by William Baer
I hope you’re behaving yourself down there, eating lots of slimy seafood, and wearing sunblock.
Love, Nonna
11
Reading Beach
Thursday, March 26th
50°
I hoped you’d show up.”
Another benefit of being famous.
Actually a detriment:
High expectations.
We were standing on the upper-level porch of her huge house, staring across Beach Avenue at the Atlantic Ocean.
Helen Pavese was mid-fifties, early retirement, most probably a local beach girl turned cop. The Jersey sun had burned some age into her face, and she had that “divorced more than once” look, but she was definitely pretty once upon a time. I’d say she was a Helen Mirren type. She held her daiquiri like she’d held way too many of them, but she was still deeply concerned about the case that she’d never been able to solve.
I knew it was rude, but I asked anyway:
“How can you afford a place like this?”
“I’ve lived here my whole life. It was my grandfather’s.”
She definitely didn’t mind my question, and she wasn’t ashamed to be the beneficiary of Cape May money.
She looked at the beach, mostly deserted on a March afternoon. Then she and her daiquiri tried to explain herself.
“When I was a kid I loved mysteries, but I failed to solve the first one I tried to solve.”
I waited.
“William Kidd.”
Everybody in New Jersey knew the rumors about Captain Kidd and his treasures. A lot of people were convinced that he buried most of his booty at the Jersey Shore before he got himself arrested in Boston, tried in London, and hung from a rope on Execution Dock in 1701. After which, they suspended his decomposing body over the Thames for three years to discourage would-be pirates.
“I thought it was Brigantine?” I remembered.
“There’s other evidence that he buried on the cape.”
I guess she never found it.
“But I’ll tell you something, Jack Colt, I’d rather solve the Nikki O’Brien case than find all of Kidd’s treasures.”
I believed her.
“You want a drink?”
She wanted company.
“I’m working.”
She understood, and she sat down in a chair, and I did the same, both facing the ocean.
“Ask me anything.”
I did.
“What about the ‘lost’ day?”
“I have no idea where she was. It’s always driven me nuts.”
“What about Diamond Beach?”
“She definitely lied to her sister about going up to her aunt’s place, and she got her best pal Ronnie to cover for her.”
“What about the B&B card?”
“Rikki told me that the Gingerbread House was their favorite B&B in town, even though they’d never been inside. When I checked the register, she’d never been there.”
“Was the gas tank full when they pulled the car out of the ocean?”
She seemed surprised.
“Yeah, mostly. Almost.”
“Edward Colt had a typed ‘suspect list’ in his files. Are you the one who typed it up?”
“Yes. I gave him a copy when he stopped by to see me last week.”
“Did he ask any interesting questions?”
“Not really. Mostly generic. He was very polite, very conscientious, but I have to admit, I didn’t have much confidence that he’d figure things out.”
She added:
“Unlike you.”
I ignored it.
“Who was your prime suspect?”
“The boyfriend. Tommy Garrison. Let’s face it, the kid’s girlfriend was off flirting with some college boy, and no high school kid’s going to like the sound of that. But we had nothing on him.”
“Why was Nikki’s father on your suspect list?”
She shook her head, as if at her own foolishness.
“Oh, that was just my natural cynicism at work. Richard O’Brien seemed too good to be true. He still does. But when I checked him out, there was nothing. Nothing. I wondered if there might have been some disgruntled plaintiff out there, harboring a grudge, but I checked out all his cases, talked to every divorcée/divorcé in the county, and came up with nothing. The guy’s clean as a whistle. So were the twins.”
“What about the sister?”
(Meaning, what about sororicide?)
Pavese laughed.
“Nah, no way.”
“It happens.”
(Meaning that siblings sometimes kill their siblings.)
“Yeah, but not those two, not the Bobbsey twins, the nerd sisters, the Stepford twins. It would have been like killing herself.”
“Which people do.”
“Which people do.”
12
Cinco de Mayo
Thursday, March 26th
48°
I looked out the window, across Route 109, watching the EMT truck, with flashers off, pull into the marina parking lot.
Louise Brooks got out.
The side of the truck said “Cape May Emergency,” next to one of those big blue Stars of Life. She was dressed, meticulously, in EMT white pants, cute blue Nikes with orange laces, and an immaculate EMT white blouse with red circular patches on each sleeve.
I was finishing up the last of my three tortillas, the remnant of my entomatadas platter, sitting inside the lively colored, not-really-that-tacky Cinco de Mayo restaurant, with appropriate mariachi playing in the background. She wasn’t really Louise Brooks, of course, but she had the same dark cropped hair that Brooks had made famous over a hundred years ago, especially in Pabst’s sexually creepy Pandora’s Box. Her haircut became the cut de choix of the twenties flappers, including other huge stars like Clara Bow and Colleen Moore. It’s known, both then and now, as a “bob,” as in Fitzgerald’s famous story “Bernice Bobs Her Hair.”
There’ve been many subsequent bobs over the years, and numerous modified bobs, of course, (see Mireille Mathieu, Liza’s Sally Bowles, Fiorentino in Men in Black, Thurman in Pulp Fiction, etc.), but this one was called a “shingle” bob, with dead-perfect bangs across the forehead, with the hair on the sides coming forward a bit onto the cheek.
Naturally, I wondered if she’d still have the bob since I’d seen the photos of the twins last night, but that was ten years ago, and maybe things had changed. They hadn’t. She looked exactly the same. Tallish (almost six foot), thin, trim, athletic, with pale but perfect Irish skin, brown eyes (which I knew from the photos), high cheekbones, and a red-red mouth that seemed unintentionally provocative.
But was.
She was kind of perfect.
Perfectly adorable. (Can men say that about a woman anymore? Who knows? Screw it.) She was, of course, a carbon copy of her dead twin sister, and both of them looked a bit like Roxanne, which was why I’d pushed their images out of my mind last night in the Grant Room.
Great!
I’d gotten myself duped into solving the murder of a girl who looked too much like the girl who’d just left me, with the dead girl’s identical still running around town and, apparently, looking for me.
She crossed the road, entered the restaurant, and walked right up to my table at the front window. I felt like I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. Yeah, I know it’s a perfectly stupid thing to say, especially since I’ve been doing some moaning-and-groaning about the California girl, but underneath the hardass exterior, I’m just a “regular” guy (remember the jackass in the mirror?), and this pretty girl could make Dante forget Beatrice Portinari.
I looked up.
She looked down.
Most intelligent human beings are wary of the likes of me, even sitting in
a Mexican restaurant with a warm tortilla in my hand. Most people simply turn around and walk in the other direction, and, if that’s impossible, they tread ever so lightly. But this one seemed perfectly as ease. Maybe patching up all her car crash victims and strokes and heart failures—all the intubations, cricothyrotomies, and defibrillations—had made her comfortable with just about anything.
Even me.
She looked right through my Ray-Ban shades.
“John Colt?”
She knew who I was.
“You know who I am.”
She was unfazed.
“I have a few questions.”
She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even aggressive or demanding. She simply had “a few questions.”
I liked her voice. It was calm, comforting, lower than expected, and concerned. Like a hotline voice.
“I have more questions than you do,” I assured her.
She seemed fine with that, but she didn’t want to do it here. The place wasn’t that crowded, but, like all the other pretty girls in the world, her sudden appearance had drawn its share of attention, and she didn’t want to discuss her dead sister over entomatadas.
“I’d like to go to the lighthouse,” I suggested.
Whenever possible, I prefer to talk to people about murder in environments related to the murder. It made them focus, and it made them nervous, but she didn’t seem to mind at all.
“When you finish your cholesterol?”
It was hard not to smile. Helen Pavese had called her one of the “nerd” sisters, and maybe she was, but she was also a Jersey girl, and still a bit of a wiseass. She was also in the health racket, so maybe she was concerned about my health.
I paid the bill, and we drove my ETS to the extreme southern end of the Garden State. We parked close to the beautiful lighthouse (who doesn’t like lighthouses?), where she informed me that it was the third one built on the spot, built in 1859, 157 feet high, 217 steps to the top.
I like her specificity, and I like the historical pride she took in her hometown. Maybe someday I’ll tell her about Paterson and really impress the hell out of her. We walked over to the ocean, to one of the wooden Hawk Watch platforms, where the bird people come day after day to stare into the sky and look for peregrines and eagles, bald and golden, and where the local kids sometimes come late at night to do what kids do late at night.
But I didn’t start with the dead sister, but rather with the guy who’d probably been killed for looking into her dead sister’s murder ten years after the fact.
As the March sun began to dissipate, we sat down on a wooden bench and stared at the Atlantic. I’d been doing a lot of that in the past eighteen hours.
“What’s with you and Colt?”
She shrugged.
“He liked me.”
I’d assumed that. For one, who wouldn’t like her, and, for two, they’d been out for dinner the night he was killed.
“Did you like him?”
“Yes.”
She seemed willing to tell me more, so I prodded her.
“Tell me.”
“He was very nice.”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what every guy likes to hear: ‘You’re very nice.’”
“But he was,” she insisted. “He was polite, and thoughtful, and pleasant to be around.”
“But—?”
“But he seemed rather sad. Damaged somehow.”
“His past?”
“I really don’t know. He said he grew up in Harrisburg, but then he lived in Mexico for a while, and his wife died down there.”
“Any specifics?”
“None, and I didn’t press him. The truth is, I really didn’t know him that well, and I didn’t want to ask him questions about the sadness in his life.”
I understood, but, in my racket, it’s always about the sadness in people’s lives.
“There’s something else,” she said.
I waited.
“He proposed to me.”
I was amazed, and I don’t amaze easily. I guess Eddie was a fast worker.
“When?”
“At Tisha’s.”
“The night he died?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you didn’t know the guy?”
“I didn’t. I hardly knew him at all. I met him once at my father’s house after he’d agreed to take Nikki’s case, and we went out to dinner three times. That was it.”
She seemed astonished.
“He never even kissed me. He never even tried.”
Which was hard to believe.
“The guy was a fool.”
She let it slide, and I wondered why I’d said it. What was the matter with me?
“What did you say?”
“What do you think I said? I was very nice about it, and I said things like, ‘but we hardly know each other’ and ‘let’s wait and see what happens’—that kind of stuff. But, to be honest, I was rather spooked by it.”
“How did he respond?”
“Like a perfect gentleman. Very polite, very understanding. He seemed more sad than hurt.”
The guy was definitely way too “sad” to be a Colt.
I moved on.
“What about his mother’s funeral?”
She shrugged again. There was something unintentionally and inexplicably sexual about her shrug. At least, I assumed it was unintentional.
“He left town for a few day, and told me his mother had died.”
“Any specifics?”
“Nothing. I assumed he went to Harrisburg.”
“You believed him?”
“Of course, I did. Why shouldn’t I? When he got back to town he was wearing a little black band on his arm.”
Rikki got suspicious.
Not of him. Of me.
“You don’t believe people, do you?”
She sounded like a ten-year-old.
“Of course, I don’t. Everyone I’ve ever met lies. Except for me.”
“That’s a lie right there.”
“I suppose it is.”
I changed the subject.
“Tell me about your ex.”
“Whoa! Am I a suspect?”
“Of course, you are. Everyone on the planet’s a suspect. Except for me.”
“You’ve got trust issues, John Colt.”
“Yeah, I’ve got lots of trust issues. Now tell me about your ex.”
She did. He was a local realtor, whom she’d EMT-ed after he smacked up his pickup on Lafayette Street about a year ago. They married two months later, (“I must have been out of my mind”), and she regretted it from the two “I dos.”
“I left him after two months. I was unhappy, and he seemed impervious, and I went back to live with my father. All of us do something stupid in our lives, and that’s mine. It was doomed from the moment I patched up his facial lacerations and started to feel sorry for him.”
“Why?”
She shrugged again, and I wondered how I could get her to do it again.
“He was loner, an only-child type. He went through the motions at work and barely got by. His big thing was deep-sea fishing, every weekend, and sitting on the couch and watching Eagles games. I’m a Giants fan.”
“You seem to specialize in sad sacks.”
“Yeah, but I’m trying to break the habit.”
“Did he go gently into that good night?”
“At first, he didn’t make a fuss. He signed the divorce papers when I asked him to, although he wasn’t too happy about it.”
“He still wants you back?”
“Yeah.”
She felt it was time to defend herself. Which was hardly necessary.
“Some men find me attractive.”
“Put me on the list.”
She laughed at my idiocy, but I was appalled by it, so I pressed forward.
I knew there was more.
“Tell me the rest.”
“It’s embarrassing.”
“Tell me.”
“Ask my father.”
“I’m asking you.”
She shrugged again.
“He started stalking me.”
“How?”
“Around town, on the web, stopping by the house. At first it was just annoying, but then he started with the threats.”
“Like what?”
“Like ‘You better come back,’ and ‘No one else is going to have you,’ that kind of stuff.”
“Did he ever get physical?”
“He grabbed me one night, and my father got a restraining order.”
“Is he capable of violence?”
“I don’t know.”
“Does he have a record?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
She hesitated, then she told me the truth.
“Yes.”
I was wearing her out, and wearing the subject out, so I moved on.
To the dead sister.
“Did you guys ever switch identities?”
“Of course we did. Even the Bobbsey Twins had a mischievous streak.”
“I read a few of those books when I was a kid. I liked the ones where they solved a mystery.”
I guess I was ingratiating myself. I wondered if it was too obvious.
“Nikki and I read all seventy-two of them.”
I liked her upmanship.
She thought it over.
(Meaning my “switching” question.)
“I guess you’re thinking I might really be Nikki?”
