Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (13 page)

“I think its pronounced Dra-nahge,” I say it kind of French.

She looks at me blankly. Right then, the bells on the door ring.

“Hi,” a guy says walking over to Squirt. “I’m Lou Drainage, I have an appointment.”

Squirt nods at me. “It’s Mr. Drainage for you,” she says, making it a point to pronounce it just as he has—drainage, as in drainage ditch. I shake his hand. He’s a thin, rabbit-y looking man, kind of twitchy around his mouth. He sits down in my office. He squirms around in my new chair. His right leg is crossed over his left and his foot is jiggling. He’s got shiny cowboy boots on.

“I like your boots,” I say, even though I don’t.

“They’re alligator hide,” he says. “They don’t let you make boots out of alligator anymore. These are collector’s items.”

“Is that so? How can I help you?” I ask him.

“There’s someone I want you to find out about. I want you to find out something about her, I mean. Do you do that?”

“Your wife?” I ask looking down at the intake sheet in his file.

“No,” he says. “Someone else.”

“Oh,” I say. I put down his file. I wait.

“I’ve been having an affair. It’s very serious. It’s been over two years now. She’s married and I’m married too, but we want to marry each other. I’m getting ready to leave my wife, and she says she’s getting ready to leave her husband. But I’m not so sure.”

“About?” I ask.

“About her leaving,” he tells me. “I’m not sure that she’s really getting ready to leave. And I want to be sure before I leave, you know what I mean. I don’t want to give up everything and then find out that she didn’t mean what she said.”

“Ah,” I say.

“So, I want you to find out about her.”

“What exactly do you need to know?”

“Well, she tells me she doesn’t sleep with her husband anymore; she sleeps on the couch. But I don’t KNOW that. She says she doesn’t really talk to him except, you know, who’s picking up the groceries and stuff. But I don’t really know what their day-to-day life is all about.”

“So, you want me to watch her and see if I can find out where she sleeps and if she speaks to her husband beyond chore-related sentences.”

“I just want to know if I can trust her.”

“Well, I can find out the answer to those two questions, but I won’t be able to tell you if you can trust her. That part will be up to you.”

“Bummer,” he says.

“What else do you want to know?” I ask him.

“I just want to be sure,” he tells me.

“Sureness is another one of those things like trust,” I say. I want to say, “Those are FEELING words,” but I restrain myself. “How ’bout I watch her for a day. If I find out something, I’ll tell you. Then we’ll decide how to proceed from there.” I like to use the word “proceed.” It makes my job sounds so stately.

“She works all day. She’s a teacher.”

“Okay then, I’ll start in the evening then.” I take all of his information and I walk him out. “I’ll call you in a couple days.”

I hand Squirt the signed contract, “Another web of lies,” I tell her. She nods at me and stamps his check for deposit with a firm hand. Nothing fazes her.

“I wasn’t very nice to him. I kept wanting to smack him and his alligator boots,” I tell her.

She shrugs.

I go into my office and call up Mrs. Black. “I lost your husband on Rt. 41,” I tell her.

“You lost him?” she can’t believe it. She knows he drives like a snail.

“There was an accident. There was a detour,” I tell her.

“You didn’t get any pictures?” she asks.

“I lost him,” I tell her again.

“I want pictures,” she tells me.

“I know, I know,” I say. “I’ll follow him again next week. My schedule’s all filled up for the next few days.”

“Next WEEK?” she complains.

“Best I can do,” I lie again. I don’t know what else to do. I have to tell her SOMETHING. I don’t want to break her heart. It’s an emotional situation, so I decide to stall. Then, I realize, that’s what I always do.

Chapter 22

The detective calls me and tells me to come into the station. “Again?” I say.

“I want to go over some things with you.”

“Over?” I say. “Do I need a lawyer?”

“Up to you,” he says.

I decide to take my chances. I’m living on a budget. My father’s paying me barely above minimum wage.

When I sit down, he says, “I could arrest you right now.”

“I don’t think it would stick,” I say with more assurance than I feel.

“Everywhere I go, every step in this case, there you are,” he says.

I notice a picture on his desk of a woman with a young girl. I didn’t notice it before. I guess I was too nervous the last time to look around. There’s a dying plant on the window sill. Everything else is neat. Cramped, but orderly.

“Is that your family?” I ask.

“That’s my daughter,” he tells me. “My wife died.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He nods. “Listen,” he tells me. “This is not a game.”

“I know that,” I say.

“Listen,” he says. Then he looks around at his office. The neat row of file cabinets, the orderly stacks, the afternoon sun streaming through the window, a big shiny black bird looking at us from the limb of a bottlebrush tree.

I look around too as if to see what he’s looking at, or for. His eyes get vague the way a gaze does when you’re looking at something close up but you’re really thinking of something far away. His eyes go to the picture. The wife is all cheekbones, short boyish black hair, slim. She’s sitting with a little girl. Their heads are both bowed. The kid is scribbling a picture with a crayon. The mother is watching. The kid’s tongue is out the side of her mouth and her hand is like an awkward fist on the crayon like she’s squeezing it to get the color out of it. There’s something tender, earnest, trying-really-hard about the picture.

“It’s dangerous,” he tells me.

“I’m not interested in safe anymore,” I tell him. For some reason, I get the feeling we’re talking about something else.

“That’s…” He stops.

“Why am I here?”

“I just wanted…” He stops again. “You’re in over your head. You’re a fish out of water.”

“That’s a lot of clichés,” I say. Little Miss English Teacher.

He taps a pencil eraser-side down on his desk. There’s no sound in the room except for the little thumps. Then the bird outside the window caws really loud. The bird hops off the branch right to the window sill and pecks at the window.

The detective says, “She wants her bread crusts. I always give her some before I leave.”

I tell the detective, “Birds are creepy.”

“Creepy?”

“Nature is creepy.”

“Nature is creepy?”

I tell him, “When I first started dating my husband, Ed, he had a miniature parrot. His name was Bob. Bob would sometimes sit on Ed’s shoulder, but, most times, Bob would go down Ed’s neckline and flutter around in the dark of his shirt. It was weird. To say the least.

“Bob hated me. He always pecked at me. Then he’d look away and pretend he didn’t do it. He would even try to attack me through Ed’s shirt. His little beak would come right through the fabric and sometimes he’d get stuck that way. Bob should have been in the Hitchcock movie; he would have fit right in.”

The detective is leaning forward listening to me. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I just keep on. That’s the trouble with me. Then I end up somewhere, and I look around, and I realize I’m lost.

“Bob used to free-fly around Ed’s house; he’d only go into this cage at night. One day, after a couple months of dating, I left a glass of water in the sink at Ed’s house and went off to work. Bob evidently tried to drink out of it, fell in, got stuck, head down, legs up, and drowned.

“Ed never forgave me.

“He had Bob stuffed. Bob was up on the mantle wired onto a plastic nest. His beady little eyes used to follow me around.

“Every time we had a fight, Ed would look toward the fireplace, then he’d turn back sadly to me, as if I drowned his best buddy, the only one who understood him in the world, on purpose, and he was crushed that all he was left with in life was me—a mere human.”

Sometimes, you’re in a room with one person, but you feel like there’s a crowd of people in the room. This is one of those moments. The picture of the detective’s family feels alive. The bird knocking at the window. Ed. They all seem like they want to come in, sit with us.

I look at the detective. My phone chirps with a text message. I forgot to turn it off when I came in. “I’m sorry,” I tell him and reach in my bag to get it to shut it off. There’s a name on the screen. Johnny. I don’t know why I never took his name off my phone.

Something must happen to my face, because the detective says, “Is everything all right?”

“Just a ghost from my past,” I tell him. I throw the phone back into my bag. My heart is going a million miles an hour in spite of myself. It’s one of those kind of things where you don’t know what it is you’re feeling—anxiety, hate, fear, love?

I look at the detective. He’s a looming presence behind the desk. I’m aware of his lime scent. His eyes look like they’re apologizing for something. He slams one hand down on his desk. “I warned you,” he says. “That’s all I can do. Stay out of trouble.”

I get up.

“One more piece of evidence, and I’m going to have to arrest you.”

I walk out. I can feel his eyes all over me.

When I get in my car, I look at my phone. “I’ll always love you,” the message says.

I press the ERASE button. Erase is a great concept. If only it worked.

Chapter 23

I go to check on Marie. Joe is already there standing on her deck getting ready to knock. “Do you want to go to Coconuts with me tonight?” Joe asks me.

“What’s that?”

“It’s a bar that Ernie used to go to. Maybe he had some friends there who would know something…”

“The detective called me into the station today,” I tell him. “He told me to stay out of trouble. I don’t think we should be involved anymore.”

“I like to be involved.”

“But…”

“I need to be involved,” he says firmly. He looks around, “I’m dying here.” It’s another Florida evening, the puffy clouds sit neatly in the indigo sky; the hibiscus flowers are yawning in the thick air; the trailers are gleaming in their rectangular yards.

We stand in the awkward sunshine, the palm trees full of singing birds. Loneliness is such a stupid and powerful thing. Here is the world, so chock-a-block full, and here we both are feeling empty.

Marie comes out of her trailer. “I wanted to tell you all, the funeral is still going to be tomorrow at 2:00.”

“Can I do something to help?” Joe asks.

“You could help set up the chairs and tables. Help bring the punch bowl over, and I have some pretty tablecloths. Subway said that they’d provide the tablecloths too, everything from soup to nuts! But I have some checkered ones that I think would go nicer. I used them at the Easter Ball last year, and everyone loved them. They’re happy colors.”

Joe and I nod at her. Joe says, “I’ll cut some flowers from my yard.”

“That will be beautiful,” Marie says.

“You should rest,” Joe tells her.

“I won’t be able to rest, until this is done,” she says.

Done, I think, is another illusion. You have to close the door—have a funeral; file for divorce; solve a case… whatever. But I don’t believe in closure anymore. Most things linger on and on.

“Marie, where did Ernie do his wood work?” I say.

“Come on,” Marie says. She walks gingerly with her arms out for balance and leads us behind her aluminum storage shed to a little area attached to it, with an awning roof and a workbench and stool. It’s semi-enclosed, and there are some shelves with half-finished carvings lined up on them, and cuts of wood neatly sorted into cubbies. Little jars of paint sit on one shelf, and, next to it, a Wells Fargo Bank coffee mug holds a spray of paintbrushes. An old beige transistor radio perches on the workbench, its antennae bent into a fanciful curlicue. “He kept all his tools in the shed, out of the weather, but he worked back here. He loved it here.”

“Can I look around?” I ask her.

“I’m going to go sit down on the lanai for a bit. This sun is still strong,” she says.

Joe helps her in, then comes back to join me.

I click on the radio. It’s tuned to a talk radio station. Rush Limbaugh is yelling at someone. “Soothing,” Joe says.

“It sets a nice tone for creativity. You gotta admire how he did this,” I say, looking systematically through each cubby. I love cubbies.

There isn’t any ordinary mish-mash, any stuff just loitering without a place. It’s all regimented. There’s a stern feel to the place. Yet the few carvings that he was working on, although stiff-figured, are expressive. I hold up a little carved dog. It’s nothing but a rectangle with peg legs and a box head. But somehow the eyes look alive, like there’s a real animal hiding inside of the wooden one.

“What are we looking for?” Joe asks.

“Maybe what the murderer was looking for,” I answer.

“What’s with the hearts?” Joe says. There’s a whole cubby full of all sized hearts cut out and some painted. They’re all a little crooked. The left side is larger than the right. Dreamer snuffles her nose into the cubby. “The box of crooked hearts,” Joe tells her.

“The box of angry hearts,” I say. Rush Limbaugh is on a tirade about Al Gore and the idea of man-made global warming, upsetting the poor woman who called him up to ask him why he thought it was 85 degrees in Michigan last October. “The weather changes,” he yells. “It’s not because of anything you or I do!” I click him off.

We look inside the shed too, but there’s nothing there. We knock on Marie’s lanai screen door when we’re done.

“What’s with these?” Joe asks, putting a carved heart on the table.

“Oh, Ernie put a heart on everything he made. He thought it was funny,” Marie says. “It was like his signature. He always painted a heart on something or put one of those on,” she points to the cutout heart.

“Funny?” I ask.

“He thought it was funny how much people loved that. ‘Look,’ he’d say, ‘another bleeding heart liberal.’”