Tailed (4 page)

Coach boomed: “Mr. Carson is here as a representative of Wilberforce/Peete, and had recently met Harris and Fulmore to appraise their taxidermy. What can you tell us about the trophy collections of these two men?”

I stood, in the process kicking my briefcase under the table.

“Ah, yes, well…” I tried to ignore the loud
whump
of my briefcase falling over. “Both men were big-game hunters and had large collections of exotics.”

“Dr. Lanston.” That was the lieutenant colonel's idea of self-introduction, followed by her question: “Exotics?”

Doc Lanston stopped twirling her pen, leveling her black eyes on me again. I couldn't tell whether she was acutely interested in what my answer would be or scrutinizing me. Perhaps both.

“Species nonnative to North America. Mostly African, like the ‘big five,' but also—”

“Big five?” Head Coach asked.

“Lion, leopard, elephant, cape buffalo, and rhinoceros. Many big-game hunters want to bag the big five.”

Lanston raised her pen. “Carson, did either man mention to you threats of any kind regarding their collections?”

“Titan spent the entire time bragging about his trophies and telling me where and how he got them. He got drunk and fell asleep. I never actually met Sprunty while he was alive, only spoke to him briefly over the phone when he called to tell me he was sending a limo to pick me up.”

“What time was that?” Stucco asked.

I shrugged. “About ninety minutes before I discovered the body.”

Everybody began flipping through their folders.

“Most of these big-game hunters are very competitive with each other over who has the larger collection of trophies and how much they're worth,” I added.

“Hmm.” Stucco looked up at me. “The medical examiner places Fulmore's death at about six that evening.”

I shrugged again, but an awkward pause developed in which those assembled just stared at me. That's when I realized: Sprunty had called at 7:00
P.M
. He was dead when he called. That is, it must have been someone else who called.

Head Coach threw up his hands. “Nobody noticed this until this juncture?” He pointed at Bricazzi. “Get the phone records for that call. Mr. Carson, I think we can assume that whoever called you was not Mr. Fulmore. Tell us about this call.”

I felt sweat start to well in my armpits. “Damn it all. If someone else called me…it could have been the killer. He knows who I am!”

“Remain calm, Mr. Carson.”

“Remain calm? A serial killer called me. He wanted me to find the body, he knows who I am. And I'm supposed to remain calm? I have a collection of taxidermy. He could be after me, for Pete's sake!”

I looked around. The import of this was not lost on the audience. They all had giddy lights in their eyes, like this was good news. Especially Dr. Lieutenant Staresalot across the table from me.

Bricazzi stood, tucking away his nail file. “What hotel were you staying at?”

“The Grand Carlita.”

He ducked out of the room and I dropped into my chair.

“Mr. Carson, your help could be invaluable, so please, remain calm. What did this person say when he called?”

“Very little. When I picked up, I think he just asked if I was Carson. I asked who was calling. He said it was Sprunty calling, asked if I was from Wilberforce/ Peete, I said yes, and he said he'd send a car for me in an hour.”

“What did he sound like?”

“Jeez, I dunno, he sounded like a football player.”

Dr. Lanston stopped twirling her pen again. “You mean he sounded black?”

I fidgeted. I couldn't be sure, but it seemed like she was intentionally putting me on the spot. “Well, he sounded a little hip-hoppy, a little gangsta, you know?”

Doc Lanston leaned in, eyes lowered as she opened another folder. “Mr. Carson, your grandfather was a notable big-game hunter, wasn't he?”

“I…I don't really know,” I stammered. The Air Force had a dossier on me? “I never met my grandparents, my parents never…”

“Some of your personal taxidermy specimens are from your grandfather's trophy collection, aren't they?”

She turned those black bull's eyes on me, scrutinizing my reaction.

I very carefully said, “Yes.”

Her eyes returned to her folder.

“Julius ‘Kit' Carson. Born 1878, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Died 1949 in a shipwreck. He hunted with many celebrities of the thirties and forties, all across Asia and Africa. You're telling us you didn't know this?”

I spoke as carefully and calmly as I could. “No, I did not know this. My father was estranged from his parents, and he never spoke of them.”

I met her eyes. Her pen was twirling rapidly. While tempted, I resisted giving her my Nipper again.

“Do you think it's possible, Mr. Carson, that your grandfather's legacy has anything to do with why the killer chose you to discover the body?”

“Oh, come on.” I couldn't resist loosing a snort of derision. “The killer somehow knew I had an appointment to visit Sprunty that night. Where does my grandfather come into this? I have some of his trophies, and many more from other big-game hunters, not just my grandfather. If the killer was just after people with big-game trophies, why did he get me there and not kill me, too? Two birds, one stone.”

Her jaw shifted as she suppressed a reptilian smile.

“Exactly. This isn't about trophies.”

“Exactly,” I agreed.

“But he didn't kill you.”

“For which I'm grateful.”

“He wanted you involved, not dead.”

“Unfortunately.”

“Which means?”

“Means? I don't know what…”

I scanned the table, and the team was all giving me that giddy eye again.

“It means,” she said, grinning like a croc in the shallows, “this is about
you.
”

chapter 5

G
abby is not your typical mom, if there is such a thing. Let's start with the fact that she married a rather, shall we say, eclectic man. Dad was an entrepreneurial butterfly collector, to be exact. Although I was reared in an upstate New York town called Scuntakus Junction, Mom and Dad met as city people. City people? OK, I won't gloss it, they were early beatniks who met in some Greenwich Village coffeehouse called Monkey Shadow, where Dad earned a living by strumming a guitar.

At some juncture, Gabby and Stuart found themselves in a commune in Michigan. Commune? I'm glossing again. Just hard to admit your parents were nudists who lived at a ranch called The Sunny Gourde. Which may or may not have been where I was conceived. And as for how and why they left the nudist colony…well, all I know is that they inherited the upstate New York homestead from my father's uncle Leonard, who if you believed the prattle of women over the clotheslines in Skunk Junction (the nonobscene pet name for our fair town) was a regular Baby Face Nelson bank robber during the Depression. I'm murky on the details of all this—Stuart and Gabby weren't the kind of parents who reminisced about Little Orphan Annie on the radio, the time Uncle Bob ran over the neighbor's chicken, or Grandad's rattletrap Studebaker. In fact, Nicholas and I never met our grandparents, much less the noted big-game hunter “Kit,” and the topic of family history was generally taboo. Over the years I managed to glean that Gabby and Stuart had each been disowned by their parents, and vice versa.

It was an odd childhood in that respect, having no extended family. And odd living in a run-down colonial loaded with taxidermy. With Uncle Leonard's house came my grandad's hunting trophy collection.

Childhood was odd but by no means dull. Instead of waiting on Christmas for Santa to bring us a new Hot Wheels set or Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, we waited on Beltane for Danu to bring us a pine tree to plant. Schoolyard singsong taunts like “Your mom is a witch, your mom is a witch…” kind of gave away what the adults were saying. We were the local
Addams Family.

Suffice it to say, Nicholas and I were never won over by the maypole, bonfires, and solstices. What Stuart and Gabby Carson had on their hands were a couple of regulation squares. Nicholas and I demanded the dreaded status quo: stockings on the hearth, trick or treat, and dyed eggs.

I admit that I feel a little sorry for what my parents went through. For sons, they'd have preferred Ginsberg and Hoffman. Instead, they got Orville and Wilbur. With so little structure in our family life, you'd probably suppose the Carson boys were ragamuffins, dirty-faced urchins with twigs in our hair. Quite the opposite. Nicholas and I did our own laundry, took our own baths, cleaned up after ourselves. I buy into the theory that an overly structured childhood is in want of free form, and vice versa. My brother and I needed a structured home life. By necessity, we embraced self-reliance, which demands a certain level of pragmatism, perhaps even conservatism. That's how we turned out, anyway.

At least I was into collecting, like Dad, and was generally pretty mellow. As Nicholas grew ever more avaricious, one couldn't help but wonder if the stork hadn't got the wrong address.

When Dad died, after Nicholas lost the meager family nest egg in a credit card scheme, Mom refused to stay in Skunk Junction. I was off at college in North Carolina, and Nicholas sought penance in the Peace Corps, so there was nothing tying her there. She sold the land our house was on, packed a suitcase, and blew that pop stand. I rushed back with a van to claim my grandfather's tuxedos and taxidermy collection just before the bulldozers knocked our condemned house over. In a few hours the dozers scraped it off the ground and hauled it off in giant Dumpsters.

Pretty devastating to watch your boyhood home wiped from the face of the earth. The room Nicholas and I had shared, the portico where I used to collect beetles by porch light, the backyard where the geese Steinbeck and Ginsberg shat all over the lawn—as heartlessly vanquished as though a horde of Visigoths had appeared out of the night with torches. The only thing that remained in the distance were the remnants of our clubhouse, a few rotting boards in a tree. Just like Stuart and Gabby's history, mine had been erased. And I was pretty bitter about Gabby's indifference. I knew personal history meant very little to her.

My own mother hadn't told me she was moving from my boyhood home. My eviction notice from my childhood was a few lines she jotted on a postcard from Michigan. I didn't talk to her for five years after that. I was on my own anyway, working my way through college as a projectionist at the college town triplex. I'd already written off Nicholas, and now her. I guess I was wrapping myself in the family legacy: don't look back, don't get attached to your past.

But why had Mom gone to Michigan? To rejoin the nudist colony, of course. And she's been there ever since, twenty-five years or so.

Before stopping in on Sprunty's corpse in Chicago, I'd been visiting Gabby in Ann Arbor. My mission? To give her the news flash about Nicholas's upcoming wedding.

Ah, the homecoming. The Norman Rockwell version: Ma in her apron shucking peas, Pa reading the paper and smoking a pipe. The reality: Ma naked as a jaybird, playing badminton with some leathery old dude covered head to toe in curly gray fuzz.

I had never been to The Sunny Gourde before. I guess most people think that nudist colonies are a thing of the past, that nudism dissolved like an Alka-Seltzer in the warm, licentious waters of the 1970s. I only wish. Of course, like everything else these days, the word “nudist” has been replaced with a euphemism: “naturist.”

I had tried to goad Gabby into meeting me in town, at a diner or something, but she wouldn't budge. Fine. But I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction of watching me squirm, of bestowing her patronizing grin of derision or her cool flutter of her eyelids that shouted “Squaresville.”

There's a Peter Sellers movie called
A Shot in the Dark,
in which buff young people frolic amid limpid swimmin' holes while a naked twangy combo riffs sleazy jazz. I didn't really think The Sunny Gourde would be that way, though I hoped it would be. Elke Sommer in her birthday suit? Bring it on.

One thing that was true to the movie was that I would not be admitted as a guest unless I, too, disrobed. At least Peter Sellers had a guitar to hide behind—I only got a towel, and the stated purpose was that it was for sitting upon. But I'd only be drawing more attention to myself if I wore the towel, or made any obvious effort to walk with it in front of me. No, I was going to do this chin up. I reminded myself of all the horrible situations I'd survived over the last five or six years: hand grenades, gunplay, kidnapping, homicidal freaks, and even poison arrows. Once you've sampled that black pie, airing out your birthday suit in front of a few strangers was only so much meringue. Or so I tried to remind myself.

The premise that the nude human form is beautiful is such a fallacy to me that I don't even know where to begin. Without sexual ardor, real-life buff is devoid of the airbrush's sympathies and the camera's naughty wink, despite what Hef would have you dream.

Adonis and I, alas, are cut from different stone. I had your standard issue love handles, perhaps a slight spare tire, but no belly, and I do have a fair upper body. Girls used to tell me I had a nice butt, and I was convinced I still did, though I hadn't made a point of checking the caboose recently. As soon as I stepped out into the open air of the grounds, though, I was quickly reassured—and more than a little mortified. There wasn't anybody within eyeshot who was under sixty-five, so I became Adonis by default.

Unlike walking around on the beach in trunks, or the bedroom
jaked as a naybird,
there is something decidedly odd about having the Travelin' Man and his luggage exposed to the afternoon breeze. I felt vulnerable to the elements. I mean, what if a bee or a fly went for my Travelin' Man? My wayfarer was used to being ensconced in the ship's better quarters, not out on deck like a vagabond. Although, to my surprise, he didn't seem alarmed enough to run for cover. In fact, he seemed downright curious of his surroundings. Not excited, just curious.

I spotted Gabby right away, the silhouette of that proud jaw and slightly Roman nose undaunted by age. Her long, yellowing white hair hung in twin braids down the hunch of her back. She was shrinking, the way old people do, slowly curling up like a fiddlehead. I tried to stay focused on her basic form, her face and motion, rather than the particulars. Rubenesque is one thing, but rumpled is another. And besides, isn't it written somewhere that after the age of five a son isn't obliged to see his mom naked—ever, ever again?

I kept my eyes straight ahead, acting casual, resisting a peek down to make sure bees hadn't beset my Ricky Nelson. In my peripheral vision, I could see people by the pool glancing my way: my farmer's tan and fish-belly shorts gave me away as a guest.
Hand grenades, gunplay, kidnapping, homicidal freaks…

The furry dude playing opposite my mom glanced in my direction, and Gabby took that opportunity to spike the birdie.

“Point, game, and match, Chester! You owe me five bucks.”

He made a sour face at her, then looked back to me, indignant that I had distracted him. I could see him checking out my tan lines, and I managed not to make a self-conscious inspection of Ricky. I just gripped my towel a little harder.

Gabby turned toward me as if she'd known I was there the whole time. Chester stalked off in disgust.

“Garth! You're next. I'll play you for five bucks.”

“How are you, Gabby?” I tried to smile. Damn, this was like one of those dreams. A very unhealthy one. If only I'd wake up in my pajamas, if only.

“Tell you what, I'll spot you three points.”

As I drew near, my mother stepped up and pulled me down for a kiss. Then a hug.

I didn't think it could get more awkward. But it had. Out of respect for Gabby, I won't elaborate, except to say that Ricky fled the deck for his cabin.

I held her at arm's length, where I could make eye contact. “Can we sit somewhere and talk?”

Her gray eyes scanned mine. Was she looking for embarrassment? Shock? Or was she taking stock of my resolve? I remember thinking how incredibly unsentimental she was. Had always been.

She held her ground. “You look good, Garth. Angie taking care of you?”

“We take care of each other and ourselves.” I cursed myself, but the line was reflexive. It was what she used to say about our family. A mother is a powerful subliminal force, nudist or not.

She smiled at my response, the twinkle of appreciation in her eye. Those teeth that used to be so white and straight now looked overly large and ochre. I noticed then that she wasn't altogether steady, that there was a slight tremble in her body. Not a shiver but tired bones.

She turned and ambled toward the pool. I followed, taking an interest in the blue skies and indigenous trees.

We finally reached poolside—seemed like an eternity—put our towels down, and sat at a green plastic patio table.

“It is good to see you again, Garth.” Some warmth came into Gabby's eyes. “You know, your father would have liked to see the man you've become. Strong, healthy…”

“Nicholas is back. And in New York.”

Her eyes gained new warmth.

“How marvelous!”

I hadn't been sure how she'd take that news as she'd been more or less happy to see Nicholas go after what happened with Dad.

“How is he? What does he do? Still working on becoming a Rockefeller?”

“Insurance investigator.”

“A what?”

“Private insurance investigator.”

She frowned, confused by this ambiguous job description.

“Is he happy?”

“Getting that way, I think. He comes to dinner at our place on Sundays. Mostly.”

“Sunday dinner?” Gabby looked exasperated. “Good God, Garth. Hard to believe two boys of mine could turn out to be so bourgeois.”

“Gabby, we were always like that, remember?”

She looked off toward the pool. I could actively see her trying not to remember. Nostaglia wasn't her bag.

“You know, I could just as well say, Gabby, that it's hard to believe I'm talking to my mother in a nudist camp.”

“
Naturist retreat.
The body is not something to hide, Garth, but something to celebrate. It's unhealthy to consider the naked body just as an instrument for sex. If not for your father, I would have raised both you boys the naturist way.”

“Your pagan festivals didn't take, so what makes you think we'd have stayed naked when you were working at the library?”

She raised her chin and closed her eyes, and I could see her dismissing the memories again. Slowly opening her eyes, she said, “So, what brings you to Michigan?”

“I was in Cleveland, and I'm on my way to Chicago.”

“Why?”

“I'm appraising collections of taxidermy.”

She nodded, clearly uninterested in the answer—she was trying to segue into her next question. “And why after all these years have you braved exposing your body to come see Gabby? Hmm?”

Taking a deep breath, I said, “I came to invite you to a wedding.”

Gabby opened her mouth to speak but then rolled her eyes instead.

“Nicholas's wedding.”

Like a dog intent on a squirrel, Gabby cocked her head and looked intently into my eyes.

“A handfasting? To whom?”

“Does it matter?” I knew I shouldn't say what came out of my mouth next, but I was frustrated by her imperiousness and wanted to take her down a peg: “She's not a nudist, if that's what you're wondering.”

Color came into her cheeks. “Don't you dare insult me, Garth.”

I looked away, and saw that the people lounging on the other side of the pool had turned to see what was brewing on our side. “I'm sorry.”