Act of God (13 page)

I tried to be softer about Abraham Rivkind. “Did Darbra talk with you at all about the other people at her job?”

“No.”

“Not even about her boss?”

“I think she has a couple of bosses, the two men who own the store.”

“Yes, but she didn’t talk to you about the one who’d been killed?”

Houle nearly came out of his lounge. “Killed? What’re you saying?”

“One of her bosses, Abraham Rivkind, was killed.”

“What … ? How?”

“He was working in his office, and the police think a robber hit him over the head with a poker from his fireplace.”

“Jesus Christ. When … when did all this happen?”

I told him.

“That would have been … That would have been when I was in Denver. For my company. After the fight in the restaurant, I thought it’d be a good …”

Now it made sense. “I’m sorry. You never would have talked with Darbra after the killing.”

Houle rubbed his face. “Jesus, maybe the fight was an omen.”

I had only one other question to ask him. “Can you think of any place Darbra might go, might take off for without letting anybody know?”

“No.” He seemed to be struggling with something. “No, I can’t … think right now.”

I rose. “Mr. Houle, I’m really sorry to have to put you through this.”

He started to get up. “No, no really. It was almost … good for me, actually. Got my mind on something else.”

We shook hands. “Take care.”

Houle sank back down. “You know, it’s true what they say, though.”

“What’s that?”

“When God decides to shit on you, it’s like he took an Ex-Lax.”

I left Roger Houle in his chair, staring past the urn at his wife’s garden.

I
STOPPED AT A
pay phone in a strip mall just before route 128 and tried to reach William Proft, partly to report in but mostly to ask about how Darbra and him not being “particularly close” had matured into her “hating” him. When I got the drugstore, though, the pharmacist on duty said Proft wasn’t scheduled to work that day. As I hung up to try his home number, two acne-faced teenagers wearing different T-shirts but identical hiking shorts and Oakland A’s baseball caps sauntered up to the phone. I finished dialing and got just a very reserved outgoing tape message with William Proft’s voice on it. I left my name and number, but also said I might not be reachable.

While I dialed Pearl Rivkind’s number, the bigger of the two teens hiked his baseball cap and said, “Hey, man. You gonna be all fucking day or what?”

I smiled sweetly. “Might be. I’ve been trying the new José Canseco hotline in Texas, and I’ve just now managed to be put on hold.”

The bigger kid looked enough like he wanted to take the phone away from me that the smaller kid tugged on his shirtsleeve till his friend tore away from the staring contest and walked with him toward the other end of the mall. In my ear, a male voice said, “Hello?”

“Hello. Can I speak with Pearl Rivkind, please.”

“Who is this?”

The voice reminded me of the bigger kid’s attitude, but I remembered my client mentioning a son, and I tried to put myself in his frame of mind three weeks after his father had been murdered. “This is John Cuddy. I’m working on a project for her.”

“What kind of project?”

His tone didn’t change for the better. Then, from offstage, Pearl Rivkind’s voice said, “Larry? Larry, who is it?”

The kid’s voice said to me, “Look, I don’t want you bothering us, you hear me?”

“Larry? Who?”

Pearl’s voice sounded closer.

I said, “Can I please—”

“I’m gonna hang up now.”

Pearl said, “You don’t hang up on somebody’s calling me. What’d they teach you at that college? Hello?”

“Pearl, it’s John Cuddy.”

“Oh, yes.”

“How are you?”

“Oh, so-so, just so-so.”

From offstage, “Mom, what’re you—”

Away from the receiver, Pearl said, “Larry, that’s enough already. I’m on the phone here.”

To me, she said, “Sorry.”

“That’s okay.”

A little color came into her voice. “You find out something?”

“I’m afraid not.”

The color waned. “Guess it’s kind of early.”

“Kind of. I was hoping to stop by the furniture store today, and I just wanted to make sure that you’d paved the way.”

“You bet. Everybody knows you’re coming, and most everybody’s there all the time, so don’t worry about before lunch or after or whatever.”

“It’ll certainly be after.”

“That’s okay.” She became a little more subdued. “You need me there?”

“Probably not.”

A breath. “Good. It’s real hard for me to just stroll around the store like I was shopping it, and it’s just impossible for me to try to … spend time in Abe and Joel’s office there.”

“I understand.”

“Anybody gives you trouble—they shouldn’t, but they do, you call me here, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Oh, and John?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re paying me well for what I’m doing.”

“No. I mean, yes, I know that. I meant more … thanks for thinking to call. I appreciate it.”

“You’re welcome, Pearl.”

I hung up the phone, knowing I’d been at least half right in taking the case. Then I took out Darbra Proft’s phone bill and tried the number listed in Salem.

A gravelly woman’s voice said, “Sixties.”

“Who is this?”

“Who’s this?”

“I just wanted to know your hours of operation.”

“We don’t do any ‘operating,’ but we’re open ten to six weekdays, ten to five Saturdays, closed Sundays. That about do it for you?”

Real warmth. “Thanks, Ms. Nugent.”

“Hey, how did you—”

I hung up on her and went toward the Prelude to head north on Route 128.

Darlene Nugent’s store was off Route 114 on Bowdoin Street, just short of the bridge that takes you into downtown Salem, the county seat of Essex. I was in the superior court there once, testifying on a case for Empire Insurance. The courtrooms were straight out of Dickens, and the lawyers’ library had a fireplace tall enough for me to walk into without having to stoop. I couldn’t say the same for “Sixties.”

It had a lot of windows, as though a miniature Woolworth’s had originally been on the site, but I had to duck to get under the door lintel, and the cowbell on the frame made for a less than grand entrance. To my right stood album covers of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Zombies, and groups that trailed off from there. A laminated page from
Billboard
magazine showed Creedence Clearwater Revival, Blind Faith, and Iron Butterfly having records in the top-ten LP category. Across the room hung posters from
Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey,
and
Barbarella,
the last showing Jane Fonda in a French-maid pose wearing less clothing and holding a ray gun that looked like the prototype for a portable hair dryer. There were racks with bell-bottoms and tie-dyes and leather vests and bowler hats, clogs and sandals and Carnaby Street two-tones on shoe shelves under them.

“Help you?”

I turned to see where the gravelly female voice came from. She was about my age, standing in front of a display with various forms of kitsch on it. Black hair parted in the center and combed long and straight like Michelle Phillips used to wear hers, a peasant dress from the Mama Cass collection brushing the ground at her feet. It was hard to tell with the dress, but the woman seemed to be below medium height and above medium weight, with a virtually boneless face and a flower in her hair over the left ear. You wouldn’t have placed her even as the heavier woman from the photograph in Darbra Proft’s bedroom.

“Darlene Nugent?”

She stood a little straighter, nearly upsetting a lava lamp by her elbow. “You’re the one on the phone.”

“That’s right.”

“I got a can of Mace under here.”

“Oh, my.”

The voice to my right belonged to an elderly woman with hennaed hair and a conservative suit, holding a hand to her mouth.

To the elderly woman, I said, “Nothing to worry about, ma’am.”

Reassured, the woman faced Nugent. “I came in here to purchase something for my grandson, because he lived in San Francisco during the summer of 1968. However, I must confess that I cannot bring myself to do so.”

Nugent said, “How come?”

“There are pornographic photos back there for a play entitled
Oh, Calcutta,
I believe it is, and others with a naked white man kissing an oriental woman in all sorts of … poses.”

“And you’re offended, right?”

“That’s right.”

Nugent nodded her head. “So fuck off, blue-hair.”

Stunned, the elderly woman teetered a bit in her sensible shoes, then stalked out of the store, the cowbell jangling wildly as she slammed the door behind her.

I said, “Great customer relations.”

Nugent came back to me. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“My name’s John Cuddy. I’m a private investigator from Boston.”

She glanced at my ID, but seemed to be forming a thought before she did. “
Mannix,
huh?”

“Not like on TV, Ms. Nugent. This is real.”

A sweep of the hand that took in her inventory. “This is real, too, pal. It just isn’t reality. See the difference?”

“This is history, but real. Only today is reality.”

“That’s right.” She seemed to relax a little. “You ever have somebody do your chart?”

“My chart?”

“Your astrological chart. You know, signs and moons and which houses things are in.”

“Not recently.”

“Too bad. I got this woman, she’s Armenian, but a real wiz with the zodiac. All the biggies used them. Marilyn, Janis …”

“Nancy.”

“Nancy?”

“Reagan.”

A hand to the hip, like a pregnant woman trying to relieve some pressure. “You’re one of those, huh?”

“One of those what?”

“One of those guys, demonstrated against the war in ’sixty-nine, then voted for Death Valley Days in ’eighty.”

“Wrong on both counts.”

“Both? You weren’t against the war?”

“I wasn’t against it until I was in it, and by then it was a little late for leafletting at shopping centers.”

For some reason that seemed to soften her. “Okay. What can I do for you?”

“I’ve been hired by your nephew to find your niece.”

“My … ? Will-yum?”

Everybody seemed to have a different derogation of my client’s name. “That’s right.”

“So where’s Darbra off to?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. She went to New Jersey for a vacation, came back, and disappeared.”

“And you figure
I
know something about it?”

“You’re a close relative.”

“I’m her aunt—Jesus, that still sounds odd to hear me say, you know? That I’m aunt to somebody in her twenties. Anyway, I’m Darbra’s ‘
aunt,
’ but that doesn’t make us close.”

“She called you a few months ago.”

Nugent moved away from the lava lamp, swinging her hips slowly, like a teen walking through a meadow with her first beau. “You’ve done some homework, huh?”

“A little.”

“So you’re wondering, why did she burn a toll call on me, we aren’t that close.”

“Yeah, I wondered.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, I wondered, too. I mean, it was my birthday and all—the Ides of March, like that Shakespeare thing?—but as soon as I heard her ‘baby-girl’ voice on the other end of the phone, I was trying to spot her angle.”

“She had to have an angle to call an aunt on her birthday?”

“Aunt and godmother. Barbra—that was my older sister? She made me promise at the christening that I’d always look after her little ‘baby.’ Thank God she never made me promise the same thing about Will-yum.”

“I take it you’re not nuts about him, either.”

“Hah. Will-yum’s like a … nonentity, you know? My guess is he’ll go out like a Viking.”

“Like a Viking.”

“Yeah. He’ll die with his sword in his hand.”

“Ms. Nugent—”

“Whacking off, get it?”

“I get it. Ms. Nugent—”

“I mean, Will-yum, he’s the kind of guy couldn’t have gotten laid during the Summer of Love.”

“Can we go back to the phone call?”

“The phone call?”

“From Darbra.”

“Oh, right. What do you want to know?”

“Why else would she have called you?”

“That’s what I was wondering. I was upstairs in bed, had a cold, a cold on my birthday yet, and the phone rings—there’s an extension up there for down here, easier that way—and it’s my loving niece, saying how are you and how’s business, and I said sucky and suckier.”

Which must have warmed things right up. “And then?”

“Then she asked me, have I heard from Will-yum, and I said, ‘Yeah, he sent me a card and some flowers, that soft touch, why?’ And she said, ‘Oh, no reason. I just haven’t heard from him in a while.’ Then she finally got to it.”

“Got to what?”

“The real reason she called me, the angle.”

“Which was?”

“The insurance policies.”

“The policies?”

“Yeah. Didn’t your client Will-yum tell you about them?”

“Not that I recall.”

A smile. I realized Nugent hadn’t shown her teeth to me, because the two canines would have been tough to miss. They stuck down a little farther than the others, giving her a Bride-of-Dracula look. “When Barbra’s husband ran off—good riddance, he was a fucking bum, dropped more acid than a whole block of Haight-Ashbury—she kind of obsessed about financial security, you know? Took out these policies on herself and each of the kids, Darbra and Will-yum both. She—Barbra, my sister—made me promise to always keep up the policies, so that the kids wouldn’t have it as rough as she did.”

“But her husband didn’t die, he just took off, right?”

“Yeah, but same difference, he isn’t there to provide for his family.”

Not really. “So there were policies out on all three?”

“Right.”

“For how much?”

“I don’t know what the premiums were back then, but they must have been peanuts, because Barbra kept all three up till she died, and I’ve been paying on the other two ever since.”

I worked through that. “What are the face amounts?”