Black Tide (30 page)

The admiral. Writing to me. I've worked as the New Hampshire columnist for
Shoreline
magazine for a couple of years now, and I've only met the admiral once, when I visited the editorial offices and he hired me. Since then my contacts with
Shoreline
have been brief and infrequent. Every two weeks a rather substantial paycheck is deposited electronically from
Shoreline
into my account at the First Porter National Bank. I never go to their offices, I never get any phone calls from anybody in the editorial department and I never go to their annual Christmas party ---- which I understand from the society pages of the
Boston Herald
and the
Boston Globe
is quite magnificent, since it's held in their brick office building overlooking the slowly improving Boston Harbor.

In exchange for this wonderful arrangement, all I have to do file a column each month through my modem. The arrangement I had with the admiral is that my column would appear, sometimes edited, sometimes not, and if they considered it crap, another column would be inserted under my name. When I was going into the hospital earlier this summer, in one three-day space of time I had written two columns ahead of schedule. But only once have I ever missed a deadline, and that had occurred last week.

I tapped the heavy envelope against my teeth as I thought about that. Miss a column and get a letter from the editor. Makes sense. But maybe something else was going on. There was a new administration in Washington, and maybe past embarrassments were quietly being disposed of. Perhaps my little electronic sleuthing in DefNet last week had been detected. Then this letter could be something else, a dismissal. Promises had been made, of course, that I would be set for life in exchange for what the Department of Defense had done to me and my friends in Nevada. The promise included this job at
Shoreline
, but that wouldn't be the first time that promises had been broken. Just ask the South Vietnamese, the Kurds or the Bosnians. With one motion I tore open the envelope and a thick piece. of stationery came out, embossed with the same seal and words as the upper left-hand corner of the envelope. It was a simply written message:

Cole

Have you forgotten what a deadline means? You've got another two weeks.

-Holbrook

Well, there had been that arrangement back then. I had been promised total freedom to write anything I wanted and to submit a blank sheet of paper if I felt like it, but something had changed. He still wanted a column, no matter what the arrangement had been. It looked like the admiral's blood was slowly becoming the fluid of an editor. I put the letter and envelope down in my lap and looked out over the ocean. The air was hot and still and I remembered what Paula had said yesterday. She was getting tired of summer and wanted it over, and I could see her point. It was hard to do your work with so many people around you, vacationing and having a good time. Their sense of relaxation and play was intoxicating, and it was hard to keep focused, something like being a janitor in an opium den. In a few weeks Labor Day and the traditional end of summer would be upon us, and the tourists and their intoxication would leave.

But I had so much to do in that time. The
Petro Star
. My column. And my promise to Felix, and in remembering that promise, I thought with another smile of Christy, and decided Felix would be the first I would attend to, later today. In the meantime, the waves were something to look at.

Back in June and about three days after my surgery I was curled on one side, watching a soap opera on television and wondering what had happened to all those wonderful game shows I had watched as a kid growing up in Indiana. At least those shows pretended they were passing on some sort of knowledge, ranging from history to art to Hollywood. I'm not too sure what kind of knowledge the soap opera writers were trying to provide, though it seemed to revolve around whose bed got warmed. The door to my hospital room then opened and Felix came in, with a woman I hadn't met before, which wasn't surprising, considering Felix's sweaty track record. Felix had on a soft black suit with a white shirt and no necktie, and if I had been feeling better, I'm sure I would have said the woman was beautiful, so beautiful that she could have easily made some fashion photographers in New York City swoon. She had long dark hair and lightly tanned skin, and wore a light blue two-piece woman's suit with ruffled white blouse that was both executive-looking and something that should be worn with a teddy underneath.  He smiled and nodded and sat down in one of the room's chairs, crossing her legs. .

Felix said, "How's it going, Lewis?" and I whispered back, "Doing better," as he bustled about my room. He had another bouquet of flowers, which he put on the windowsill, and another bag of books. I remembered once telling him that as a high school student I had loved the novels of John D. MacDonald, and with each visit he had brought a couple more paperbacks with him. The books remained on the windowsill, out of reach. I was still not all together since the surgery. The body rebels against being put to sleep and cut open, and mine was no different. I was drifting in and out of sleep, I was sloggy with constipation, and I felt greasy, since all the nurses could do for me was a sponge bath. You try sponge baths for a couple of days in June and see how good you smell.

Felix sat on the arm of the second chair and said, "This is a good friend of mine, Lewis. Christy Gunn. We were going to do some shopping at Faneuil Hall today and thought we'd stop by."

She smiled at me and said, "Nice to meet you, Lewis."

I nodded back, too tired to say much, and then Felix smacked his palm against his head and said, "Damn it, hon, did you put money in the meter?"

"No, I thought you did."

Felix laughed and said, ''Any more tickets, it's the Denver boot for my car. Hon, you stay here with Lewis. I'll be right back."

He left, and I think I was even too tired to feel shy at being alone in a hospital room with such a beautiful woman. Yet if Christy felt equally uncomfortable, she hid it well. She smiled at me and deftly took off her jacket and slung it over the back of the other chair. Even with the ruffles in the blouse, it was easy to tell that she was quite well proportioned.

Christy said, "The both of you seem very interesting."

"Really?"

"Really," she said. "Felix told me a lot about you on the drive over here. About how the two of you met, the places you've both gone to and the things you've done. He called you a holdout, one of the last ones left with any sense of duty and responsibility."

That was getting a bit too deep for me, and I tried to change the subject by saying, "How long have you known Felix?"

She smiled again, wider. "Oh, we've been friends for a while. Occasionally business associates. In fact, he asked me to come over today and visit with you."

"He did?"

"Unh-hunh." She got up from her chair and sauntered over; and then touched my cheek for a moment, and I closed my eyes, enjoying the touch. Christy said, "He asked me to do something special for you. Felix has arranged everything, and we have an hour together. We won't be disturbed."

I closed my eyes, conscious of the throbbing pain in my side that the codeine pills couldn't quite mask, and of the smell of my skin and the sheets and that cloying perfume that Christy was wearing; my mouth was still dry. I opened my eyes. She was still there, breathing and smiling. Oh, to be whole again.

"I would like a drink of water," I finally said.

She nodded, went to the tiny bathroom, filled up a cup and came out again. While the sight of her was something that I'm sure would have stirred me at any other time, on this day the taste of the cool water upon my dry tongue was all that I lusted after. She held the cup, and while I drank, she touched my cheek with her free hand.

When I was done, she put the cup down on a counter and then washed my face with a wet towel, and I looked up at her and said, ''And what exactly has Felix arranged?"

She smiled again. "What do you think?"

"I'm not sure."

She laughed and touched my cheek again. "Oh, stop looking o stunned." She went over to the windowsill and began rummaging around the book bags. "Felix knows you love these books, and he also knows they haven't been touched since he's delivered them. So. I'm here to read to you, if you'd like."

I shifted, grimaced some as the pain blossomed a bit on my side. "I would like that very much." She pulled out a couple of books. "The ones here are all by the same author. Is there a special one you'd like?"

"The one that has the color blue in the title," I said. "That's the first one in a very good series."

She took out the right paperback from the bag and pulled the chair close to my bed, and she opened up the book and started reading. She read with one hand and held my hand with another, and for the next fifty or so minutes, I was intoxicated with so any things: the sight and smell of her, sitting so very close to me, the warm caress of her hand upon mine, her quiet and strong voice, and the words themselves, written so many years ago by a craftsman who knew the power of phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Not once did she pause or stop for a rest or a drink. She kept on reading, and I wondered how much longer she could keep on going.

Then came the knock upon the door. She looked up, disturbed. Then she looked over at me with another smile and she leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.

"Felix is fond of you, Lewis," she said, and then she got up and put her jacket back on. There was another knock and Felix came in, an innocent look upon his face, and said, "Well, I got caught up in something. I hope you don't mind."

"Nope," I said. He looked at his watch. "Well, it's getting late. Tell you what, Lewis, I'll come back in a couple of days for another visit." He winked. ''Alone.''

"That would be fine," I said.

As they left, Felix turned to Christy and said, "I hope everything went all right."

She touched my cheek as she left. "He was a perfect gentleman," and Felix said, grinning, "Of course he was."

Christy had left the book on my bed. I picked it up and resumed reading where she had left off. The book had her scent upon it for the rest of my stay there.

It was late on Friday afternoon after a wonderful lunch and I had a headache. I had spent a lot of last night's hours reading and rereading the files that Diane Woods had provided me with, and on this day I had gotten to work. Earlier this morning, when it was finally a reasonable hour on the West Coast, I had talked to Dennis and Owen Martin, the sons of Ben Martin, the former Manchester police officer who had been on guard duty that night at the Scribner Museum. Dennis lived in Seattle and maybe that city's rainy weather had something to do with his mood, for when I started talking to him, he had just two words in reply before hanging up on me and those words weren't "Merry Christmas."

His brother Owen --- living in Los Angeles --- was only marginally better. He had listened somewhat patiently to my lying spiel: I was doing a follow-up story on the theft for
Shoreline
magazine, and I was wondering what could he tell me about his father and his museum job.

Owen had said, "I really can't answer that question, Mr. Cole."

I was in my upstairs study, phone to my ear, pen and pad of paper in hand, bare feet up on my desk. "Excuse me?"

“You see," he said, his voice clear over the thousands of miles, "I was already living out here before he retired from the police department. All I knew about his job at the museum was what he told me in his letters. It was just a job, something to help out with his pension plan, and it kept him busy. He worked a lot of years as a cop, and that was all he knew. He was scared of staying home during the day --- I think he would have worked just as happily at McDonald's, serving burgers and fries, so long as he made a buck and felt like a wage earner. He was not one to take it easy and loaf. With Mom being dead, I think being alone in that house would have driven him crazy."

"What happened after the theft, then? Do you remember that?”

Even three time zones away, I could make out the sigh of despair in Owen Martin's voice. ''A lot of strange things can happen to you because of the little choices you make, Mr. Cole. I found out in school that I had a knack for engineering and so I'm out here working for Lockheed. My brother Dennis can make things with his hands, beautiful pieces of pottery, and so he's up in the Pacific Northwest. My dad, he needed a job after retirement and was happy as a museum guard, and that choice killed him."

His voice was stronger. "You see, my dad kept clean in his years on the force. Even piddly shit like taking free lunches or Cokes during the day, he wouldn't do it. He was always proud of the uniform and the badge, even if some of the guys he worked with weren't. So imagine what it was like, after retirement as a cop, to be a suspect in the biggest art theft in New England's history. To be interviewed by detectives you knew, who you worked with. To be grilled and followed by the FBI. It broke his heart, and it killed him."

I doodled a bit on the pad. "The news reports said that your father thought he recognized one of the fake cops over the video monitor and that's why he let them in."