The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  But they were pleasures I would have to defer, I thought regretfully, crossing the street toward the fish dock, where the squat, grey tugboat Ahoskie rolled at the half-tide, the lights on her bridge faint gleams through the enveloping mist. Beyond her, the Star Verlanger loomed up out of the fog like an apparition, her cranes grappling white-wrapped pallets of particleboard and swinging them into her cargo bays.

  Past the roar of the trucks lining up to be unloaded and the payloaders scuttling among them, the gangway to the Hoodathunkit was a metal stair leading down past a forest of weed-draped dock pilings toward water level, which was dead low tide. I slipped Monday’s leash and she scampered fearlessly ahead of me, her toenails clinking on the metal steps, which in addition to being nearly vertical were also moving, on account of being attached to the floating dock.

  By the time I made my own way down, she had already leapt from the dock and nosed into the cabin, and Jemmy Wechsler was calling out my permission to board the Hoodathunkit.

  “So,” Jemmy inquired a few minutes later when he had supplied Monday with biscuits and me with a strong hot toddy, “to what do I owe the honor?”

  Drinking in the morning is not by any means my habit, but around Jemmy Wechsler almost any action seems permissible; the things he has done and seen are so far beyond the pale that a toddy for breakfast is as nothing. His final act before leaving New York two years earlier was to transfer something approximating a king’s ransom to a series of confidential accounts at a large, well-known bank in Zurich; the numbers and ID codes of these he had committed to memory and also—he had informed me recently—to the links of the Hoodathunkifs anchor chain.

  “To my need for information,” I said. Monday glanced at Jemmy, got a nod of assent, and hopped up to settle herself on his lower berth, while Jemmy’s Irish whiskey warmed me from within, burning off the fog’s penetrating chill.

  I’d gotten one phone call from Jemmy, soon after his hasty departure, and I’d had to do some fast talking—first in English and then in my few little broken bits of French, German, and Italian; the only thing I can talk about in any of these latter languages is, of course, money—to persuade the Zurich bank to accept him as a client. The bad publicity the institution had gotten over its private accounts made it leery of deposits in cash. Only my threat to take the deposit to nearby Lugano, some of whose bank managers are equally silent about the identities of their account holders but less inquisitive as to the gory details—such as, for instance, the precise method by which the cash had entered the country in the first place—had turned the trick.

  “I’m following some money around,” I revealed cautiously. “Last time it stuck its head up, it belonged to Threnody Mcllwaine.”

  Lean, brown, and bearded, Jemmy wore a black fisherman’s sweater, faded blue jeans, and work boots. To look at him, you’d think he was just another downeast lobsterman, but a glance around his living quarters dispelled that notion; from the outside, the Hoodathunkit was a common dragger with a high, nosy prow and the bare necessity of an operator’s shack plopped amidships. But below decks, she was all gleaming teak and polished brass, fitted out with enough electronic gear for the flight deck of a 767. In addition to the usual loran, global satellite positioning, wind speed indicator, and depth finder, he had built-in racks of other stuff I knew nothing about, only that it looked complicated.

  Jemmy grinned. “Mac was one of the big boys.” He raised his mug. “To the undear departed, may his soul get what it deserves.”

  I felt my eyebrows go up. “Connected?”

  “Like the Pope,” Jemmy replied, “is Catholic.”

  And as to that, who should know better than Jemmy? Before he left New York, he was a banker to the mob from Providence to Newport News; if the guys who were looking for him ever found him, Jemmy was fish food.

  I told him what I wanted, and asked what it would cost me in return, meanwhile mulling over the idea that Mcllwaine was mob-related. It made sense; a lot of the industries Mcllwaine had been involved in were traditional organized-crime territory—trash collection, construction, and so on. And the people he’d bullied and terrorized, possibly even murdered, in order to be so successful in those businesses—well, nobody believed that the tycoon had gone out on any leg-breaking expeditions, himself.

  Or anyway, not recently. “Send Sam down here when he gets home from school,” Jemmy replied. “One of my outboards is turning over funny, I need him to take a listen.”

  Hearing Sam’s name, Monday thumped her tail happily. “You in a hurry?” I asked. My eyes kept returning to the space under the neatly made berth. Last time I’d seen it, it had been packed full of Jemmy’s favorite method of filling his time: books.

  “Little bit,” Jemmy replied, following my gaze.

  The space under the berth was now stuffed with diving gear: I recognized a Diver’s Unlimited International dry suit, the one-piece kind with latex seals and neoprene hood and mitts. With it I could see a mask, a set of fins, a snorkel, a tank and regulator, and a BCD—a buoyancy compensation device. Stuffed in alongside were what looked like several sets of thermal underwear, the kind local divers wear under dry suits to protect them against the fifty-degree water of the bay.

  All these items were similar to ones I’d seen on various trips to Federated Marine—a lot of the guys who work there are divers for the aquaculture outfits, or on boat-repair crews—but with one difference:

  The DUI dry suit colors are orange and black, for safety; their brilliance makes a diver visible in the dark water. Jemmy—or somebody—had covered the orange parts with strips of black friction tape.

  Jemmy watched me assess the gear without comment. I didn’t make one either; I knew better than that. But it looked to me as if he planned to be underwater. And invisible.

  Monday descended from the berth and I clipped her back onto her lead. “A little bit of engine repair isn’t much of a return favor, especially since I’m not going to be the one doing it. Am I running up a tab?”

  Jemmy grinned, his teeth gleaming white behind his beard. Half his mouth was a product of space-age materials and high-tech dental reconstruction, the result of an argument between Jemmy and a fellow with a nail-studded two-by-four. The guy (and I knew this for a fact) had not survived the encounter.

  “Have you broadcast my whereabouts yet?” he asked, taking our mugs to the galley where he washed, rinsed, and dried them, then stowed them neatly away. Back in Manhattan, his attention to detail had been legendary.

  “Not yet.” It was a running joke between us, funnier to me than it was to Jemmy, perhaps. Imagine his surprise when, after absconding with a pile of the mob’s ill-gotten gains and going on the lam for almost two years, Jemmy chose Eastport as the bolt-hole where he was least likely to be spotted, only to find me, an old Wall Street chum, already snug in it.

  “Then you don’t owe me anything,” Jemmy said. “Might take a while, though. I can’t exactly call those fellows direct, can I? But I left myself a few back doors, and it’s time to put an ear to a couple of ’em, anyway. Find out,” he added, “what the opposition is up to.”

  As if he didn’t know. I had a feeling his knowledge might have something to do with all that diving gear, but I wasn’t about to ask that, either.

  He closed up the galley cabinets. “I find out what you want, I’ll give you a holler.”

  “Fair enough.” I sent Monday back up through the hatch, and followed her. Jemmy came topside, too, stretching and breathing the raw, moisture-laden air with pleasure.

  Breathing any air at all was a luxury to Jemmy; what he was up to was no joke. But once he got over the shock of running into me in Eastport, he’d said he was glad to see me, to have someone that he could talk to. Running from the mob was a lot of things, he’d said, but mostly it was lonely.

  Above our heads, the cargo vessel cut off the sky; beside us, the dock pilings were like a forest of dark, dripping tree trunks. The water in the boat basin was flat calm, the waves slopp
ing softly against the cannery foundation ruins.

  On the deck, several boxes lay under a blue tarp. The tarp had come loose at one corner, fluttering in the breeze. Jemmy strolled casually over to it, and tucked it in, but not before I glimpsed what was printed on one side of the exposed crate.

  “I hear your friend Ellie was the one stuck a sharp thing in Mcllwaine,” Jemmy said. “These questions of yours, they wouldn’t by any chance be connected to that?”

  The roar of truck engines rumbled distantly. “You always were a quick study.”

  He laughed. “Yeah, that’s why I got the hell out of Dodge. Thing is, you’re not the only one interested in that money.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Jemmy shrugged, watching a pallet of particleboard sail up off the bed of an eighteen-wheeler, swing around, and hover over the Star Verlanger’s open cargo bay.

  “So I’m in the Baywatch the other night,” he said, “minding my own business, having a quiet nightcap. My back’s to the room, but I could still hear pretty much everything.”

  Of course; if his hearing weren’t good he’d be resting in pieces, surrounded by a forty-gallon drum at the bottom of the East River.

  “And I hear these two talking about just what you’re talking about,” Jemmy went on. “Quiet, but I hear it. So after a while, I look in the mirror behind the bar and there’s the two of them with their heads together.”

  Impatience overcame me. “The two of who.?”

  Monday glanced up, then returned to crunching one of the urchins whose crisp, sea-green shells blow like small tumbleweeds all around the perimeter of the island. I glanced again at the tarp-covered crates on Jemmy’s deck, now safely concealed again.

  Back in another life, before New York, before what I thought of as my real life even began, I’d seen a lot of those crates. For an unwelcome instant my first sight of them came back to me, along with the unwanted recollection of a smell that had permeated my entire existence back then: the thin, sour reek of poverty.

  Once I’d gotten out of it, I never went back, but the scenery stuck, vivid and unerasable, in memory.

  Explosives, the legend on the side of the wooden crate had read before Jemmy covered it up; that and the bright yellow danger triangle and health-hazard warning. I remembered them well.

  But now all I smelled was salt water, seaweed, and a whiff of diesel from the trucks moving busily above. That old life of impoverishment and of struggling up out of it was in the past, and I would never have to live it again, except in a few unhappy memories.

  Money may be the root of all evil to some, but it is better than the alternative; take it from one who knows.

  “It was Ellie,” said Jemmy, “and George Valentine.”

  19

  When I first came to Eastport, I was optimistic about doing small repair jobs myself, and I thought replacing a toilet seat was within my home fix-up capabilities. So I went to Wadsworth’s and bought a new toilet seat, with plastic attachment bolts.

  Unfortunately, someone had attached the old seat with metal bolts, securing them with metal nuts, and over the years these items had fused themselves together via the miracle of rust. No turning or twisting had any effect whatsoever on them.

  Undeterred, I went back to Wadsworth’s and bought myself a hacksaw, sat down on the bathroom floor, and slid the hacksaw’s blade between the first rusted bolt head and the ceramic surface of the toilet bowl. Happily, I began sawing back and forth; home repair, I thought, took ingenuity, which I had in spades.

  Whereupon the rubber seal between tank and bowl, embrittled over the years and disturbed by the vibrations of my energetic hacksawing, gave way, pouring water into the crawlspace over the basement stair, where it was my understanding that a lot of very important electrical wires were located.

  The shut-off valve broke off in my hand; I scrambled to the basement, where pipes crisscrossed along the ceiling. All were draped in thick, greasy-feeling cobwebs, and a confusing number of them seemed to be connected to the hot-water boiler, which I believed would explode if allowed to run dry. Nevertheless I began turning valves, since my homeowner’s insurance covered explosions but not floods, and I was certain that it did not cover a basement stairway transformed inadvertently into an electrocution chamber.

  When I had turned off all possible water flow, I went back upstairs and opened the telephone book, knowing it was hopeless. It was Sunday afternoon, I knew nobody in Eastport, and I really needed a plumber right away, which as everyone knows is when you really can’t get one.

  But there was a number in the book, so I called it, and a nice, elderly-sounding woman answered and said that her nephew was watching football, but she would tell him and he would get over as soon as he could. I was about to give my address, but she said she guessed I must be the lady who bought the big house on Key Street.

  Yes, I said, imagining her blue-rinsed hair and flowered apron; no doubt I had called away her from her doughnut-frying, or from the fixing of a traditional downeast casserole dish in which potatoes and salted codfish were important ingredients.

  Well, she had to go, now, she said. She and some friends were going to ride their motorcycles out to Meddybemps, and she didn’t want to be late.

  Bemusedly, I hung up. Probably, I thought as I went around back to open the Bilco doors, it would be days before the plumber got here. Probably he was too busy with football to care about me: new in town, all alone, and in danger of drowning, electrocution, or both.

  Just then a bright red panel truck puffed into my driveway, neatly avoiding the raspberry canes on the left and the lilac bushes on the right. A small, wiry fellow of about thirty-five jumped out, carrying a toolbox.

  “So,” he said cheerfully as he strode toward the Bilco doors, slanting metal hatchway-covers that led to the below-ground cellar entrance. “I guess you must’ve tried to fix that toilet seat.”

  He looked down at my hands, which were smeared with rust from those damned bolts.

  “Hacksaw,” he diagnosed. “That’s good. The direct approach. Got its pitfalls, though, old houses like this one. Got what you might call a falling-domino effect. Well, let’s have a look.”

  Swinging his toolbox, he hopped over the Bilco foundation, ducked accurately under the header above the doorway, and vanished into the basement. Moments later I could hear him whistling down there, and then his bootsteps going up the basement stairs.

  “Wow,” I heard him say to no one in particular when he got to about the level of the wet electrical wires.

  Half an hour later he had sealed the toilet tank, fixed the shut-off valve, dried the electrical wires with my hair dryer, and drawn a diagram of the pipes in the basement so I would know which ones to shut off, next time something happened; we both knew there would be a next time.

  Oh, and he had also replaced the toilet seat.

  He gazed at the house. “You know, though, your water pipes are old. You want to watch out, if you ever turn off the water main, that you turn it back on slow. Otherwise they could go,” he gestured vividly, “kablooie.”

  He pulled an inhaler from his pocket and drew on it. “Doctor gave me this,” he explained at my inquisitive look. “My whole family’s got asthma, some worse’n me. But if I take my pills and stay away from cigarette smoke—”

  His nose wrinkled just at the mention of the stuff.

  “—and keep a couple of these babies on me all the time, I’m all right.” He tucked the inhaler back into his pocket.

  “Thanks for coming over so fast,” I told him, getting out my checkbook. “I appreciate this a lot. How much do I owe you?”

  He waved off the check and picked up his toolbox, setting his black gimme cap with Guptill’s Excavating lettered on it in orange script atop his small, neat head.

  “This one’s on me. Welcome to Eastport.”

  He said it the Maine way: Eastpawt.

  And that was how I’d met George Valentine.

  Now the rumble of m
edia vehicles arriving and departing outside kept up a constant bass counterpoint as I set a plate of scrambled eggs and toast in front of George.

  He tipped his head at the sound, sighing heavily, then began devouring the toast and eggs. He wasn’t telling me all he knew, but for a born-and bred Eastporter that was standard operating procedure; except for a year or so—out in Colorado, where I gathered from Ellie that he had been working construction, and sowing his wild oats—George had lived here all his life.

  “Thanks,” he said when he had finished. “I’ve been feeling too hungry to sleep and too tired to eat. That hit the spot.”

  He got up and made to set his cap on his head; I’d gotten him over here on the pretext of fixing a faucet, but I wasn’t finished with him.

  “Not so fast,” I said, taking the cap away. “There are a couple of things I want to talk to you about.”

  I poured more coffee, and he sat down again, looking trapped.

  “A little bird told me you knew all about the big money Alvin White had salted away. And that you and Ellie might have been on the front burner again, romance-wise. So what’s the deal, George? This doesn’t look so good for either one of you, you know.”

  His face was miserable. “Maybe,” he appealed, “we could go down in the cellar. Now that the gravel is here, I want to look at the dry-well hole again, and I talk better when I work.”

  The dry well was an ongoing project I kept George plugging away at, when no other area of the house was actively engaged in collapsing. “Fine. Get your toolbox, and we’ll go.”

  In the cellar, George examined the Bilco doors that led to the outside, and the wooden steps leading down from them. The damp in the cellar was so persistent that even in the winter with the furnace on, the rough concrete floor was a patchwork of darkened wet spots, so that as a cellar it made a great spot for a mushroom farm but was useless for much of anything else. That, and the fact that I now kept the Bisley locked down here along with the ammunition, had made me determined to solve the dampness problem.