Winter Tides (18 page)

“I
GUESS THEY THINK IT WAS
J
ENNY THAT STARTED THE
fıre,” the Earl said to Dave. He spooned sugar into his coffee and then beat at the bottom of the mug with the spoon instead of stirring it. The cup held about a pint, and had a picture of Morro Rock on it. The Earl looked tired to Dave, his face pale, his shoulders slumped. He wore paisley suspenders and a bow tie, and his hair was slicked back with some sort of oily, rose-smelling hair tonic. He was a short man, only about five-five with the build of Tweedledee. “Looks like she squirted those pallets down with charcoal lighter from Collier’s shed and put a match to it.”

“I don’t believe it,” Dave said. “Jenny just wouldn’t do that.”

The Earl shrugged. “Neither do I. Anybody might have started it. Those pallets and trash have been piled up there for three weeks or more. The problem is that Jenny doesn’t deny it.”

“She admitted to starting it?”

“No, she still says her
friend
started it. They were playing with matches outside. Collier was down at the doughnut shop looking at the wreck.”

“He left her home alone?”

“Looks like. Only for a few minutes, I guess. He heard the crash at the corner and went down there to see if he could help. Apparently he didn’t figure it could hurt much, leaving her alone for a couple of minutes.”

“Neither do I. What about this friend? Has somebody checked Jenny’s story out?”

The Earl sat down in his office chair and swiveled slowly back and forth. “The friend’s imaginary.” His usual cheerfulness was utterly absent this morning, and he ran his hand tiredly through his hair. Dave looked at the picture of the Earl’s wife, framed on the desk. She was blonde, her hair done up like Greta Garbo, and she was looking ethereally off into space. The Earl had married her in ’46, after he and Collier had gotten out of the army. She’d died in childbirth in ’55, and the Earl had never remarried.

“Who says the friend’s imaginary?” Dave asked.

“Collier himself. He got home just as the fire department was pulling in. It was Jenny who told them about the friend, how she started the fire. Jenny couldn’t say how. Apparently the fire had got going pretty good when Edmund saw it. By the time he called the department, it was too late to save Collier’s truck. That’s where the pallets were—shoved under the rear bumper.”

“And they think Jenny pushed these pallets under the truck and lit them on fire? She burned her grandfather’s truck on purpose, in other words?”

“Nobody’s
saying
that, exactly, but it’s implied.”

“If that’s what they’re implying, then they’re full of baloney.”

“I hear you. You’re aware of this thing with Collier and Social Services?”

“Yeah. How serious are they?”

“Very serious, with this fire. And Collier’s got this bee in his bonnet about it. He thinks there’s someone calling them up, making up stories. And now this kind of thing …” The Earl shook his head sadly. “And you heard about the magazines?”

Dave shook his head.

“Apparently the investigating officer found a couple of skin magazines in the back of the Harvester, half burned up from the fire.”

“What kind of magazines?
Playboy
or something?”

“Or something
is right. Pretty filthy stuff, as I understand it. Cops confiscated them. At least that’s what Edmund telis me. Said he hadn’t ever seen anything like them.”

“These magazines were
that
bad, and Collier had them lying around in the open, loose in the back of the truck?”

“That’s where they were when the fire department got there. You can see the problem with all this Social Services trouble.”

“Collier says the magazines aren’t his?”

“Of course he says that. Collier dismissed the whole damned thing. Said he didn’t care where they’d come from and didn’t give a damn. He told the cop that he was seventy years old and could care less about dirty magazines. Apparently the cop even got a good laugh out of it when Collier put it to him that way. It was the cop’s idea that maybe the magazines were stashed there by neighborhood kids, you know. That old heap of Collier’s has been sitting there for a couple of months with bad brakes. Probably that’s just what happened. As I see it, though, a man hates to be put in the position of having to deny something like that, doesn’t he? One way or another he loses. Like Edmund said, though, they can’t be used as any sort of evidence of anything, because of how they were found—without a warrant or anything.”

“I suppose they went into the police report, though.”

“I suppose they did, along with Collier saying they weren’t his.”

The Earl poured himself another cup of coffee, and there was the rattling sound of the big door sliding open and the truck backing up to the loading ramp. A radio started up abruptly—a salsa station, too loud at first, but then turned down, and someone shouted a question in Spanish. Dave caught the words
barril
and
caballo
, and there was the sound of the
Oklahoma
props being loaded onto the flatbed.

“Those pallets were piled up by the side of the building, fifteen feet from the car,” Dave said to the Earl. “They’re pretty heavy. I’m surprised anyone thought that Jenny could even move them.”

“Well, like I told you, there were two of them—her and her imaginary friend. I guess the friend did all the lifting.” The Earl laughed humorlessly. “Anyway, she says she doesn’t know about moving the pallets. She got scared and ran inside. Hell,” he said, “it’ll all blow over.”

“I hope it does, for Collier’s sake as well as Jenny’s.”

“We’ve been here since fifty-four, and nothing like that’s
ever
happened. Never any real trouble. Hardly an argument.” He shook his head. “But I don’t believe that little girl started that fire, no matter how many imaginary friends she’s got.”

“What does Edmund think about it?” Dave asked. “He was there for the whole thing?”

“Edmund was working late, smelled the smoke. Apparently he’d seen Jenny standing out there, near where the fire broke out, maybe five minutes earlier. He tried like hell to save Collier’s truck, but it was too late.”

“Well,” Dave said, “that’s a dirty shame.” He tried to keep the skepticism out of his voice, but there were a couple of things about this that he didn’t believe. Given that it wasn’t Jenny who started the fire—and he’d bet a shiny new dime that it wasn’t—then it was an arsonist. But an arsonist who wanted to do what? Burn Collier’s International Harvester, a truck that was worth about two hundred dollars soaking wet? Collier didn’t have any enemies … except one.

Edmund started the fire himself
. Dave knew this with utter certainty. He understood that the idea was crazy, that he
wanted
to think that Edmund was up to something shabby like this. Casey would warn him about that kind of thinking, and probably Casey would be right. And certainly there was no use telling the Earl that his older son was a creep and a liar. The Earl couldn’t see it. He
wouldn’t
see it. And even if he could be made to see it, he would deny it just as easily and surely as if he were brushing away a fly. He denied the termites in the windowsills, the leaky skylights, the money draining through the floorboards of the old Ocean Theatre. The Earl didn’t want “pollution.”
He didn’t want the outside world. The Earl of Gloucester was his fortress it kept the outside out and the inside in. That’s why this kind of thing hit him so hard. One thing was true, though: he’d bounce back just as hard.

“Collier’s been a little bit worried about a couple of other things lately, too,” Dave said. “He didn’t need this.”

“What else is he worried about? He hasn’t said anything to me about any other worries.”

“He thinks you’re going to sell the bungalow out from under him. Sell the property to the city.”

“That
old hogwash. He’s been on that tack for years now. He’s worried he’s going to be out in the street in his old age, living in an alley. Collier’s a worrier. Always has been. That’s why he’s so damned cheerful and full of crap all the time it’s a cover. I told him that bungalow was his as long as he cared to stay there. And now that he’s got Jenny, he’d be smart to stay there until she’s grown. He can’t do any better than he’s doing right here.”

“That’s just what he thinks. He’s worried that if he loses the place, they’ll take Jenny away. Put her in a foster home.”

“To hell with that. If birds crapped rocks, we’d
all
have to wear helmets.”

“There’s more truth than poetry in that,” Dave said.

E
DMUND WAS AWAKENED BY THE TELEPHONE RINGING
, dimly aware that it had been ringing for a long time. There was sunlight through the windows, the fog already burned off, so it must be late morning. He groped for the phone, but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and he pushed himself up onto his elbow, focusing his eyes as pain lanced
across his forehead. His mouth was parched, and he could taste something faintly perfumey, as if he’d been chewing rose petals. He was naked and cold, had been sleeping with-out covers. The two blankets and bedspread were folded and piled where he’d left them, but the top sheet was torn and rumpled and moist, as if he had sweated with a fever all night. He licked his lips. The phone continued to ring. He spotted it on the floor, next to where he had moved the bedside table last night so that all of it would be out of his line of vision. He bent over and picked it up.

“Yeah,” he said, the word sticking in his throat. He looked for his water glass, but it was knocked over and lay broken on the floor.

“Dalton?”

“Yeah. Wait a second.” He recognized Ray Mifflin’s voice. He covered the mouthpiece with his hand and cleared his throat, suddenly recalling last night—the door in the wall, bits and pieces of what had followed—but all of it only vaguely, like recalling a dream. The pain in his forehead was a dull throbbing now, like a hangover headache. He looked at the east wall, but there was no door now, just the clean expanse of freshly painted white.

And yet he could tell
exactly
where the door had opened, could very nearly see a line of shadow there like a hairline scar, like the edge of the dark side of the moon against the darker blackness of space.

He realized suddenly that he was holding the phone to his face, that he had forgotten about the call. “Yeah, Ray. Sony.”

“The phone must’ve rung twenty times.”

“I was asleep.”

“Well, I hope you’re awake now it seems that we’ve got a litüe problem.”

“You sound miffed, Mr. Mifflin.” Edmund snickered, but Ray didn’t laugh. “Seriously, what’s the trouble?” He worked his shoulders and neck to loosen up.

“It seems as if there’s a gentleman who’s interested in our transactions.”

“A gentleman? That wouldn’t be my pseudo father, would it?” He had half expected this after Mayhew’s capers last night. Threatening the man was useless. He should never have used Mayhew in the first place.

“If you mean that homeless man you brought in the first time, no, I don’t. This guy’s fairly young. Thirties, maybe. He introduced himself as Jim Jones, which of course isn’t his name.”

“Jones?”

“That’s the name of that minister who killed all those people in Guyana with poison grapeade. A few years back? C’mon.
Edmund
. You’ve got to remember that one.”

“
That’s
who he pretended to be? That cultist?” Edmund smashed his eyes shut and rubbed his forehead, trying to grasp this, but it was simply too insane. He looked at the bedsheet again, but he couldn’t remember tearing it up. Things had happened last night that….

“No, damn it. He didn’t pretend to be
that
Jim Jones.”

Edmund looked at the telephone receiver in disbelief. “Look, Ray. What the hell are you telling me here? I’m
way
off the beam.”

“I’m telling you it was a
phony name
, the first one that came into his head.”

“So was he some kind of agent? What? These guys must carry I.D. You didn’t say anything to this clown, did you? Did he have a subpoena?”

“He didn’t work for the county or for any other agency, Edmund. I’m not sure who he was, but I suspect he’s one of your employees, getting cute.”

“Christ. Of course he was. Fairly tall? Brown hair?”

“Yeah. Looked a little like Jimmy Stewart, but with more muscle, and a different voice, of course.”

“Yeah, I know him. Christ.”

“He’s up to some damn thing. I couldn’t read him, but he was obviously snooping around. I got him to back off, but I wanted to let you know. We don’t want trouble.”

“He’s not trouble, Ray. He’s nothing. He’s a nonentity. Don’t let him worry you.”

“He tells me you’ve got a brother.”

“Yes, indeed,” Ray said, without any hesitation. A lie wouldn’t do here. The jig was clearly already up with Mifflin, not that it mattered.

“Well, that’s not nothing, is it? Looks to me like we’ve got trouble one way or another. I don’t need lies, Edmund. I don’t need to wake up one morning and have some clown from the county handing me my head in a box.”

“Unlax, Ray. To hell with my brother.”

“That’s two people we’ve got to say to hell with—this Jimmy Stewart character and your brother. Yesterday the coast was clear. Today there’s some kind of invasion. Next thing it’ll be your sister and your cousin.”

“There is no sister, Ray, and I’m telling you not to worry about it. My brother’s a beach bum. He renounced money ten years ago.”

“Nobody renounces money. Look, if it’s all the same to you, I’m going to cash out.”

“What are you talking about, ‘cash out’?”

There was a long silence, and then, speaking very evenly, Mifflin said, “it was our agreement that I could take an early retirement—those were
your
words—if I ever wanted out. You agreed to pay me half the money you owed me for the commission.”

“Hell, of
course
I remember that. But what I said is that I’d advance you the money if you were short. And I’m happy to do that. What do you need? New car?”