Basket Case (10 page)

"I do."

Her smile is grateful but sad. "You know, I haven't slept a night since he died. I can't believe it happened the way they said it did. Fact, I can't believe a word that greedy no-talent twat says."

"Think she murdered him?"

"Well, somethin's not right," Janet says quietly. "I honestly don't know. You're the reporter, what do you think?"

"Did your brother have any money?"

"Any money left, you mean. Sure he did. Even in the bad old days Jimmy was pretty sharp—whatever he blew on dope, he'd make sure to send the same amount to Smith Barney. For a junkie my brother was very disciplined. That's how come he could afford a place in the islands."

"Speaking of which, you wanna go?"

"Right." Janet, with a sarcastic sniff.

In the living room, the computer clicks to life and beeps out a greeting.

"Shit," she mutters. "My lonely lumberjack."

"The Bahamas. You and me," I say. "We'll talk to the cops who investigated Jimmy's drowning."

"You serious?"

Behind her, the PC keeps beeping entreatingly.

"Jack, I can't afford a trip to the islands."

"Neither can I," I say lightly, "but young Race Maggad easily can."

"Who's that? "Janet asks.

"Please go with me. It won't cost you a dime. The newspaper will pay for everything." I'm not trying to sound important so much as convince myself that I can pull this off. For obvious reasons, the obituary beat doesn't come with an expense account.

"How about it?" I ask Janet Thrush.

"Damn, you are serious."

After the fifth beep, she rises to attend to her caller.

"Please," I say. "If I go alone, they'll just blow me off. They've never even heard of my newspaper in Nassau. But you're his sister, they've got to talk to you."

"Doesn't mean they gotta tell the truth."

"Sometimes you can learn more from a lie. Think about it, and call me later."

"Might be late. After Larry I've got Doctor Dennis logging on from Ann Arbor and then there's Postal Paul from Salt Lake. My very first Mormon."

"I'll be up," I say.

As I'm backing the car out of the driveway, the camera lights flare on in Janet Thrush's living room. The drapes are lined so there's nothing to see but a hot white glow around the margins of the windows. From inside the house, though, I hear the beat of some jazzy music, accompaniment to the dance of the modern meter maid.

My mother knows when my father died but she won't tell.

"What does it matter? Gone is gone," my mother says.

I'd like to know when my father died in order to avoid dying at the same age, which is my deepest fear. My mother disapproves of this obsession and therefore refuses to provide useful clues about Jack Tagger Sr., who stomped out the door when I was only three and never returned.

"How did he die?" I've asked her many times.

"Not of a heredity disease, I can assure you," she usually says. "So stop this ridiculous fretting."

My mother kept only one photograph in which my father appears. He is tall and sandy-haired and bare-chested and, to my eye, radiantly healthy. In the picture he has a tanned arm slung around my mother's shoulders. They are squinting into the afternoon sunlight—this was on a beach in Clearwater, where my parents lived at the time. I am in the photograph, too, sleeping soundly in a stroller to my father's right.

Once I asked my mother what my father did for a living, and she replied, "Not much. That was the problem." In the photo I would guess his age to be between twenty-five and thirty years old. That means if he were alive today he'd be at least sixty-eight and possibly as old as seventy-three. But he's not alive—on this point my mother wouldn't lie.

After Jack Sr. skipped out, our lives moved briskly along. My mother worked long hours as a legal secretary but she always made time for me, and a social life. Although she seriously dated several men, she didn't remarry until after I'd finished high school. I went off to college, fell into the newspaper business and never thought much about my father until many years later, when I got demoted to the obituary beat at the Union-Register. It was then I started worrying unhealthily about mortality; my own, in particular. So I phoned my mother in Naples (where she and my stepfather retired for the golfing opportunities) and asked if my father was still alive.

"No," she said evenly.

"When did he die?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Just curious," I told her.

"I'm not sure when it was exactly, Jack."

"Mom, please. Think."

"It's not important. Gone is gone."

"How did it happen? Was it something congenital?"

"For heaven's sake, don't you think I'd tell you if it was," my mother said. "Now let's drop the subject, please. It happened a long time ago."

"But, Mom—"

"Jack!"

A long time ago. That clinched it. When my mother says "a long time ago," she means at least twenty years—which by my calculations would have made my father no older than fifty-three when he died, and possibly as young as… well, that's the gut-gnawing, ball-clenching question.

Was he thirty-five? Forty? Forty-six?

One time I came out and asked my mother: "Was he older or younger than I am when he died?"

"Don't be morbid," she scolded.

"Come on, Mom. Older or younger than me?"

Younger is what I wanted to hear her say, because that meant I was out of the woods. I'd skated through the year of doom.

"What difference does it make, Jack? When God calls us, we go. Obviously your father got the call."

"He was in his forties, wasn't he? He was exactly my age and you're afraid to tell me!"

"This job isn't good for you, Jack. Maybe you should try something lighter, like a dining-out column?"

Not knowing the specifics of my father's death keeps me up some nights. Whenever I speak to my mother I find myself prying a little more, which explains why she doesn't call so often.

"Just tell me," I asked her recently, "was it natural causes?"

"Of course," she replied soothingly. "Death is always natural."

It was a monologue I'd heard before.

"If a man falls off a twenty-story building," my mother said, "it's only natural he should die. Same thing if he lies down on the railroad tracks in front of a speeding train. Or a bolt of lightning strikes him on the thirteenth fairway—"

"Okay, I get your point."

"The heart seizes up, the lungs puddle, the brain shuts down. End of story."

"Sheer poetry, Mom. May I borrow that for your eulogy?"

Tonight, waiting for Janet Thrush to call, I impulsively decide to try again. My mother picks up on the first ring.

"Oh hi!" she says. "I thought you might be Dave."

Dave is my stepfather. He enjoys the occasional late poker game.

"There's something I've been wanting to ask," I say.

"Oh, not again."

"Look, you don't have to tell me what happened or when, or whether it was a car accident or a heart attack or a brain embolism—"

"Jack, I'm very worried about you."

"—all I want to know," I say to my mother, "is how you knew about it. I mean, the man had been gone all those years. Did you two stay in touch?"

"We did not!"

"Didn't he ever call or write?"

"Not once," my mother declares. "Nor did I expect him to."

"Then how'd you find out he died? From his family? The cops? Who called you?"

"You're getting on a plane tomorrow, aren't you?" my mother says.

"What if I am."

"You always get weird like this before you go on a trip."

"That's not true." I'm faking and my mother knows it.

She says, "If it makes you feel better, your father didn't die in an airplane crash. Where are they sending you, anyway?"

"The Bahamas."

"Poor baby," says my mother. "I wish somebody'd send me to the Bahamas."

"I'm going to look at an autopsy report. Wanna come?"

"Yuk."

"It's a seaplane. We land in Nassau harbor."

"Airplane, seaplane, don't sweat it. That isn't how your father bought the farm."

"Don't I have a right to know?"

My mother laughs. "Maybe we should go on Sally Jessy, you and me. See who the audience cheers for."

"Did I tell you I get a complete physical every month? Head to toe."

"That's a little extreme, Jack. Every month?"

"And I mean a complete physical."

"See, this is why Anne left you," my mother says. "This kind of craziness."

As if I need reminding.

"Who was it back then—Stephen Crane?"

I grunt in the negative. "Scott Fitzgerald."

"Right!" my mother exclaims.

At the time they put me on obits I was forty-four, the same age as Fitzgerald when he died. I couldn't get it out of my head, couldn't sleep, couldn't stop talking about it—and I wasn't even a Gatsby fan.

At first Anne tried to help but eventually she decided it was no use. Then she left. On my forty-fifth birthday I instantly snapped out of it, but Anne stayed away. She said if it wasn't Fitzgerald it would be some other dead famous person, somebody new each year. Often I feel like calling her up and telling her how much better I'm doing at age forty-six, considering the heavy Elvis and JFK portents.

"Anne was no Zelda," I hear my mother saying. "Anne was a grownup. I liked her. Her daughter was a wild one but Anne I liked."

"Me too, Mom."

"It's this godawful job of yours—writing about deceased persons every day. Who wouldn't start to unravel?"

"I'm doing much better. Really I am."

"Then why these phone calls, Jack?"

"Sorry."

"You could switch over to the Sports page. Write about the PGA. Or even the LPGA—maybe you'll meet a nice girl on the tour!"

"All I'm asking," I say calmly to my mother, "is how you knew when my father died. It just seems peculiar, since you say you hadn't seen or heard from the guy all those years… How did you find out about it, Mom?"

My mother delivers one of her trademark sighs. "You really want to know?"

"I do."

"I'm warning you. There's an element of irony."

"Fire away. I'm sitting down."

"I read it in a newspaper, Jack," she says to me. "Your father's obituary."

9

The belly of the seaplane is hot. It smells of fuel, grease and sweat. We're fanning ourselves with rolled-up magazines, but I'm not as jumpy about flying as I usually am.

I like the concept of an aircraft that floats. It makes a world of sense.

Janet Thrush says, "I've never been on one a these contraptions."

I can barely hear her over the racket of the propellers. She's sitting across the aisle, wearing a yellow sleeveless pullover, cutoff jeans, sandals and a floppy canvas hat. She looks perhaps a bit too ready for the islands.

Through the window I see the indigo rip of the Gulf Stream behind us. The waters ahead are turning clear and brilliant, a silky dapple of gemstone blues. Janet leans closer. "I love it here. I used to visit Jimmy all the time till he hooked up with Cleo."

"She keeping the place in Exuma?" I practically shout.

"Who knows." Janet shrugs. She slips into the same cheap shades that she wore last night as Rita the Meter Maid. "Hey, Jack," she says, "did my brother leave a will?"

"You're asking me?"

"Hey, you're the one writin' the story."

The plane splashes down gaily and skims the wake of a cruise liner in Nassau harbor. We clear Customs without incident and I hail a cab. Police headquarters is downtown, across the big toll bridge. I've phoned ahead to make sure Sergeant Weems is on duty today, hut that doesn't mean he'll hang around to welcome us to the commonwealth. I warn Janet that we might be in for a wait but she seems determined and calm. The only sign of jitters is the prodigious wad of chewing gum she's been chomping.

"It's either that or Camels," she says.

Incredibly, Police Sergeant Cartwright Weems is at his desk when we arrive. He is young and upright and courteous. His desk is exceptionally tidy. I introduce myself first, and then Janet as "the sister of the deceased."

Weems says he's sorry about her brother's death. Janet says, "Jack, tell him why we're here."

"Certainly. It's about the autopsy."

Weems folds his arms, giving the appearance of polite interest.

"Actually," I say, "we have reason to think there wasn't an autopsy."

"Why do you say that?" the sergeant asks.

"Because there were no stitches in the body."

"Ah." Weems sits forward and turns open the file folder on his desk. Inside is the official police report about the drowning of James Bradley Stomarti.