The Perfect Ghost

by Linda Barnes

  TB: Do you see Malcolm as being like the heroes in his films?

  SD: It’s too glib, too easy, Teddy. He had a hermit-like tendency from the start; but with Claire, he socialized. With her gone, he shut down for a while. But he came back and made some superb films. And then the isolation, the theater group on the Cape, it’s like he’s gone backward—toward the limitation of theater over the freedom of film, but that’s just how I see it, because you can’t manipulate live theater in an editing room. Maybe he feels he has more control as a theatrical director, but it makes me sad.

  TB: Why?

  SD: Because he doesn’t need me anymore, I guess, although I wouldn’t like to read that in your book.

  TB: Off the record, then.

  SD: It’s like he’s living in the past. Staying on the Cape where the Justice films were shot, where Jenna was born, working in theater like he did when he was a child. It seems like a retreat somehow, and I wish he’d come back to film. It’s not like we don’t need him. He’s one of the great film talents, up there with Scorsese and Coppola, and that you can absolutely quote me on.

  CHAPTER

  six

  Rain pelted down on the Southeast Expressway. Windshield wipers clacked like a metronome, and I found myself wondering whether Malcolm and Sylvie had done it. Did you decide one way or the other, Teddy? Malcolm was drop-dead handsome then, dark and brooding, and he had a reputation for that kind of thing. When he acted, they said he slept with any available starlet. When he directed, he moved up to leading ladies. Would he have drawn the line at an editor, or jumped in the sack with her?

  A more relevant question: How had Caroline gotten her hands on a tape that should have been safely stowed in the office? Did you make a copy and take it with you to the Cape? I peered into the Bloomie’s bag and checked the tape’s label. It looked like the original, so consider yourself scolded for lifting it without telling me. God, Caroline could have tossed it in the trash on a whim.

  Now that I’ve scolded you, let me also praise and bless you. The tape made me remember how I loved the sound of your voice, Teddy, that deep bass-baritone with the growl around the edges, and how grateful I was that you’d taped the out-of-towners first. If I’d needed to board an airplane, interview La Duchaine in Paris, track down Malcolm’s friends and colleagues in Los Angeles or London, I don’t know what I’d have done.

  The bus to Hyannis was bad enough.

  I sat bolt upright on the padded seat and calmed myself with a silent recitation of facts: Caroline hadn’t canceled the lease, so I had a place to stay. I knew my way around the Cape. One of my few fond childhood memories is of a house—a shack, really—near Truro. Not because of the people I was with, one foster family in a long string of them, but because of the wild beauty of the dunes and the surging ocean.

  I’m not sure how old I was, but my knowledge of beaches was restricted to TV simulacra, smooth white stretches of sun-warmed sand. The Truro beach proved television wrong. Brown and chilly, its grainy sand lay buried under a sharp layer of pebbles. The swarm of local kids wore hard rubber beach shoes. My foster father yelled and called me a baby when I complained that my feet hurt.

  Once I had painfully waded deep enough, it was heaven to lie back, float, and imagine what a wonderful life I could have led as a fish. With my ears underwater, I assumed it would be understood that I couldn’t hear anyone calling my name. It was blissful, the quiet fish-world peace. I felt utterly alone, but free and unenclosed. I wanted to stay in that world, dwell there forever. My foster father splashed through the waves to carry me out, which seemed like a reasonable alternative to stepping on sharp pebbles at the time. He wasn’t drunk then, not yet. The sharp crack of his slap across my face was still to come.

  The Peter Pan Bus Line runs down to the Cape. Maybe that’s what made me think of childhood. For years, vacation to me meant stones cutting into my feet, fear of tracking blood on the floor.

  The bus lurched and belched alarmingly. With a start, I realized I hadn’t finished examining the contents of the Bloomie’s bag. I reached into its depths and pulled out a book of matches, two business cards—one from a realty firm, one from a legal office—and two partially chewed pencils.

  I’d have noticed the notebook right away if it had been turned right side up, but it lay facedown, its yellow pages obscured, its cardboard backing a close match to the bottom of the brown bag. I jiggled it loose, found the binding ragged with remnants of torn-off pages. At first, I thought the remainder of the book was blank.

  A page near the back crawled with letters and numbers, quickly and carelessly written as though you’d been taking notes or doodling during a phone call. One sequence could have said “JULY,” or maybe “JFLY.” Another looked like “HMB,” a third said “2nd BST BD.” The numbers were large, with comet trails of zeroes: 11,000,000.00, 48,000,000.00, 118,000,000.00.

  Expert as I was in deciphering your handwriting, I struggled with the letters and numbers. July meant nothing to me; it was April. Had you meant to rent property on the Cape in July? Was the Realtor’s card connected to the month? I fingered the business cards. Picarian Realty. Not the firm I’d dealt with on the rental and you hadn’t said anything to me about July. The lawyer’s card read: RUSSELL, AMES, AND HUBER. I quickly folded it and jammed it in my pocket.

  “HMB” rang no chimes, nor did the astronomical numbers. I was stumped and puzzled by the figures. They couldn’t be dollars, but what about lira? Had you gotten a foreign offer for the book? Accepted the “second-best bid”? Why didn’t I know about the first one, about either of them? One worry led to others, spreading, deepening. Yes, Caroline hadn’t canceled the lease, but what if she’d persuaded the neighbors not to let me in? What if no snug picket-fenced house awaited, no bedroom where you’d slept, no couch with the indentation of your body, no desk where I might sit, knowing you’d sat there, too? The prospect drained the heat from my body, and not till we’d crossed the icy ribbon of the Cape Cod Canal, passing over the metal span of the Sagamore Bridge, did I convince myself that my plans remained solid.

  Caroline had expensive tastes. Caroline needed the next installment of the advance almost as much as I did. Caroline wouldn’t jeopardize the book. She wouldn’t interfere.

  CHAPTER

  seven

  The bus was bad enough, the car only marginally better. A cobalt blue Ford Focus with barely enough trunk space for my duffel, a midget compared to your Explorer, waited in Hyannis at a rental dealership near the bus stop. I drove it quickly off the lot, pulled over at a level spot two blocks away to adjust the seat and the mirrors. The rain had slackened, so I paced the exterior to make sure they hadn’t tried to pawn off a vehicle with a dinged fender or a hissing tire. When I popped the hood, the engine looked clean, but I pulled the dipstick anyway, then opened the engine oil cap and peered inside through the oil-filler hole. Everything looked shiny, so I got back inside, flipped on the engine, and walked around back to examine the exhaust, which was fine, just white water steam. Consulting the rental company’s map, I reaffirmed the straight shot up Route 6. The map was small, but reassuringly detailed.

  I felt powerful driving, even though I stuck to the right lane while faster cars passed at high speed. The Cape’s skeletal structure was simple. Route 6, the spine, charged up the middle of the narrow ridge of land, with Route 28, intermittently called Main Street, reliably to one side, and Route 6A, the old King’s Highway, on the other, till they converged near the Orleans Rotary and Route 6 rolled on alone all the way to Herring Cove and the Province Lands.

  After a stretch of multilane highway, the road narrowed abruptly to a scant lane in each direction, the only improvement over the old “Suicide Alley,” a strip of yellow warning markers that barricaded the median. Signs said to turn on your headlights even in daytime. The Land Rover behind me crept up my tailpipe, and my hands clenched the wheel.

  The character of the road changed again, multilane, but stop-and-go, with traffic lights, cros
s streets, and drivers no longer in such a hurry. Art galleries and ice-cream shops prevailed over infrequent chain stores. I passed seafood stands, a chiropractor’s office, a billboard advertising a women’s clinic, and swept around the Orleans Rotary into Eastham, where all the streets seemed to be called Seacrest or Seaview. Some of the small shops sported colorful flags to show they were open, but more seemed deserted. Ladders leaned against windows. Workmen painted and repaired wind-scoured façades. This far up the Cape, past the bent elbow of the peninsula and nearing its clenched fist, fewer and fewer guest accommodations were open. Signs read CLOSED FOR THE SEASON.

  I passed a gas station coupled to a garage that advertised a mechanic on duty. Maybe it was the same garage that housed the twisted remains of your car. That’s what usually happened, wasn’t it? They towed the car to a local garage. I wondered whether Caroline had viewed the wreckage during her brief pilgrimage. Maybe she’d encountered the cops who’d attended your funeral there. Maybe that’s why they’d seemed familiar. I remembered Detective Snow’s telephoned request for a callback. I should have taken his number with me, but I hadn’t. I glued my eyes to the road.

  Eastham was gone in a flash. Wellfleet followed; Truro beckoned. I crept along, searching for Goshen Street. There it was, just up the street from the Dairy Bee. I turned left at the traffic light, right at the third intersection, left again. Willis Road, a tiny gravel turnoff, opened on the right, and the house was exactly as you’d described: a shingle-sided, dormered cottage with a steeply slanted roof, a doll’s house, a summer place barely winterized.

  The blue-trimmed brick house next door was larger by half. Two fierce women, you’d proclaimed, and one elderly shaggy dog. Guardians of the key. One chatty, one terse, one incontinent. I prayed for the terse one.

  At first glimpse I thought she was a man. I kept my eyes down and requested the key. I could hear the dog snuffling behind the door.

  “His wife already cleared out the place.” The woman was huge and bearlike in a chenille bathrobe. A cigarette dangled from one corner of her mouth.

  “I’m his business partner,” I said. “We have the rental till the end of the month. I called and spoke to someone named Ruthie?”

  Her voice was nothing like Ruthie’s. No one would have dared call this woman by any name that ended in a cute diminutive.

  She took a drag on her cigarette, and the ash glowed briefly. “Just a minute.” The door closed and the dog barked. When the woman reopened the door, I caught a glimpse of a standard poodle’s graying muzzle.

  “You know that guy in the blue van?” the nameless woman asked.

  I denied it with a shake of my head.

  “Keeps driving by the house. Stopped a couple times, looked in the window. You gonna be there alone, you be sure and lock up. Windows, too. Ran the van smack over the ice crocuses, didn’t bother to stop.”

  Sturdy blue flowers lined her side of the narrow driveway. I assured her I’d be careful and thanked her for the key.

  “He comes back, I’ll call the police.” She slammed the door. Fierce, indeed.

  I tucked the key in a pocket, grabbed the duffel in one hand, my laptop and the Bloomingdale’s bag in the other. Oh, the relief of flipping the lock after carting my belongings inside.

  The foyer was cramped, the kitchen an alarming shade of yellow, the bathroom tiny. Exhausted, too tired to eat, I shoved clothes onto hangers in the smaller of the bedrooms. It was narrow, but the view was lovely, a small pond, a stand of oak and maple. You’d have chosen it over the drab larger room. I was sure it was the room in which you’d slept.

  My mind skittered to the penciled notes on the yellow pad. “2nd BST BD,” could be the second-best bedroom, in which case you’d have been talking to the owner of the house or the rental agency that handled the property. I envisioned the numbers and shook my head. You hadn’t paid any of those enormous sums for a one-month, out-of-season rental. You probably could have purchased every house on the street for money like that.

  I went to bed early, but even with the grace of Ambien, couldn’t sleep. Such a long time since I’d left the nest and flown away, yet here I was, perched in a strange aerie. I tried breathing exercises. I tried counting. The plumbing gurgled, and a clock hissed and ticked. I missed the familiar noises of the apartment, the ping of the heating unit, the rain on the windowpane. It rained on the cottage roof at two in the morning, but there was no one to share the sound with, Teddy. I padded around the cottage twice, checking doors and windows, staring out the peephole.

  I replayed your interview with Sylvie Duchaine in my head, recalling that old Hollywood credo about how films are made three times. Once by the writer, once by the director, and once by the editor. Our books were made three times, too, once by the subject who lived the life, once by you with your probing questions, and once by me in the written word. How would I ever manage it, handling your job as well as mine? Meeting, interviewing, a man as famous as Garrett Malcolm?

  I heard the poodle bark around four thirty. It made me remember that girl, Barbara what’s-her-name, the French lit major with the dangly earrings who used to walk Pogo for you during your Tuesday office hours. I wondered whether you’d ever slept with her, an echo of my thoughts earlier in the day when I’d wondered whether Malcolm bedded Sylvie. Maybe you were right, Teddy, maybe I do brood too much about sex.

  CHAPTER

  eight

  RE: Accident Report

  SENT BY: rsnow@dennisportpd.org

  SENT ON: March 30

  SENT TO: Paul Jericho, Chief of Police

  Paul,

  Thanks for sending the AR. I’ll look it over. IMHO, Lennie did a fine job managing the scene. No way he knows the guy’s some big shot, and with so much going on, I would have done the same thing, started things in motion without waiting for the accident crew. The regional guys know that. It happens. You can’t keep the roads shut down forever. Things get screwed up, usually in tourist season, granted, but it happens. Sorry I was out of the loop that night, because I know you could have used all hands on deck.

  I’m pretty much back on my feet. Had Lennie drive me to Blake’s funeral, which was quite a big do. Thought it might smooth Mrs. Blake’s feathers, but no guarantee on that. Lennie started the ball rolling on the vic’s cell phone records. Guy might have been texting. Old for that, not a kid, but if he was some kind of writer, he might have been texting, or even talking, and that could be why he lost control. Also, sent Lennie back to do a grid search, check for animal tracks. Maybe a deer ran out of the woods. Or a dog. It’s fine that he sent the wreck off to D’Arcy Brothers. They’ve got a good lockup garage, and damage-based analysis isn’t time-sensitive. You can leave it and come back to it years later. On trajectory analysis, it’s just measurements and formulas. Lennie filled in all the diagrams, so no sweat.

  Next is BAC and toxicology. Tricky reconstructing a one-car fatal, but the tox will tell if he was drunk or doped. If this one’s going high-profile, you can try to expedite, but they’ll push back. No authorization for overtime.

  I guess what troubles me most is Lennie didn’t bang doors right away to check wits and their memories ought to be fresh. I listened to the 911. I know you think I can ID everybody in town by voice, but this one’s got me stumped. It’s a bad stretch of road up there. Lennie says streetlights were operational and the vic had his headlights on, but if the guy was unfamiliar with the road, or speeding, and didn’t see the switchback-curve sign, even if the weather wasn’t bad, he wouldn’t stand much chance on that curve.

  Shirley says thank you for the plant. If she hadn’t made me go to the hospital, I might have made it to the accident scene, but the docs say I wouldn’t have got much farther. This way, all I needed was a couple stents. Timing is never good for a thing like this, but the docs patched me up good. I’m home now, making phone calls from the couch, but I’ll be back at work before you know it.

  E-mail with anything you’ve got. I’m happy to have something to
do, but don’t let Shirley know, okay? She’ll take away my laptop.

  Russell Snow, Detective Grade One

  Dennis Port Police Department

  One Arrow Point Way

  Dennis Port, MA 02639

  CHAPTER

  nine

  Let me set the stage for you, Teddy. Appropriate, right? Since Malcolm seems to be taking a break from movies to do a stretch of live theater.

  Time: The present. Act One: The Old Barn at Cranberry Hill.

  Malcolm’s personal assistant set the venue for the encounter, demanding we meet at the barn since the great director would already be present, reviewing production schedules, inspecting set designs, checking lighting plots. What a busy, busy calendar Malcolm kept! The PA hoped I appreciated that a person in Malcolm’s august position, with his many commitments, couldn’t take time to concentrate solely on a petty item like a scheduled interview. Whether Malcolm himself had urged him to put me off or whether it was the PA’s own snide initiative, I wasn’t sure.

  The size and grandeur of the estate numbed my hands on the wheel and made me wish I’d rented a better vehicle to blend with the yew hedges and stone fences, the subtle glow of understated and plentiful old New England money. The driveway stretched for miles, crushed shells murmuring under my wheels, before dividing into a web of roadways. It came to me that those huge figures on the yellow pad could be estimates of the value of Malcolm’s property. Would you have checked that with a real estate agent? Such huge numbers, if they signified dollars, were likely to be associated with the director.