Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (17 page)

I hear his voice growing more piercing as he says, “We have to go. My wife is
sick
. She’s
ill
. I have to get her
home
.” He’s speaking very clearly, emphasizing one word in each sentence as if the police don’t understand English. But they do, and they also understand the difference between drunk and ill, so they make Fred and Feather go through the fingerprinting routine. Fred makes a big production of holding Feather up and helping guide her hand to the ink, then steering her out.

By now, a little crowd has gathered. Everyone’s pretending to look at Ernie’s pictures, but they really are looking at the cops.

Dick walks by with Gladys, hurrying her forward. Dick’s got his big hat on again. “But I love Subway,” Gladys says.

Dick nods at me as they pass, “We have a previous engagement,” he says. They try to walk past the cops as if the cops are invisible.

“Excuse me,” the older cop says and blocks the door.

“Oh, we didn’t think you meant us,” Dick says.

“Just routine, sir,” the cop says. “We’re in the process of eliminating suspects at this point.”

“Oh, well then, eliminate me,” Dick says, and makes it sound obscene. His wife lines up behind him tittering.

Richie and Susie are looking at the pictures of Ernie. “That’s Ernie with Ted and Fritzie, the guys who owned your trailer.”

I bend over to look. They are two thin men. One is bald and the other has Donald Trump hair. “That’s Fritzie,” Richie points to Donald Trump.

Susie says, “I don’t know why he insisted on wearing that hairpiece.”

“He should have looked in the mirror more,” Richie says.

“They didn’t stand a chance. Ernie sucked them dry,” Susie tells me.

“What are you saying?”

“He got to them.”

“He killed them?”

“I think he just collapsed their will until they decided to die.”

“I thought they died naturally.”

“That’s what everyone says.”

“But you don’t think so.”

“Nature doesn’t usually work so simultaneously. Fritzie had been a nurse for years. He had plenty of access to drugs that could put you down easy.”

“So they killed themselves together.”

“We’ll never know now, will we?” she says.

Chapter 30

Miss Tilney tells me, “He was happy ruining people. He was nobody, then POOF, he thought he was somebody. That’s what steroids do to you. He got muscles where he should have had brains.” She’s looking at the pictures of Ernie. She’s in a ruffly purple dress today. Her eyebrows are purple too, but she lacks her usual spunk.

“Something wrong?” I ask her.

“I got arrested once,” she tells me looking at the cops. “It was back in the sixties. Harold and I went to a party at our next door neighbor’s house. He sold insurance for Met Life. Turns out, the guy was a drug dealer too. There were drugs everywhere at the party. What did we know? We were just a bunch of middle aged people. They put LSD in the onion dip. Harold and I ate some.”

“You?” I say.

“It was the sixties,” she tells me again. “It was the worst night of my life. We got raided. We all got busted for possession. I threw up onion dip all night.”

“Did Ernie know that about you?”

“It’s not something I’m proud of,” she says. “It’s not hard to find an arrest record,” she tells me and walks bow legged up to get fingerprinted.

Miss Tilney on onion-dip-LSD? I think. Would she care if anyone found out? People are draining out in earnest now. The cops are efficiently handling the flow. Nobody seems to be balking. I see George across the room helping Sal and Joe clean up. I don’t see his parents. Maybe they don’t believe in funerals at the Church of the Holy Innocents.

The detective walks toward me.

I tell him about the two guys Ernie knew from Coconuts. “Maybe you should check them out. Joe thinks that Tom guy is a steroid dealer. And the shoe bomber maybe was getting blackmailed by Ernie.”

“The shoe bomber?”

“If you saw him, you would understand.”

Marie thanks me for all my help as she walks by. She already got fingerprinted, it seems. She pats Dreamer on the head, says that Cathy Bumbridge is driving her home. Her head is pounding and she’s exhausted. I know how she feels. I help slide the last paper plates into black hefty bags.

Sal walks up to me and puts a twist tie on the hefty bag. “The cow hairs were brown and white. And Marie doesn’t seem like she’s even thinking about suing me for premise liability. I think I may be off the hook.”

“You don’t need my father anymore?”

“He just gives me bills for hours he spends drawing diagrams of my maintenance shed.”

“He’s detail oriented,” I say.

“He’s expensive,” Sal says. “But me and your father go way back; his details have saved my butt a couple times.”

Joe and George and I get ready to go. When we walk past the policemen, the detective says, “I’ll walk you home.”

I start to say no, but he says, “Just to see what’s waiting for you on your doorstep.”

“Oh,” I say.

We all walk together. The rain has stopped. The sky looks like it’s blowing away in torn bits and pieces.

We watch Joe get safely in. When we get to my trailer, George says goodbye and the detective walks up my steps and tries the door. It’s locked. “It looks okay,” he tells me.

That same bird is perched on the roof edge of my trailer, chirping and hopping back and forth near the detective’s head. “She won’t go in her bird house,” I tell the detective. “She can’t commit. She doesn’t want to buy a couch or anything.”

He looks at me, and looks at the bird, and then looks at the birdhouse. He gets on his tippy toes and peers into the heart opening. It’s just above eye level for him. “It’s blocked up,” he says.

“Yuck,” I say. I’m envisioning an entire house full of bird droppings.

The detective stretches his arm up. The bird flies off. He can reach a little into the house, “Hmm,” he says. “Plastic. Do you have a ladder so I can see how this is attached?”

“A ladder?” I say, “I don’t even have a bed.”

He’s busy trying to look inside the birdhouse.

“I’m going in then.” I move toward my door. “Dreamer needs to eat and I need a nap.” He doesn’t respond. Men get so focused. There’s no distracting them once they set their minds on something.

“This area is closed off,” the detective says.

“What?” I say.

He stomps across the dirt lane to knock on George’s door.

“You gotta be kidding me,” I mutter.

Soon they’re both back carrying a ladder.

“You have any gloves?” the detective asks George.

I lean on the rail in a stupor. Dreamer lies down on the wet pebbles. “Men,” I tell her.

The detective climbs up and looks in again. He puts on the garden gloves. “I’m going to need a screwdriver,” he tells George. “Phillips head.” George trots back to his shed.

I shake my head. Dreamer’s stomach gurgles. One of those little green lizards darts out from below the trailer, takes one look at all of us, and scuttles back in. George hands up some tools and then holds the ladder. A minute later, the detective comes down with the birdhouse cradled in his gloved hand.

We all go into my trailer. “Home at last,” I say throwing my bag on the cot. I emphasize the “at last” part. But the detective is all business. He asks for a plastic bag to put on my card table, then he puts the birdhouse on it. “Do you have any tweezers?” he asks me.

“What’s in there?” I say handing some tweezers to him, trying to peek in.

“Is it a clue?” George says.

The detective ignores us. He’s so focused though, that we all huddle around. Even Dreamer puts hunger aside for the moment. We all want to see what’s in the birdhouse.

The detective pulls up my cardboard chair, perches on it, and gently inserts the tweezer into the heart’s hole. It takes him a while, but he twists and tugs out a zip lock bag. Inside there’s a black papery something with a string attached to it. He holds it with one gloved finger and unfolds it with the tweezer. It rocks back and forth on the table, still semi-crumpled. It’s a black mask. The kind that covers your eyes. The kind that you wear to a costume party if you’re Zorro.

“Huh?” I say and look at George. But there’s still one other thing in the zip lock bag. The detective pulls it out. It’s a photo rolled up and held by a rubber band. He unrolls the photo with the tweezer and his gloved finger. We all bend over. It’s a photo of a white Saturn in a parking lot. It’s the back of the car. You can see the license plate, although it’s dark in the photo. George bends over more closely to look at it. The stillness in the trailer is marked. Then the air conditioner blasts on. “Oh,” I say startled.

George walks over to my front door window. He looks across at his yard at William’s car. He reads, “H3P 220.” He reads it calmly and slowly. The detective and I are looking at the same numbers and letters on the photo, silently matching them up to the ones George says. “Bingo,” I say.

The detective stares at the photo and the mask. He doesn’t say anything. George stands at the door looking out. “I don’t get it,” I say, “William is Zorro?”

Chapter 31

“They took William away.” I call Joe the minute the detective and George leave my trailer. I can’t wait to tell him about the Zorro mask. “He went voluntarily, although, not happily.”

“They don’t allow happiness in the Church of the Holy Innocents. Are they charging him with something?”

“What? A picture of his car was in a birdhouse. That’s not really proof of anything except how weird this place is,” I say.

Joe says, “We bought here because my wife’s friend Gracie had a place here. Then Gracie died four months after we moved in. And now Edna’s gone. And here I am. It’s strange how you end up in a place.”

“Yeah, well…,” I say. I’m not ending up here, I think. I’m just… I pull the curtain aside. The sun is setting over the swamp. There’s something about a sunset after a storm. The colors are washed and crisp and true. The sun crackles through the dark clouds.

“So, could you see where William’s car was parked in the picture,” Joe asks.

“In a parking lot.”

“But was there anything about the parking lot, a building, a store, other cars, bushes, grass…”

“A building.”

“What kind of building?”

“Well, it was dark. But, let me think. I think there was a small building and a little window, a little window kind of high up in the wall. It was lit.”

“Brightly?”

“Um,” I say. “There were other cars to either side. You couldn’t see the whole cars, but you could see their edges. It all seemed kind of ordinary. A generic parking lot, you know? I didn’t get a good chance to look at it. That detective was out of here in a flash. He doesn’t like me.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“The only useful thing I’ve supplied to this investigation so far has been a couple of tall kitchen garbage bags.”

“And a birdhouse.”

“William’s mask was very weird.”

“How do you know it was William’s?”

“Well, I don’t. But it was all together in the zip lock bag.”

“Maybe Ernie’s whirligigs did have something hidden in them.”

“It was some good hiding spot. Right out in the open. I can’t believe that bird house was sitting up there the whole time, chock full of stuff. Why did he do that? Why didn’t he do something normal, like get a safe deposit box at the bank or something if he couldn’t hide it in his house?

“He probably didn’t trust banks. I don’t think he trusted anybody or anything.”

“Are there more birdhouses?” I ask.

“There’s got to be more,” Joe says urgently. “I’ll ask Marie.”

My mother calls after I hang up. “Lola,” she says, “could I take a rain check on our shopping date tomorrow?”

“Sure,” I say. “I have to work anyway.”

“It’s supposed to be a beautiful day. Your father’s going to take me sightseeing.”

“Really?” I ask.

“We’re taking one of those boats through the everglades. The kind that looks like you’re sitting on top of a giant fan.”

“You’re kidding,” I say. This seems like something neither of my parents would ever do.

“I’ve always wanted to do that,” my mother says.

“I hear it’s very loud,” I tell her.

I look around my trailer. Everything is glowing orange from the slanted sun. “Mom and Dad go to the Everglades!” I tell Dreamer, like it’s the title of a new book I’m about to start reading.

I look outside. There’s a group of people gathering outside Miss Tilney’s trailer. Here in Alligator Estates, sunsets are a big production every night. People pull out their lawn chairs, make a semi-circle facing the swamp, aim toward the western horizon like they’re watching an outdoor movie. Miss Tilney makes her God-awful punch, and somebody brings hor D’Oeuvres. Most of the time about six or seven people show up.

I walk Dreamer by them, and Joe shouts out. “Hey, come on. I brought you a chair.” It’s true; there’s an empty chair waiting for me. I walk over. Everybody makes a big deal out of Dreamer. I sit down.

They discuss good recipes for hamburger casserole, who has arthritic pains, who sold his trailer and went back to Michigan to be with the grandkids, who sings off-key in the Do-Wop chorus. Stuff like that. It’s peaceful. Dreamer lies down in the center of everything near Joe who rubs her back with his foot.

“Something weird is going on,” Joe whispers to me.

“No kidding,” I say.

“No, I mean, you know that web site. The one that Ernie visited.”

“Big tits…,” I say

“The other one,” he says. “The blue visitors guide to Ft. Palms.”

“Oh, that one.”

“I’ve been checking it every day.”

“Really?”

“I’m methodical that way.”

“I should get that way. I can’t believe I missed that birdhouse.”

“That detective only found it because he’s tall. He could see in.”

“That
was
unfair.”

“Here’s the thing. You know how the web site is worded?” He pulls a printout from the pocket of his plaid shorts: “If it’s afternoon, and you want a good hot fudge sundae, go to Big Bass Inn. If you want to boogie on Saturday night, go stomp on over to Fleetfoot Café. If you want to see the greatest show on earth, see the sunset at Sam’s market every evening. If it’s midnight on Tuesday and you need to rest your bones, MM39 on Rt. 33 has what it is you need.”