Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  “I got bad news for you, John. It’s about your buddy Botello. We found the body.”

  He had no comment, no reaction other than a glance at the suspect mirror on the wall.

  “Nobody’s behind that glass, John. It’s just you and me. In case you think I’m bluffing about the body, I’ll tell you where we found it. That piece of swamp behind the place used to be a tannery, then was a plastics factory, now is nothing. Nobody goes there because everybody thinks it’s loaded with toxic waste. Except kids go there. Kids go everywhere.” The detective smiled. “You slipped up, John.”

  John reached under the table and massaged his knees. The left one hurt the worst, though not as bad as his bladder.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” the detective said. “You think we can’t identify it. What did you use besides lime? Acid? The face and fingers are gone, but the teeth are there. You’d be surprised what we can do with teeth.”

  John said, “Seems to me Sal had false teeth.”

  “Caps and crowns is what he had. Three minutes ago I was talking to his dentist. See how easy this is going to be?”

  “If that’s Sal you dug out of the swamp, I’m sorry to hear it. He was a pal.”

  “You saying you don’t know anything about it?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  The detective regarded him with a display of disappointment and regret. “Sorry to say I got more bad news for you. Day Sal disappeared a lady friend of his, Mrs. Reynolds from across the lake, was strolling over to see him. What she saw instead was somebody stuffing something into the trunk of Sal’s Lincoln. Something big in a blanket, she said. She took her time coming forward because she’s a married woman, but her conscience got the best of her. Plus she thought a lot of Sal. Pretty woman, wouldn’t you say, John? We got her in protective custody, which she didn’t like at first. Now she finds it exciting.”

  “Sounds like a flake,” John said. “That the same woman Sal and her used to swim bare-ass in the lake?”

  “Could be.”

  “Yeah, she’s a flake.”

  “I’d be more worried, I was you, John. No matter how you cut it, we got you.”

  “You got me, bust me.”

  “I got to ID Sal first, then I’ll bust you. And then I’ll go all the way with it. No deals. Only deal you might get is from the feds. If they’re still willing.” The detective pawed his shirt and produced a slip of paper from the shapeless breast pocket. “I got a number here, you want to call them.”

  “Guess you didn’t hear me the other time,” John said. “I don’t deal.”

  The detective suddenly looked bored. “It’s your life.”

  • • •

  Barney Cole got home a little after six. On the table was a note from Kit Fletcher. Warm and touching. He read it twice and then tossed it away. With no appetite for supper, he drank a bottle of German beer in the sun room, shady at that hour, the bare suggestion of a breeze traveling through the screens. The early evening was painted bright, but he viewed it with a drab eye. Across the way a young woman and her daughter cavorted on their lawn. The child, golden-haired, did a cartwheel, and the mother, lemon legs flying out of white shorts, did a better one. The sight, which should have stirred him, dug at him in a spiteful way. Moments later he phoned Louise Baker.

  They met in the downstairs lounge of a restaurant in Andover Square and sat in low comfortable swivel chairs at a tiny table. They talked of Chick Ryan as if his body were laid out on the bar in full uniform. Cole, gripping a glass of Harvey’s, said, “I can’t get him out of my mind.”

  “I can.” She swiveled in her chair, her legs thrown to one side. “I’m sorry he’s dead, but I never liked him, not even when we were kids. No honor, no loyalty, no class, and he was the worst kind of cop. I’ll cry when I see him in the casket, but that won’t change what he was.”

  Cole pressed his drink glass against his hot brow. “A crazy question keeps ripping through my head.”

  “One I’m supposed to answer?”

  “Yes.” He spoke fast. “Did you have anything to do with it?”

  “Nothing,” she retorted with the same speed. “Nothing whatsoever. Maybe you think you had reason to ask, but I don’t appreciate it. What do you think I am, Barney?”

  He lowered the glass, spoke over the rim. “I had to get it out of the way.”

  “Now you have, let’s forget it.” She leaned forward, revealing pale cleavage, and sipped Chablis without seeming to taste it. She was without makeup, lipstick, which made her face more daring, much more her own personal belonging.

  “Where’s your lady tonight?”

  He shook his head. “We won’t talk about Chick, and we won’t talk about her, OK?”

  Her hand came across the table. “I’m glad you called, Barney. If you hadn’t, I would’ve.”

  “I was afraid you might’ve gone back,” he said. “Your husband must be anxious.”

  “He’s in the hospital. God knows how long this time. We won’t talk about him either.”

  Their fingers interlaced, her wedding finger glistening. Two women in fashionable summer plumage took a table nearby. They looked at Louise first, at Cole by the way, and then studied the limited but delectable supper menu chalked on the wall. Cole whispered, “Are you hungry?”

  “No,” she said.

  Each gazed at the other more intently than ever. Her unadorned face gave her eyes a greater depth, and he wondered whether she knew everything in his mind and decided she did. “How wonderful that we know each other so well,” he said.

  “Do we?” She directed her eyes away from him, then back to him as if to burn him. “It might spoil things if we did.” Their fingers tightened. Her voice was guttural. “What do you want, Barney?”

  The two women were staring at them. “Every single bit of you,” he heard himself say.

  He drove her Porsche, the first time he had ever been behind the wheel of one. She did not ask where his car was, either the old one or the one she had given him. The headlights poured through the early darkness as they glided through the choice part of town, the grounds of Phillips Academy on each side of the divided road, the misty buildings lurking like ships in dim-lit waters, a fleet manned by ghosts, here and there a porthole of light, as if alumni from another era were back at their books. “It’s magical,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said, gazing at the spectral shape of the bell tower.

  “I mean us.”

  His house was pitch black, surrounded by choruses of peepers, the signals of fireflies. He unlocked the front door and she stepped in. She had been inside his house only a few times through the years but easily found her way through the dark. She turned on only the necessary lights, then waited for him in the passage beyond the kitchen. She stood straight and still, as if someone had turned her into sculpture.

  “Hot in here, Barney. Don’t you have air?”

  “Only in the master bedroom.”

  “I should’ve remembered.”

  The words touched a nerve in him. They were what she had said the last time, much too long ago. Their hands went out to each other, and he kissed her, lingering on her full lips. In the dim bedroom her elbows rose like a butterfly lifting its wings as she came out of her bra. He remembered the first time he had seen her naked, a wallop to his senses. It was no less now.

  He reached her in two clean strides.

  On the bed she said, “Do you love me, Barney?”

  “When have I not?”

  His head sank. She tasted rich, nutty, of long-vanished days yanked out whole from his memory. Her head twisted above full bright breasts. “I can smell her in the sheets, Barney. Your other lady. Doesn’t matter,” she said with vigor. “It goes with the territory.” Their naked legs coiled, hers softer in strength but superior in suppleness. They were nose to nose when the telephone rang in their ears. “It’s her, isn’t it? Are you going to answer it?” she asked needlessly and drew him into her. The bed pitched.
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  Within the hour, the plug pulled from the phone, they made love again, with no less abandon but perhaps with deeper feeling, and then collapsed in the disarray of sheets. The pillow that had been under her looked as if it had been punched to death. A framed picture above the headboard hung cockeyed against the wall. Her voice was a whisper. “You’re better, Barney.”

  “Better than I used to be or better than others?”

  “Both.”

  They caressed each other indolently, murmured playfully, and drifted off to sleep. He slept soundly, six and a half hours of death, from which he woke with a start. His hand reached out, but she was gone.

  • • •

  It was eight o’clock in the morning, downtown Springfield. A shrimp of a woman punched coins into the slot of an outdoor pay phone. When her call went through, she tipped her cap back and asked for Mrs. Baker.

  “She just come in,” said an elderly voice full of reproach. “You wait a minute.”

  The woman waited impatiently, tapping her foot. “You got reason for concern,” she said tonelessly when Louise came on the line.

  There was a small pause. “Pretty sure of that, are you?”

  “Would I call if I weren’t?”

  “Thank you, Mary.”

  The line went dead. The woman walked back to the waiting cruiser and plunked herself in. The male officer behind the wheel gave her an inquiring look. “Did you get through to her?”

  “Yes,” she said, and removed her cap, placing it on her stiff knees.

  “How much do you think it was worth?” he asked with a glitter in his eye.

  “Plenty,” she said.

  SIXTEEN

  IT WAS the first Sunday of July, the air spicy and warm. There were a few streaks of heat lightning and smashes of thunder, but no rain. Cole was mowing the lawn. He took a rest when the blade threw up a grass snake in three pieces, the head the highest, the forked tongue spitting. Kit Fletcher was in the house gathering her things. She came out presently, husky and athletic-looking in khaki culottes. Her smile was loose, her voice droll.

  “Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed.”

  He mopped his brow with his forearm. “Me.”

  “Besides you,” she said, stepping to a rosebush beset with Japanese beetles, mostly three to a leaf, two mating and one waiting. Instinctively she seemed to choose the right place to stand, where the sunlight played most effectively in her blond hair. She glanced back at him. “Change your mind about anything?”

  He said something light and noncommittal while toying with a lever on the mower. She gazed off at lush summer trees that seemed taller than they were, birds stationed high in them.

  “I’ll miss this place.”

  “You’re welcome anytime.”

  “As what? Friend, sweetheart, overnight guest? Could we just be chums, you and I?”

  “Doesn’t seem likely, does it?”

  “Nothing seems too likely anymore, Barney. We were planning an August vacation. Should I forget it?”

  “Plenty of time to talk about it,” he said.

  She turned to him with a wry look. “Know anything about spiders?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m reminded of the one that spins a web in the evening and destroys it at dawn. Our relationship wasn’t unlike that.”

  “First I’ve heard of such a spider.”

  “One is standing right here,” she said, “but I’m not sure whether it’s you or me.”

  He accompanied her to her car, which was crammed in back with cartons and garment bags. His old coppery Cutlass squatted nearby, operational once more. Kit held out a hand, and he gripped it.

  “We might not see each other again,” she said.

  “What’s to prevent it?”

  “Our egos.” She pushed herself into her little car with a girlish ungainliness that always touched a thread in him. After strapping herself in, she smiled out the open window. “You know something, Barney? We would have had a beautiful kid.”

  He finished cutting the grass and stowed the mower in the garage. A little later, his back to the sun, he sat in a lawn chair with a bottle of beer and listened to the birds uttering their sounds. Stretching his legs out, he gazed at the shorn grass and wondered what the property had looked like a couple of centuries ago, what untamed trees had soared overhead, which red men had eaten off the berry bushes. He had, his father had told him, a touch of Indian blood, a Canadian tribe, and he wondered whether a brave remotely resembling him had ever ventured down this far. His eyes closed, he heard a car turn in at the driveway and recognized it by the sound, as if it were a peculiar breed of animal.

  Louise Baker appeared through a torpid veil of sunlight as he erected another lawn chair. She waved it aside. “I can’t stay,” she said, an otherworldliness in the float of her voice, faint signs of fatigue in her face. She took a thirsty swig of his beer and wiped her mouth with the back of her slender hand. Light flooded through her dress. “My sister and I are taking my mother to dinner. That’s what I came to tell you. I can’t see you tonight.”

  He composed his lips into an expression of understanding. “How is your mother?”

  “Getting on my nerves.” She took another swig and gave another wipe. “All she does is pray and talk to the dead. Last night she claims my father materialized, but all he wanted was quick sex. Then he left. She’s mad she didn’t deny him. She’s sure forty years ago he fooled around with my Aunt Rosa. I’m supposed to look like Rosa, which doesn’t help matters.”

  “What can I say?”

  “Nothing. You asked, I told you.” She dug a vivid red fingernail into the Beck’s label on the bottle. “I promised my mother I’d take her to the fireworks on the Fourth. After that, I’m going home. I’ve had enough around here.”

  “I’ll miss you,” he said. “I’ll also worry about you,” he added in a slower voice.

  “Why?”

  “The feds.”

  “I always cover my ass. Scampy taught me that.”

  “Let’s forget good old Scampy.”

  “He worshiped the ground I walked on, but he was a jealous prick. He hated you.”

  “I hated him.”

  “Now it comes out.” Her smile effectively covered him. “You’ve never seen my place in Mallard Junction. Would you like to? You could stay awhile, a long while if you like.”

  “I don’t think I’d be comfortable.”

  “As my lawyer, not just my lover. I told you I’m retiring, and I meant it. I’ll be strictly legitimate.” A silence fell, a strain on each. She said abruptly, “I have many investments that would keep you busy.”

  “Not my line, Lou. I’m lousy about money.”

  “What I’m saying,” she said with a throb of color, “is I don’t want any more garbage in my life, no more Henrys. I want you, Barney.”

  “You have a husband.”

  “At his best he’s baby talk. He’s my child. You understand?”

  “Only that I’d make a lousy stepfather.”

  “We could work around it,” she said with supreme confidence. “Nothing’s impossible.”

  “That is,” he said.

  She lifted the bottle and drank the dregs, the sun blazing on her diamonded ears. She placed the empty on the seat of the chair he had set up for her. “One last question, Barney. Is the reason her? Your other lady?”

  He was silent.

  “Is it none of my business?”

  “It’s not a factor,” he said in a way that revealed more than he had intended.

  He walked beside her to her car with the same lope and finality with which he had accompanied Kit, but with a great sense of aloneness, as if an old chill in his soul were making itself felt again. He opened the driver’s door for her, but she stepped back and peered into his garage.

  “Where is it?”

  At first he pretended he did not know what she meant, but her eyes rolled too hard at him. “I gave it to Daisy.”

  “I shou
ld’ve known,” she said, and kissed him.

  They met in DeMoula’s Supermarket at Shawsheen Plaza in Andover. With her young man, Mario, steering the overburdened cart, Rita O’Dea in a flouncy floral sundress rounded an aisle like a big Bo Peep exploding into a personification of summer. She halted after a few steps into the next aisle, motioned to Mario, and with one hand began fitting cans of Bumble Bee Tuna into the pyramid of the cart. Her other hand clutched a wad of grocery coupons, Mario’s job to snip them from magazines and newspapers, a good way to learn to read English, she had told him. Slowly she lifted her eyes and said, “I was wondering when you were going to show up.”

  Louise Baker carried a plastic basket containing a loaf of bread. Her jaw was set rather tight.

  “You look a little haggard,” Rita said. “The weather or what?”

  Both women edged aside, Rita the slower, as other shoppers sought passage, some casting curious glances as they might have at the zoo in nearby Stoneham.

  “You certainly remember Mario,” Rita said, and Louise nodded. Mario, no less a curious object than his patron, was wearing a fishnet top, running shorts, and sandals. His smile was dazzling. “You go pick out some treats for yourself,” Rita said, and watched him maneuver the heavy cart down the aisle. “Look at that beautiful ass,” she said with wonderment. “Be truthful, you ever see a sweeter one?”

  Louise tilted toward a shelf stacked with pound cans of coffee, as if some inner rhythm had pushed her into an unexpected place. “I need a bailout,” she said.

  “I thought it might be something like that.” Rita riffled the wad of coupons. “You use these? You’d be surprised how much you save. Place I go sometimes in New Hampshire they count for double, once triple, but that was a special time.”

  Louise shifted her basket to her other hand.

  “Go ahead, tell me about it,” Rita said, and listened with a cool ear, once throwing a punch with her eyes at a woman who stared too hard. When Louise finished, Rita said, “This is going to cost you.”