now.
The screeching grew louder by the second. He looked around his room; baseball cards blew off the nightstand, medals that he’d draped across trophies clinked together in the breeze. He glanced up at a citation from the mayor that was hanging on the wall and saw that it was shaking.
He looked at the window, east across the rooftops in the direction of the sea, and then he ran to the hall and down the stairs by twos until he hit the first landing; the picture window exploded as a wall of green seawater slammed into him.
The room flooded. He was trapped under the ceiling, using his hands to push himself down and work his way toward the stairs; a lunch pail floated by, a pair of eyeglasses; his chest felt like there was an elephant on it and blood wiggled from a tear in his pants leg.
Drip, drip, drip…
Somewhere in the recesses of his brain, he understood.
But what was dripping?
Drip, drip, drip…
Slowly he opened his eyes; across the room beneath a rusty sink he saw the source, a blue coffee can beneath a leak from a rusty drain trap.
He rolled to his side on a bare damp mattress, his brow soaked to the hairline as he sat up on the edge of the bed.
His right arm was twitching so badly he had to grab it with the other as he looked around the room nervously. The nice curtains were gone, replaced by a stained white towel nailed over the window. The dresser with trophies didn’t exist; there were no baseball cards on the floor.
Jeremy rose and pulled on his only pair of trousers, trying to control the spasms in his arm as he dragged a broken comb through his hair. Then he went to the bathroom and scooped cold water onto his face. Cold was the only temperature water came in, according to his landlady. Mrs. Lester also controlled the heat, which she kept low most of the winter “because heat rises and what heated her rooms was more than sufficient to keep him warm.” So he would cover himself with blankets he found in the trash.
Before he left, he pulled on the filthy tan trench coat that he wore every day of the year, high rubber boots, and fingerless gloves.
It was foggy out, the air so thick you could wipe it from your face. He walked his quickest pace, toes pointed inward and favoring his right leg. His white canvas sack hung from his shoulder, his paper spear was firm in his trembling fist as he set out toward the harbor to get his morning coffee.
The tide was high this morning; the dark swells washed over the jetty, leaving frothy suds and crabs for the gulls to pick apart. He thought about the dream again and felt sad for reasons he couldn’t explain.
The Crow’s Nest was a fisherman’s bar, a small square building tucked between the icehouse and bait storage.
There was a modern jukebox and a phone bolted to the bar so no one would throw it out the window. Tables and stools were similarly screwed down. Cueballs and sticks would have been out of the question at midnight, so there was never a need to buy a pool table. Instead the fishermen gambled away their earnings with a jar of bar dice.
He left his canvas sack and paper spike outside; Janet told him it smelled too bad to bring inside the bar. The room had plank floors and a cast-iron woodstove for winter. The bar was L-shaped and sat only ten stools. He walked to his usual place by the window, stepping over someone’s brown dog curled outside the men’s room. A fisherman’s oils hung on a hook just above it. He heard a toilet flush behind the wall.
“Hi, Jeremy.”
Janet poured a Styrofoam cup full of coffee that she set on the bar along with the sugar and cream.
Jeremy smiled back at her with a look of love.
“Moorrniiiinnggg, Janet.”
She smiled her best smile for him.
Janet pitied Jeremy; he was still a handsome guy beneath the rags. Even someone who didn’t know him had to admit that. If you trimmed his hair a little and dressed him up, you might even think he was something special from a distance.
His arm twitched as he picked up the cream, but he managed to pour it without spilling. Then he proudly set it back down and picked up the cup.
A dragger was motoring out of the harbor, nets riding high on steel plates that looked like wings. Jeremy heard its horn blow and looked up just before its lights disappeared in the fog.
Janet turned to finish the glasses, wondering how things might have turned out for Jeremy. She often wondered if he would have wanted to live or not if he knew the truth about himself.
“Did you get another haircut, Jeremy?” She asked it loud, for he was deaf in one ear.
“Yeeeeesssss, Janet,” he lied, wiping his hand over his hair. She reached across the bar and patted the side of his head. “Looks real smart, I’d say, very short here at the sides; that’s the way the guys wear it these days.”
Jeremy was in heaven.
The toilet flushed again and a fisherman in rubber overalls came out. Janet set his Budweiser on the bar and Jeremy looked into his coffee and tried to find his reflection.
Janet had been about ten years behind Jeremy in school, but everyone knew his story. He hadn’t been just an honor student. He was the only MVP ever to hold the title for three years and not just for football; he was the baseball MVP as well. And then there was all the gold he had brought home from the state Olympics.
But that was then, and then might as well have been never, for Jeremy could barely drink his own coffee now without spilling it all over himself.
There were times, though, that people said they thought they caught a glimpse of someone in there. He might hear a familiar name and his eyes would flash, or he’d see the sports highlights on the TV over the bar and there was something in his expression searching for God knows what, and then it was gone in an instant.
He didn’t even know his own parents after the accident. They tried to take care of him for years, but finally left town brokenhearted, realizing they would never make him any happier than he was on his own. Life had ended and then started over again on that day in 1976 for a lot of people.
Janet reached for a glass to dry and Jere
my shoved a quarter her way so she could see it. She put the smile on once more.
Jeremy of course had not become anything. She often wondered if he had an inkling of what was going on around him. Did he ever see his high school sweetheart and her three grown children on the streets? Did he ever notice the picture of himself in his football uniform with the rest of the ’76 Warriors hanging in a black-draped frame in the window of the shoe shop on Main Street? Would he even know himself if he had?
Did he know the cheerleader Debbie McCormick had posed for Playboy or that Derrick Hunter had died in the Twin Towers? Did he know that Bill Grant and Gavin Thomas died of AIDS and that the Michelson brothers crewed in an America’s Cup race?
She put down the glass and leaned close to Jeremy, picking up the quarter. “Thank you, babe.” She patted him on the hand. Then she turned so he wouldn’t be embarrassed getting off the stool, which he had difficulty doing.
It was 8:20 A.M. when Jeremy slipped out the door. He gathered his paper spear and placed the empty coffee cup in his sack before he set off through the alleys that would eventually lead to Ocean Avenue.
Trucks were unloading in delivery zones and shop owners were dragging bundles of newspapers in their doors, cleaning windows, and organizing displays. Cars began to sound their horns and Jeremy slipped between them, alley to alley, street to street, following a schizophrenic path that ended precisely at Twenty-sixth Avenue and the boardwalk at 9:00 A.M., rain, snow, sleet, or hail.
He never wondered why he went by the high school or looked at himself in the reflection of the gymnasium doors. Or why he cut through faculty parking until he reached the football field. He never suspected that cheerleaders once yelled his name or that crowds of people stood and roared as he drove toward the end zone. A utility road took him past the stadium gates and a boarded-up hot dog stand to a strip of trees that he entered and exited on Barclay.
The beach and boardwalk were Jeremy’s only assignments. Not on top where people walked, but below, where people threw their trash and where all kinds of things blew away from the crowds on the beach. In the morning bicycles thrummed overhead; later came the clopping footsteps and then the whine of the long motor trams.
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