The Dead Cat Bounce

by Sarah Graves

  “Course, there’s no shame in being extra careful,” he continued. “Putting fresh batteries in the smoke detectors, locking up your doors for a while until this is straightened out.”

  He nodded toward the retreating dragger. “Just like on a boat: the more alone you are, the more safety gear you want to carry.”

  The comment popped Jemmy Wechsler’s face into my mind; what the hell was he up to? But it was none of my business and I couldn’t do anything about it. I put the thought of him away, at least for now. “You’re right,” I agreed. “I’m just starting to wonder if anything I do is going to do her any good, that’s all.”

  Wade slung the slicker over his shoulder, and we started down to the beach. In the lee of the cliffs, Broad Cove spread ahead of us, dead low, with acres of green rockweed sprawling up from the water’s edge. “You might be surprised,” he replied at last, “at what you can do.”

  We came to a stretch of low granite ledges and began traversing them. “Sam ought to go to boat school,” Wade said suddenly, stepping smoothly from one chunk of rock to the next. He was too large a man to possess that kind of grace, but he had it, and he didn’t even seem to know it.

  He turned, balancing easily on one booted foot, and caught me watching him. “What?” he grinned.

  “Nothing.” I felt a smile spread helplessly across my face. “Go on with what you were saying. Boat school.”

  He light-footed it deftly to the next rock. “Oh. Sam. Harpwell’d hire him right now, but he won’t tell Sam that. He figures Sam ought to get his schooling in, first.”

  Ron Harpwell was a big, burly fellow who had sailed from Halifax to the Caribbean, built boats from scratch, and ran his marine design-and-repair business in the same shipshape way he kept his vessels. The idea of Harpwell taking Sam on was a gift.

  “Only,” Wade said, “not the kind of schooling your ex-husband wants. The technical school is big on applied sciences, computer-aided design, high-tech materials, all the real hands-on stuff. And Harpwell needs a hands-on kind of guy.”

  Fresh water trickled through crevices in the shale looming up out of the beach, flowing in rivulets among the pebbles back to the ocean. You could pluck out slices of the ancient rock, solidified silt from the bottom of a Paleozoic sea, and sometimes discover fossils.

  “What I don’t get,” I said when we had tramped up the beach almost back to the lot above Broad Cove, “is how someone knew that George would be at the Whites’.”

  We stopped to watch a pair of mallard ducks tipping up in the shallows, only their tailfeathers showing, like a pair of twitchy fishing bobbers.

  “I mean, if he was supposed to be the suspect,” I went on. “To some degree, it would have to be happenstance, just waiting for your chance and taking it.”

  The thought of Nina Mcllwaine seizing the opportunity to get out of her war-torn homeland recurred to me with some force. I had no doubt that a woman who had accomplished such an escape would also be capable of murder, if she were determined enough.

  “But it would be better if you had some warning in advance,” I said, “just so you could … gear yourself up.”

  “Well,” said Wade as the ducks’ heads popped to the surface, “maybe somebody knew where he’d be, because he said where he’d be.”

  The mallards launched themselves from the water in a flurry of quacks, their wings trailing sparkling droplets.

  “I was in the IGA with George, early that morning,” Wade continued. “We were getting coffee, and George was talking about what he was doing for the day. Working,” he added, “at the Whites’.”

  He bent to examine an old iron spike. Around the turn of the century, a half-dozen wooden warships had been burnt on this beach, after all the useful fittings had been scavenged from them but before anyone thought of them as interesting. Then, they were just boats nobody wanted anymore, and at low tide their charred timbers are still visible.

  “And while he was talking about it,” Wade went on, putting the spike in his pocket, “Nina Mcllwaine walked by with that cook of theirs, the one that doesn’t speak any English. Maybe she heard George say it. Mrs. Mcllwaine, I mean.”

  I looked at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope.”

  “She heard him?”

  “I’m pretty sure she did.”

  So she’d known he was there, and it wasn’t much of a leap to think she had also known he would make a great suspect. All Nina would have had to do was make it in and out of the Whites’ house unnoticed. At that moment, I stopped wondering whether and started wondering how.

  We made our way carefully over some thick mats of rockweed, dark green and fibrous. The stuff looks like perfectly good footing and is slippery enough to break your leg.

  “Anyway,” he said after another long pause, “I was thinking. You might want to consider bringing the Bisley upstairs. If,” he added, “you’re planning on pursuing this.”

  “Don’t you think that’s a little extreme? Keeping a handgun ready?”

  Among the stones on the beach were red, round-shouldered bricks, smoothed by decades of rolling under the tide, and shards of china, their scraps of blue and white antique glaze still visible from the days when the schooners brought it from the Far East as ballast, when the harbor bristled with wooden masts.

  “Extreme,” Wade repeated consideringly, seeming to turn the word one way and another in his mind. He picked up a piece of blue beach glass, its edges smoothed and frosted away by sand, and put it in his pocket with the spike. “I’m not sure I would call it extreme.”

  Broad Cove curved around to where an old pasture rambled bumpily over the uneven fields, down to the shore. We jogged away from the water, up a sandy path between rugosa bushes still sagging with rose hips. Sam said that in summer Broad Cove smelled just like Cleopatra, although at low tide in any season, it still smelled like low tide.

  “I think,” Wade pronounced finally as we made our way through the tall grass to the lot where we had left my car, “an ice pick in the head is extreme.”

  The parking lot was edged with white boulders, and because Shackford Head was state property both the lot and the road to it were generously furnished with gravel. Even when roads on the rest of the island were ghastly, you could almost always make it out to Shackford Head.

  “I didn’t,” I told Wade, “misunderstand.”

  “No. I don’t believe you did. Find out what happened … she meant it. Ellie’s depending on you for something, but she won’t say what. Or can’t.”

  Emerging from the tall grass, he paused. “That’s the way it works around here, though.” He waved a hand, indicated the water and the wild-looking landscape.

  “We’re just far enough from official kinds of help that most times, we end up helping ourselves.”

  At the trailhead stood a trash barrel and a sign prohibiting guns, alcohol, and dogs not on leash. I had parked directly across from this sign, and the Honda stood where I had left it.

  The difference now being that all of its tires were flat.

  25

  Half an hour later I stood in the tiny, cluttered office of Porter’s Garage, peering through the doorway into the spic-and-span work area where Gerry Porter was crow-barring the first tire off its rim.

  “You backed out of your driveway. You backed over a nail. You drove to Shackford Head,” he said. “Then the air leaked out.”

  Gerry was a wizard with cars, but he was an airplane mechanic at heart—in his spare time he hung out at Quoddy Airfield; that was how Mcllwaine’s daughter Patty had met him, when Mcllwaine’s jet flew in—and as such he tended to think that if you weren’t actually planning to take a vehicle up into the air, you would be safe in fixing it with a few lengths of baling wire, maybe a wrap of duct tape, and as an extra-special security measure, a wad of chewing gum thumbed onto the critical spot.

  The wonder of it was, Gerry was usually right. Like Sam, he had a talent for the unlikely fix, but what he didn’t have was a
head for nuance.

  Or for malice. “I didn’t back over a nail, Gerry. I backed over four nails; one for each tire. Capisce?”

  But Gerry did not want to capisce the implications of that; it wasn’t in his sunny nature. “Bad luck. You better start readin’ your horoscope. It’s all,” he said, “in the stars.”

  Which was a hell of a lot more comforting than what I thought it was in: somebody’s cold heart.

  In the corner, Gerry’s police-band radio sputtered, blurting out another request for a license plate check.

  Gerry laughed. “Boy, they got that dispatcher hopping. All the reporters speedin’ in over the causeway, gettin’ tickets. I guess Arnold’s checkin’ out every one. He’s not happy with ’em.”

  Undeterred, I began again. “Gerry. They were new nails, poked through cardboard squares so they would stand up straight.”

  The cardboard squares, of course, had gotten nailed to the tires, proof in case I needed it, which I didn’t, that the bad luck I’d had wasn’t the kind Gerry insisted on believing it was.

  Gerry paused. “Ayuh. Well, I guess you’re right about that. Can’t really think who would do such a mean thing, though. Don’t know as you’ve been makin’ any enemies, not that I’ve heard.”

  “Haven’t you?” I inquired a little too sharply, and his face closed up the way it did when somebody spoke unpleasantly to him.

  “You come back a little later,” he said quietly. “I’ll have the tires on, good as new.”

  I swallowed my impatience. “Sorry, Gerry. I’m just on edge, after the fire and all. Thanks for coming out and getting us.”

  We’d called from my car phone, and Gerry had been there to rescue us in five minutes, driving Wade back down to Federated Marine before bringing me up here.

  “Aw, that’s okay, Mrs. Tiptree.” He wiped his hands on a rag. “Way I figure, if you can’t help your neighbors, what’s the good of having them?” He glanced outside. “Say, you want a ride home?”

  “No, thanks. I think I’ll get a little exercise, clear out my head. Maybe it’ll put me in a better mood.”

  “Yeah. A walk’ll do that, sometimes. Listen, Mrs. Tip-tree, I don’t know whether you know this or not.”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Jeez, Patty’d kill me, she knew I was telling you this. She likes listening, and she says I’ve got a big mouth. But those scanners pick up cell phones. And so many people in town have got ’em. Scanners.”

  As I may have mentioned, in Eastport you don’t have to worry about keeping secrets, because for the most part it is impossible. Your bank balance, your medical history, your marital situation, and the pattern of the wallpaper you are thinking of using in your kitchen are all common knowledge the minute they happen, and my strategy from the start has been to relax and enjoy it.

  So I hadn’t worried at all about the cell phone, and had in fact forgotten its broadcast capabilities, since the broadcast capabilities of the Ultra Low Frequency station down at the U.S. Navy Station in Cutler are the equivalent of a couple of tin cans strung together with twine, when compared to the communications skills of most of my neighbors.

  Now, though, it hit me; Plenty of people had undoubtedly been all ears every time I picked up the handset, including the occasions when I’d talked to my ex-husband about clotting times, head wounds, and the surprisingly indirect path a certain ice pick had taken through a certain dead person’s bone, blood, and tissue.

  It was, aside from the active back-fence network in Eastport, how someone could know I’d taken an interest in Mcllwaine’s murder.

  “So, Gerry,” I inquired casually, pausing in the doorway, “how’s Nina doing?”

  He shrugged. “Well as you’d expect. Thing like that, it comes as an awful surprise. But she’s been kept busy. Cops coming out to talk, lawyers from the old man’s company, so on. Enough to keep her, you know, from dwelling on it. And then …”

  Gerry hesitated. “Aw, hell. Patty’d kill me if I told you this, too. But the thing is, you shouldn’t expect Nina to be too broken up. Woman gets smacked around, can’t expect her to grieve too hard, the old guy kicks the bucket.”

  “He hit her? You mean Mcllwaine?”

  “Yuh. Nobody was supposed to know about it. You know how it is, a woman thinks it’s shaming, or something. But he was a mean old bastard, and that’s the truth. I’d hate to see Nina get a bad name, just ’cause she’s not cryin’ her eyes out over him.”

  “You like her?”

  He paused again. “Don’t know. She’s … different. All that money, and her coming from another country … I don’t understand her, is what I guess I’m trying to say.”

  He thought for a minute. “And then what he did to Patty and Janet, making the one so tough and the other so, well, you know. Janet’s got no backbone at all.”

  He levered the final tire off the rim. “All I know is,” he finished slowly, seeming a little embarrassed by his own momentary flash of insight—Gerry, I reflected, probably thought more than anyone gave him credit for—“that old man was a son of a bitch. ’Scuse me for speakin’ ill of the dead.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone you did. We all have to get things off our chests sometimes. And thanks for reminding me about that scanner business.”

  He nodded, falling into another of the long silences that are a standard feature of conversation, downeast; I used to find them unsettling, but now I find them peaceful, these absences of verbal obligation.

  “I’ll be more careful,” I told him, going out.

  I was, too. Not that it did me a bit of good.

  26

  “Okay, here’s the scoop,” said Jemmy Wechsler. “Thirty years ago, Mcllwaine paid White a hundred and fifty grand on a handshake deal. There’ve been two similar payments since.”

  I’d tossed the cell phone receiver into my bag, and it had beeped again just as I’d been leaving Porter’s Garage. Come on down, a familiar voice had said, and that was all. No one had to remind super-cautious Jemmy Wechsler of the broadcast capabilities of cellular instruments.

  “Twice they ran it through the lumberyard books. Phony purchase orders,” said Jemmy matter-of-factly. This sort of thing was nothing new to him. “Then Alvin ‘borrowed’ the money out of his own business, on the up-and-up. The last time, it was a straight loan, or that’s what they called it, anyway. They worked it so it wasn’t income.”

  Which still wouldn’t have put off IRS interest in where the money came from, but that wasn’t my big question now. “And you would know that how?” I asked.

  I sat in the scoured-clean galley of his boat. He was packing shaving things into his leather kit bag. The Hoodathunkit’s decks were cleared, her fuel tanks filled to capacity, and her big anchor hauled. Jemmy was leaving.

  And the anchor chain wound around the capstan, I’d noticed as I came aboard, was brand-new.

  “Don’t worry, Jacobia.” He followed my uneasy gaze, then tossed some charts out onto the table in the galley. “You didn’t blow my cover.”

  “I shouldn’t have asked you to find out about Mcllwaine’s money. You asked somebody else, and now someone knows where you are.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not like that.”

  He finished packing up his gear and began stowing provisions: flour, salt, eggs, tins of meat and fish, boxes of dry milk, two five-pound cans of coffee and a bottle of brandy. Wherever he was going, he expected it to be a long trip.

  “Hey.” He put his hands on my shoulders steadyingly. “The guy I asked, he’s not with the guys who want me. He’s above that. You might say several levels above. Top,” he emphasized, “level.”

  In the organization that wanted to kill him, he meant: an idea that had always seemed somehow reasonable in the abstract. But now, without warning, it was real.

  “Hey, when it comes to information,” Jemmy told me breezily, “we’re like animals in the jungle. All gotta drink at the same watering hole. But the fellow I talked to
, well, you could say he’s the source of the water.”

  He slid one of the charts into the chart rack. “Anyway, I knew this was coming. Had to, sooner or later. Nothing to do with you. You must have noticed I was getting ready for it.”

  I sat on the lower berth. “I don’t get it. I thought Junior was the top level, now.” Surely Jemmy hadn’t been trafficking with that little hoodlum.

  Jemmy grinned. “You and most of the rest of the population. Because,” he added, “that’s what you’re supposed to believe.”

  He fiddled with a knob on the depth finder, frowned, adjusted it until he was satisfied. “Think about it. Here’s a group that controls everything, and I mean everything, in the tri-state area. They buy judges the way little kids buy candy, put the jurors and even the prosecutors in their pockets.”

  He opened a compartment, pulled out a 9-millimeter Glock semiautomatic pistol, and checked the weapon over, handling it as easily as I’d run portfolio hypotheticals, back when I was a professional.

  Which of course Jemmy still was. “Then all of a sudden,” he went on, “they’re lettin’ the fibbies crawl around the ceiling of a social club, buggin’ the lady’s apartment that lives upstairs.”

  As he spoke, his speech patterns modulated and his gestures became jerkier, more abrupt. It was as if, having been called back into the old life, he was reassuming the colorations that would allow him to survive in it: the Brooklyn-tinged speech patterns, the bulky-shouldered, faintly threatening stance.

  “Gotti goes away for life. Life” Jemmy turned on me. “You gonna tell me that’s an accident? Sammy the Bull’s on television, showin’ his face, talkin’ about the thing’s dead?”

  He chuckled. “Jacobia,” he laughed softly, “don’t tell me you swallowed that. You didn’t used to believe everything you heard on the news.”

  It struck me, what he was telling me: that the crime families had orchestrated a major takedown, and that the FBI had needed a win and had gotten one by mutual agreement.