Don't Explain: An Artie Deemer Mystery Page 6

  “A pleasure doing business with you, Cap’n.”

  “The pleasure’s all mine. Let me ask you something. Have you seen the face in the lichens?”

  “Me? No.” He seemed surprised at the question.

  “Do you know anybody who has?”

  “Well, let me think now. No, can’t say I do.”

  “It might not even exist?”

  “Might. Might not. I don’t see it makes much difference.”

  After we left the store, I showed my new binoculars to Jellyroll. He sniffed them skeptically.

  Lobster boats with wire traps stacked in the stern were tied side by side three deep along the opposite side of the dock from the Belgian’s boat. Salty-looking lobstermen stood in a clot smoking, talking in accents so thick it sounded like they were speaking Norwegian. They giggled now and then at a joke. They nodded at us in a hospitable manner but didn’t say anything as we strolled by. Jellyroll sniffed their gear on the dock, nets and things, and one of the captains called him Bowser. Hell, maybe his disguise was working.

  We walked out to the end of the dock where the little ship was moored. It was called Slocum. It had a low center deck with the wheelhouse in the back and a high upswung bow in front— but it was tiny. Aboard the low center deck, sailors were lowering a refrigerator by rope from the stout wooden boom overhead. Jellyroll and I stopped to watch. Two burly guys waited with their arms up to receive it, while a third stood somewhat aside, at the base of the boom, and lowered away.

  The third deckhand, the one lowering away, was a woman. She wore shorts with wool socks and heavy hiking boots. Her muscular legs were bent, her body centered. Her thighs twitched as she paid out the rope. It creaked around the cleat under the load. She wore nothing under her olive halter, and her arms squeezed her breasts together into a deep valley. I would love to see Crystal lower something heavy. Perhaps at the right moment, after a nice dinner, I could ask her to lower a major appliance.

  But the fact is, just then, I was overcome with lust. I stood there staring at the deckhand’s straining body like a testosterone-crazed juvenile peeking through a knothole in the women’s shower room. Beads of sweat ran down her flanks as she lowered, and the curve formed by her neck and chin as she looked up, eyes fixed on the refrigerator, turned my knees to rubber. I couldn’t tear myself away from the sweaty physicality of her lowering. This was raw, inarticulate, pounding, boyhood lust. I forced myself to waddle off, disoriented, back toward the Belgian’s boat, where I meant to go below and consider the matter, but I didn’t get far—

  A scream of raw female terror froze us all in our spots. Sometimes I hear screams like that in my neighborhood in the middle of the night. But here where human relations seemed simple and stable, the sound of terror in full voice chilled my blood. Jellyroll’s, too. The salts and I hunched our shoulders as if something were about to explode in our midst. When it didn’t, we uncoiled, only to be blown back by another peal. Everybody looked for the source.

  The coffee shop had a back porch, with picnic tables, built out over the harbor. It must have been a nice spot for breakfast under normal conditions. Even now all the picnic tables were crowded with diners. That’s where the screams had come from. The commotion grew.

  The woman began to scream again, now in short staccato blasts. She wasn’t very far away, a half block maybe, but I looked at her through my binoculars: She had bobbed black hair. She wore jeans and a Hard Rock Cafe sweatshirt. She was obviously from away. She covered her face with her hand as she continued to scream. She had bangs that she kept flipping away from her eyes. Her eyes were wide and round and darting.

  She pointed at a wooden shed built into the corner of the porch. It seemed to have a door, but the door was closed. She was pointing at the door as she screamed, all the time backing away in mincing steps until she came up against the railing. There she began to sob breathlessly—

  “Looks like they got some trouble up at the Cod End,” one old salt commented.

  “Ayah,” another agreed.

  “From away,” another said.

  Some diners on the porch went to assist the screaming woman, while others started hesitantly toward that door and its terrible secret. Other diners remained frozen at their picnic tables, forkfuls of food halfway to their mouths. It’s troubling how human tragedy can often look so comic to the observer—

  “Brains!” the young woman began to scream. I didn’t understand at first, but she said it again and again. “Brains!”

  “What’s she say?” asked a salt.

  “Didn’t get it,” said another.

  “Brains,” I said.

  “Brains?”

  A man in a matching shorts and shirt ensemble boldly grabbed the door to the shed and flung it open—outward toward the dock, so I couldn’t see inside. The sign on the door said GULLS. The guy in the lime-green shorts recoiled from the sight inside. Somebody else looked in, then still somebody else. They recoiled. Everybody who looked in recoiled. They knocked cups and plates and maple syrup off the picnic tables as they recoiled.

  A uniformed cop with a pear-shaped torso showed up on the porch from inside the restaurant. He held his holster down as he ran around the corner. Everybody pointed at the shed, and the cop looked in. I could only see his shoes from under the door, but he didn’t recoil. After a while, he closed the door, pointed to an ununiformed, lanky guy in the doorway, and motioned for him to stand in front of the door. The uniformed cop herded everybody off the porch. Most of the Jesus people had turned from the face in the lichens to look down at the porch.

  “You know who he reminds me of?” queried a salt.

  “Sheriff Kelso?”

  “Ayah. He reminds me of that TV cop, the confused one with the wrinkled raincoat.”

  “Colombo.”

  “Colombo, right. What’s his real name?”

  “Walter Matthau.”

  “Ayah.”

  I told Jellyroll to heel. We hurried back to the Belgian’s boat. We went below and just sat stiffly.

  An hour later, Dwight showed up in his boat. It was that distinctive type of lobster boat almost identical to the salts’ boats across the dock. Dwight passed me a line, but I didn’t immediately see anything to tie it to, so I held on to it until he came aboard and took it from me.

  “Do you know what happened at the Cod End?” he said. “One of the Jesus people just got murdered. Somebody chopped her skull in half, for Chrissake! She was taking a piss on the porch right over there at the Cod End, somebody split her skull in half. Literally in half. . Whack.” He made a deadly chopping motion with his open hand. “Jesus. Somebody must have been in there waiting, but how the hell can that be? It’s a one-holer.” He kept shaking his head as I passed our gear to him over the rail. He had bags of food from the Selfs in his boat, and he had an old-fashioned plaid-painted thermos. “Want some coffee?”

  “Deeply.”

  EIGHT

  Dwight’s boat smelled like a living thing of the sea, like a star-fish in a tide pool. I inhaled as if air were a drug concocted to drive out cruelty, despair, murder, all the generally savage shit people do to one another. I hung my new binoculars around my neck and unrolled my chart on the engine box. I weighted its curling corners with bags of dogfood. The chart was full of information and symbols I couldn’t exactly interpret, but I could immediately find Micmac Harbor because it was incongruously round. The island just outside was called Round Island.

  A pair of ospreys stood side by side on their nest atop a dead cedar tree, necks pivoting as we passed below. I took a close look at one of them through my new binoculars. His black pupil was ringed with bright yellow, peering back at me across that great gulf between species.

  I wondered what Dwight thought of my binoculars. Dudeish probably. You really have to be Supreme Allied Commander of the European Theater of Operations to pull off binoculars this big. All Dwight’s stuff was worn and slightly shabby. It had that look only time and use can give a utilitarian thi
ng. Dwight himself was like that.

  I scanned the horizon. It was empty. We headed out into the emptiness, our wake straight and confident. I wanted to maintain my sense of adventure, but Dwight was tense. He manipulated his boat in a relaxed, casual way, but he kept clenching his jaw and pursing his lips. Occasionally he shook his head. He was talking at times, but not loud enough to be heard over the engine noise. I asked what once, but he didn’t increase the volume, so I decided he was talking to himself. This woman had gotten her brains chopped out in his hometown, not my own.

  In fact, Micmac wasn’t even my destination, merely the departure point for the last leg of my trip. I was just passing through. One can’t take on all atrocities as one’s own, especially when passing through. I hadn’t even bought a cup of coffee in Dwight’s hometown. Wrongful death and senseless injury come wholesale in mine. But in Micmac, they still asked, why?

  The air was cool and crystalline, free of known carcinogens. Beautiful. The edges of objects—buoys, rocks, birds, waves, the bow of Dwight’s boat—seemed to my eyes unnaturally sharp.

  “Even Teddy Kelso was shook,” said Dwight audibly. “Teddy’s seen some horror. He’s the local law, but before he come up here, he was twenty years a homicide cop in New York City. Comes in the fish co-op sometimes, tell us stories’d curl your hair. But he didn’t have no color in his face when he told me what he saw at the Cod End.” He decreased our speed as the ride got lumpy. “Teddy married a Self just like me. We have that in common.”

  Out in open water, the shape of the waves changed from ripples to shallow rolling hills, I suppose because the water got deeper. Dwight didn’t slow down, and the boat began to move more excitedly. A rolling motion joined the lengthwise rocking. Jellyroll’s nails skittered for traction on the painted plank deck when a big one ran beneath us. I began to worry about his stomach. Jellyroll has a weak stomach.

  “Did she have friends or family?”

  “No, she was from away.”

  “I mean among the Jesus people.”

  “No, but Teddy said she had ID on her. She was from Hartford, Connecticut. There was pictures of two little daughters in her wallet.”

  We went on in silence for a while. I scanned the horizon all around. It was bereft.

  “Christ, looks like somebody killed her for the hell of it. I mean, she weren’t robbed. There was money in her wallet, Teddy said, a watch on her arm. You’d almost feel better if there was a crazy husband, or she was killed by the mafia ’cause she was a stool pigeon, or…some foreign death squad killed her ’cause she pissed off a mucky-muck in Peru. Something sensible.”

  “Have you seen the face in the lichens?” I asked.

  “The Virgin?”

  “The Virgin? I heard it was Jesus.”

  “Oh. I heard it was one of the Virgins. Who’d you hear it was Jesus from?”

  “The guy who owns the marine supply store.”

  “People around here tend to let others do pretty much what they want, ’specially when it comes to religion, unless of course they go to sacrificing house pets or declaring themselves the Deity. But now, with this killing, I don’t know what’s gonna happen. Whoever did it could still be up on that hill. Could do it again. To anybody. That changes things. It ain’t from away no more. It’s here.”

  A flock of herring gulls followed above our wake screaming invective at each other. I scanned the water again with my binoculars. That kind of magnification took some getting used to on a moving platform. It made me a little bilious.

  Dwight said something I couldn’t hear.

  “What?”

  He pointed straight ahead with his thick, scarred hand— “Kempshall Island.”

  What? It was fully formed, close enough to identify individual features. I looked at Dwight. Had he played some kind of tenderfoot joke on me? But how could he have? You can’t make an island appear when a moment ago there was no island in sight, not even the hazy hint of one. That’s what happened, however. I had looked…Maybe it was some kind of atmospheric anomaly caused by refraction or something, like those fiery sunsets over New Jersey, caused, you soon learn from the cynics, by particles in the polluted air reflecting the sun. Maybe one grows so used to seeing the world through tailpipe smoke that its sudden absence dazzles the eye and brain. Maybe it was my new binoculars, maybe I needed some practice, or maybe they were defective in this rare, weird way that causes island myopia. I wished Crystal were here to tell me what she saw. I looked over at Dwight. He didn’t bat an eye.

  Dwight was saying something about the island. He pointed over the bow, then left the wheel to show me on my chart, but at that very moment, Jellyroll drew himself inboard and began to retch. His whole body convulsed and jerked. It’s a disgusting thing to watch, and it seems to go on forever, as if his gut were thirty feet long. Dwight watched openmouthed, never making it to the chart. Finally Jellyroll curled back his lip and expelled the usual yellow bile. I wordlessly swiped it up with a paper towel I’d brought for the purpose and tossed it over the side. Jellyroll watched me do that, licking his lips.

  NINE

  We turned sharply around a rocky point and I saw the boathouse for the first time. Until my eye caught the straight-line roof, I didn’t realize it was a man-made thing because it nestled so gently into the forested hillside at the top of the cove. It was roofed and sided with spruce shingles painted forest green, and the foundation was made of shoreline stones cemented together. The window and door frames and the railings of the porch were painted the russet of autumn leaves. A wooden porch cantilevered out over the water.

  Dwight slowed the boat, once inside the cove. He said something, but I didn’t catch it.

  “What?”

  “Sunkers.”

  “Sunkers?”

  “See, over there.” He pointed just off to the left where dromedary humps of black rock roiled the surface. Leathery kelp and black weed sloshed back and forth. A sunker.

  “‘Nother off there to starboard.”

  This sunker didn’t even break the surface, but I could see its menacing presence. I had stopped looking at my chart to take in direct reality.

  “This is Dog Cove,” commented Dwight.

  “It is?”

  “Yeah. See the two islands out there?” He pointed astern.

  Both were just beyond the mouth of the cove. About the size of toppled-over Upper West Side brownstones, they guarded the cove from the sea, calming the water inside.

  “Near one’s called Dog Island, other one’s called Outer Dog Island.”

  Jellyroll knows that word, of course. He clapped his jaws shut and looked around for one of his fellow men. “Why so many dogs?” I asked Dwight.

  “You ever heard of John Cabot?”

  “The explorer?”

  “Yeah, him.”

  About 1497, Cabot, a Venetian exploring for English merchants, made a successful voyage to Newfoundland. Some people think he came down this far.

  “Cabot’s supposed to’ve heard barkin’ when he passed by here in a fog. Must’ve been terrifyin’ approachin’ this coast in them ships.” Dwight paused, probably to consider with a seaman’s knowledge the terror of doing that back then, then said, “Modern people killed off all the seals, so you don’t hear no barkin’ these days, but seals is probably what he heard.” Then Dwight seemed to muse on millions of murdered seals.

  We slid past a big orange float, and I asked what it marked.

  “That’s a moorin’. Belongs to Hawley Self. He’s an urchin man. He mostly lives aboard his boat on that moorin’.”

  “Urchins?”

  “Yeah, this Japanese guy in Micmac buys all he can get. They love their sea urchins, Japs. Urchin divers make decent money. If they live. Lot of ’em don’t. Drowned bodies never come up in these waters.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the gasses.”

  “What gasses?”

  “The gasses in your gut. By-product of bacteria and so forth. That’s what caus
es a dead body to float up after a couple days. Water’s too cold for the bacteria to grow. Cold like that day after day makes addled old men outta thirty-year-old urchin divers.”

  There was another mooring float nearby. He said it belonged to Clayton. Dwight passed the mooring and headed for shore. He stopped his boat beneath the boathouse porch against a flat rock six inches out of water, put there by nature as if for a dock. Dwight stepped ashore and attached lines to rings imbedded in the boathouse foundation.

  “Is this natural?” I asked.

  “Nope. We cut it out.” Dwight started to unload. I passed things over the side to him. I was delighted with our new environment. So was Jellyroll, who leapt ashore and ran into the bushes. In two loads, we had our gear stacked at the foot of the steps beside the house leading up to the porch. This was the front entrance. There was another door at ground level in the back, but it opened onto the side of a steep hill.

  Jellyroll struck up a relationship with a chipmunk inhabiting the woodpile near the back door. Shucking and jiving in and out, the chipmunk ran Jellyroll ragged.

  Dwight and I picked up shopping bags full of food from the Selfs, and I followed him up onto the porch. This porch is where we’d spend our time, Crystal and I, sitting at the weathered picnic table peering peacefully out across the cove toward the Dogs and the empty ocean beyond. Sights and smells this sweet and gentle could change a melancholic back into a romantic. Upper Broadway raises calluses on the old worldview. I’d lose them here, but I supposed I’d raise others. I couldn’t imagine just then what kind they’d be. Jellyroll sniffed a circuit of the porch, glanced at the view, and decided he’d rather crash around with the chipmunk.