How I Spent My Summer Vacation (13 page)

And here we were, together again at day’s end, Ma working over a hot TV and Pa bringing news of the larger world.

“Find him?” I asked when he’d settled into the second upholstered chair.

“Him?” He pointed at the television.

“No,” I said. “That’s Jesse Reese. We know where he is.”

Mackenzie looked at the screen. “What’s that you’re watching, the news?”

“A tape,” I said. “An infomercial that was going to run, probably on a local cable channel. Seminar number one for senior citizens on what to do to protect their futures. I don’t think it’s soon to be a major motion picture.”

“Where’d you get it?”

I stopped the tape. “I’ll tell if you don’t lecture me on ethics. In fact, I’ll tell you everything about today if I can be spared the voice of the law.”

“Stole it, didn’t you?” He sighed, then smiled. “That wasn’t a lecture, so tell me about your day.”

I did, as much as I could remember in one gulp. He already knew whatever Sasha had said this morning, so I began with the business with the chambermaid, awaited applause, which I found rather stingily meted out, then grudgingly continued with Frankie’s additions and the details of my expedition to Cherry Hill.

“I just wish I could have found out why he was in Atlantic City, if not to gamble,” I said. “The fact that Norma Evans wouldn’t say means it must be important. She’s shielding him.”

“Maybe she didn’t say simply because she didn’t know.”

“You’re kidding. The woman made it very clear—was very proud of the fact—that she organized every detail of his life and had done so for seventeen years.”

“Maybe this one time he had no intention of lettin’ her know, and she couldn’t admit it. The woman’s embarrassed.”

“But she was there. She didn’t say so, but Sasha mentioned somebody with a blue and purple leather pocketbook, and there was one like it under Norma Evans’s desk.”

“Don’t women change purses?” Mackenzie asked with real curiosity.

“She isn’t exactly a fashion plate. The bag, to tell the truth, was a lot spiffier than the rest of her. I bet it was a gift from Reese. For Secretary’s Day or something.”

“But don’t hundreds of women own the same bag?”

Of course they did.

“Did you ask her where she was that night? Her whereabouts?”

I shook my head. “I was supposed to be writing about investments for seniors. Interrogation didn’t exactly fit the role. Sorry.”

“Well…good job, anyway,” Mackenzie said. Rather grudging, just because it would have been illogical to ask the question he had in mind. I wondered if Mackenzie’s competitive streak was as erratic and ineradicable as mine, and whether it bothered him that I’d detected something on my own.

I moved the topic slightly off the mined ground. “What happens when an investment advisor dies?” I asked, somewhat rhetorically, because there wasn’t a business-oriented brain between us. “Who takes care of the money that’s invested?”

Mackenzie slowly unwrapped one of several peppermint candies in a small glass bowl. “Probably just give it back and the folks have to choose somebody new.” He didn’t seem particularly worried about Jesse Reese’s clients.

“Do you think one of his investors could have had it in for him?”

His voice was muffled around the candy, which bulged in his cheek and compounded his accent. Slowly, I deciphered each word. “Anything’s possible,” he said, “though I thought his clients tended toward senior citizenship. Could they overpower him? Bash him with that heavy lamp?”

There was that. “A surrogate?” I asked halfheartedly.

“I did find out some about Dunstan,” he said when the candy was down to talking size. “At least where he lives. Lived. His place was locked up and his next-door neighbor told me he’d gone away for an indefinite period. Left early this mornin’. So I didn’t find out much. He lived out a piece in one of those standard-issue condos. Fake Tudor half-timbering on a three-year-old cinder-block building, for whatever that says ’bout his character, taste, or means.” He slouched in his chair, long legs straight out into the room.

I couldn’t believe it, but I had forgotten to tell Mackenzie about my phone call to Wisconsin. “Well, I found out more than that. I found out that Dunstan Farmer died in some big city in the South when he was in high school.” I thoroughly enjoyed the blue flash of interest that ignited Mackenzie’s pale eyes. Gotcha. I know that my competitive attitude is unworthy of me and unhealthy for any relationship I might have, but it feels good not to squelch it all the time. Besides, if
that’s
what terminates C.K. and me, if we can ever whittle our problems down to one such issue, I’ll be happy to work on it. And very surprised.

“The dead Dunstan wasn’t foreign-born, was he?” Mackenzie asked.

I shook my head. “Dunstan Farmer’s family goes way back in Wisconsin, where he, too, was born, although they moved to the South when he was in high school.”

Mackenzie sat up straighter and rewarded me with a companionable grin. “Good goin’,” he said, not at all grudgingly.

Brilliant going, I told myself.

“That’s what I figured myself,” he said, even more slowly than was normal.

“How?” I said. “Why?”

He shrugged. “Why not? Had lots of time to think today. Couldn’t find his place—he’s moved three times recently. That ride was incredibly boring. How come they call this the Garden State?”

Only God—or the advertising agency that had invented the slogan—knew. And the garden’s culmination, America’s number one vacation destination, was no more picturesque than the roads that led here. Driving back from Cherry Hill, I’d again been struck by the depressing decay behind the boardwalk. Atlantic City was a one-dimensional backlot facade, the only place I know where the expression “The buck stops here” is literal and visual. The place where the bucks stop is one block back from the boardwalk and as clearly marked as a high-tide line.

But that was beside the point. Dunstan was the point. Mackenzie’s ability to have known my great revelation in advance was the point. The itchy flare of that competitive annoyance was yet another point.

“You know,” he said, “I should have mentioned somethin’ this mornin’. Maybe could have saved us both time.”

“Mentioned something like what?” It didn’t matter what Mackenzie would specifically say. The thing was, he’d been ahead of me all the time. I was no more than a dogsbody. The dummy Watson bringing home tidbits to Holmes. “Something like what?” I repeated, trying not to snivel. I hate not knowing things.

He stood up, making the room look even smaller, the ceiling even lower. He’s not gigantic, although he is tall, but wherever he is, in some secret alchemy I have yet to figure out, he dominates the space. He can stand unobtrusively, his colors pastel—blue eyes, salt and pepper hair, unflashy clothing—slouching mildly, and he will nonetheless still be the focal point of the room, its chief architectural adornment. Besides, this particular room didn’t have much space for pacing, but moving his long legs seems to crank his brain, so I let him pick his way in a half loop around the bed, then back. And again. “You told me this mornin’ and it makes sense, long as we assume Sasha’s tellin’ the truth,” he said. “An’ why shouldn’t we?”

That was kind of him. There were actually lots of reasons why we possibly shouldn’t, given that she was charged with murder.

“An’ anyway, I’d already been wonderin’ what would have kept Dunstan from simply admittin’ he was with her, except bein’ afraid of the law. An’ why would he be afraid, this photographer who’s unknown to the local police, unknown far as we could check to anybody much, certainly not
wanted
? Why would he refuse to just plain say he was with Sasha?”

I twiddled with the cellophane wrapper of another peppermint. I could nearly hear him processing his thoughts, the squeak of ideas moving through neural pathways, each grabbing the next connector, whispering “Pass it on.”

“I considered that maybe Dunstan was part of the witness protection program,” he said, “afraid of havin’ his picture in the papers. But hell, he’s a photographer. Out at public functions all the time, an’ the kind of functions where distant relatives and complete unknowns are likely to show. Weddings, bar mitzvahs, anniversary parties in the number one vacation destination of the entire country just doesn’t seem a way to hide. Besides, he’s obviously foreign-born, some English-speakin’ country, so if he needed protection, why wouldn’t we send him back home, wherever that is, but out of the USA, and safe?”

Mackenzie was remarkably calm about the idea of somebody’s being an imposter. Was the world, then, full of Dunstans, people trying to be invisible? The landscape suddenly became one of those hidden pictures of flowers and butterflies that turn out to be people upside down and in fetal positions. How many convicts and escapees can you find in this drawing? I didn’t like the idea one bit.

“So I figured his fear prob’ly wasn’t based on what he’d done, but on what he
hadn’t
done.” Mackenzie stopped next to the night table and held up a hand, like a professor. “Or maybe,” he added, “it was based on both. What he had and hadn’t done.” Then, having dramatized his cryptic point, he started pacing again, but at a speedier, corner-cutting tempo that didn’t work. He bumped into the edge of the bed in his excitement, then bent to rub his shin. “So,” he said, his voice muffled, “it seemed a matter of finding out what country and what he was running from and why he didn’t become a citizen the normal way, with a green card, etcetera. Then you told me about that drunk who called Dunstan ‘Egbert.’”

“Edgar.” At least he’d slipped up somewhere, even if it was on an irrelevancy.

“So he ran away from Yorkshire and his wife, faked a drowning, and became Dunstan Farmer.” Mackenzie straightened up, probably so that I could see how innocent, how truly superior, how devoid of smugness he managed to be.

“It’s hard to think of Dunstan as an illegal alien,” I muttered.

“Not quite the stereotype, is he? He’s countin’ on that. So do a lot of other Brits. Right color skin, an’ even though he has an accent, it’s our accent of choice, the one we’ve decided shows breedin’ and class.”

Mackenzie was a tad oversensitive on the subject of accents, but I shelved that issue for another time.

“What he’s done is a good way of establishin’ a whole new identity,” Mackenzie said. “Take the name of a dead person who’d be near your age and whose birth record is in one part of the country and death certificate in another. The records aren’t consolidated anywhere, an’ anybody can get anybody’s birth certificate. Then you’re off and runnin’. You get a new Social Security number based on the certificate, ditto a driver’s license. Get a passport with that piece of photo ID, and so forth. Build a person from scratch, each new piece of ID leadin’ to more. Show the driver’s license and get a charge at a department store. Show that and get a credit card. And so forth.”

I forgave him for figuring out the essential points without my help. I even admired him for it. I didn’t feel the need to tell him that, however. Instead, I simply said, “You can make yourself up, then. Make yourself over.”

Mackenzie nodded. “And you can unmake a whole life that you didn’t like. Egbert—”

“Edgar.”

“Edgar of Yorkshire was uninvented, and I’ll bet Dunstan Farmer is currently evaporating and somebody new is startin’ even as we speak. We are never going to find the man. At least not in time for Sasha.”

His words made me feel imprisoned along with my friend. I had to establish my own freedom, at least. “Let’s get out of here,” I said. “Let’s take a walk.”

Mackenzie, rubbing his injured shin again, agreed.

* * *

The rain that had hit me in Cherry Hill had not made it all the way to the ocean. The afternoon was cloudy, but dry. Georgette was no longer anywhere in sight, which I mentioned to Mackenzie.

“She’s homeless, not immobilized,” he said. “We tend to look at those people as if they’re less than human, a different species. Don’ patronize her or infantilize her.”

“Is it my imagination, or have you mutated into a pompous, pontifical, pretentious, self-important, bombastic bore?”

“It’s your imagination,” he said.

The boardwalk was not exactly the fix I needed. After two blocks I felt terminally bombarded by blinking lights, blasts of music and electronic sound, the mixed aromas of grease and plastic, and the people. Nothing connected or made a whole. Not on the boards, not in real life. “Let’s go on the beach,” I said. “I love it when the shadows start getting long.”

Holding our shoes in our hands, we walked down to the surf line where tiny stalk-legged birds rushed for crabs each time a wave receded, then backtracked as a new wave came in. Talk about a lousy way to make a living.

Finally there was time to tell Mackenzie about the little boy, Lucky. I felt a residual flare of anger at the child’s mother and at the hotel management. “I think it’s criminal,” I said.

“So does the law,” Mackenzie said. “Leaving a kid unattended is neglect or abuse, and there are laws against it. And, in fact, it’s also a crime to not report it when you’ve seen it.”

“So why aren’t all those parents being hauled off to prison? Because it’s bad for business?”

“Maybe because the witnesses are troubled by the same issues that must be troubling you, or else why haven’t you reported Lucky’s mother to the police yet?” he asked in that infuriatingly noncombative tone of his.

“Because it seemed…because I don’t want anything more to do with the local police right now?”

He turned toward me and raised one eyebrow.

“Okay, because I want a chance to warn her first. It isn’t going to make Lucky’s life better if his mother’s in jail. That should be a last step.”

Mackenzie nodded. “You could work on the business end of it, alleviate the problem by makin’ a stink with the casinos for child care centers.”

I hadn’t even made a small peep, let alone the squawk I’d promised myself. I felt the full weight of my crimes of omission.

“But you’re right to hold off on an all-out effort in that direction till after Sasha’s out of jail.”