Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (11 page)

“Sure,” George says smiling as Sal walks to his car.

“Tomorrow. Nine o’clock,” Sal says.

Mean Muumuu sits down suddenly. She’s talking to herself. She’s a little tipsy.

“Son, go get your car,” William says.

George zips away. A moment later, he roars up in his red car. It’s very souped up. It roars just standing still. William gets Mean Muumuu over to the back seat. She’s kind of unsteady. George opens the door and we look in. The seats are really low to the ground. Uh oh, I think.

“Lift your leg,” George starts to say, but, meanwhile William gets behind Mean Muumuu and nudges.

Instead of stepping forward, she surprises us and tucks, and therefore ends up doing a kind of forward somersault. We all peer in after her to see how she ended up. Her face looks up at us out of a mass of Muumuu. She’s smiling crookedly, “Oops,” she says.

William says, “I’ll walk.” He slams the door on her.

“Let’s go see those whirligigs,” Joe says.

“Why? The cops’ll have it all closed off by now,” I say.

“Maybe not,” he says.

“Let’s go,” George says, gesturing to his car.

I get Dreamer into the backseat next to Mean Muumuu. Then I pile in. It’s very tight. Mean Muumuu and Dreamer take up more than their share of space. Mean Muumuu is studying Dreamer’s face. “You’re a pretty dog,” she says. Dreamer gives her face a little lick.

Joe gets in the front with George. George hits some button and the top of the car peels off backwards and retracts. It’s kind of a James Bond moment. “Oooooh!” Mean Muumuu says. The moon is coming up in the late afternoon sky. The air is fresh and soft. George slams the car into gear, and we’re off.

Dreamer’s ears are flying. I hear Joe say, “Yahoo.” We’re winding through the palms, turning here and there, bumping onto a dirt road. George stops the car with a skid.

There’s nobody around. The cops were here though. When we get out, there’s fingerprint dust on all the whirligigs. There’s no police tape, so we look through everything. The whirligigs are shattered. I can’t tell if anything was in them. We pick through anyway. Dreamer pads around. Mean Muumuu snores gently in the back seat. Joe and George find a little carved woman in the pile. She’s sitting on a whale, and on the whale’s nose is the whirligig. They brush it off and bring it to me. The painted face on the woman is stoic but alive. The whale looks like it’s moving, even lying in my hand.

“He was good, wasn’t he?” I say.

They both nod. “Look at how she has a kind of carved saddle she’s sitting on,” Joe says.

“It’s a heart,” George says. And it is. There’s also a heart on the nose of the whale where the whirligig sits.

“If something was here, it’s gone.” I say. Maybe there WAS a camera. Maybe there WERE pictures, or money, I think, looking around at the shattered wood.

“We should look around at the other things Ernie’s made, see if he’s hiding anything in them,” Joe says. “Before the murderer gets to them.”

Chapter 19

That night, while we’re all sleeping, somebody gets into Marie’s trailer and hits her on the head with a potted plant and searches her trailer.

I hear the ambulance first thing in the morning, but you hear a lot of ambulances in Florida all the time. I didn’t think much of it.

The newspaper delivery man called 911 when he drove by Marie’s house at five a.m. and her front door was flapping open. She’s alive, thank goodness. Whoever hit her didn’t hit that hard. I doubt she needed to be hit at all what with her Sleep-eze’s and everything. She must have surprised whoever it was. She was supposed to be at her cousin’s for the night on Turtle Island. That’s why she couldn’t come to the blackmailing party. Joe tells me all of this. He knocked on my door this morning to tell me the news. Now, we’re walking Dreamer around the perimeter of the complex.

There are still cop cars circled around Marie’s trailer. “There’s going to be a lot of fingerprint dust for Marie to clean up,” Joe says.

“Did someone break in?” I ask.

“No. Marie’s neighbor, Claire Pearson told me Marie waited and waited for her cousin to come pick her up. Marie is afraid to drive at night because she can’t see. But the cousin never showed up. Marie found out later that her cousin had a flat tire out on Route 10 and didn’t have her cell phone. So Marie ended up staying home, sleeping on the couch. She was worried, so she left the door unlocked in case her cousin showed up.

“What do you think he was looking for… pictures, cash, something? If I were a blackmailer, I’d have a notebook, files, and pictures. Something tangible. Wouldn’t you?”

“Not if I didn’t need it,” Joe says.

“You mean maybe Mean Muumuu was right? Maybe Ernie just hinted around at things that he didn’t really know, and that was enough to extort money from people?”

“Mean who?”

“May. George’s mom. You know, Mean Muumuu.”

“Ah,” he says.

“But he must’ve had something real on at least one person. I think he’d have to have something tangible on somebody for them to have killed him,” I say.

“That doesn’t really narrow anything down, does it?” Joe say.

Three separate cop cars pass us by as we loop around the perimeter. They’re just trolling along. This is suddenly a high-crime neighborhood.

When we get back to my trailer, a huge gray bird rises out of the swamp. It lifts and lifts and strains with its huge wings. It looks almost prehistoric with drooping long yellow legs and a neck like a snake. “GGRCKGGRCK,” it says, more a clatter in its throat than a call. We stop, and it rises over us.

“Holy Smokes,” I say startled, “What was that?”

“Great Blue Heron,” Joe tells me smiling. “Beautiful.”

“Weird.”

The swamp is pulsing with its usual wheek-wheek insect noise. Most of the time, I try not to look at it, try not to think of it. I keep my curtains closed.

“Take care,” Joe says to me.

“You too,” I tell him. I mean it.

There’s a little brown bird perched on top of the heart-shaped birdhouse near my door. It’s tweeting away at me. “Go inside,” I tell it. “Make yourself at home.” But it just stays on the roof and sings at me. “I know, I know. It’s not that easy, is it?”

As I’m going out the door to go to the office, the detective pulls up. Uh oh, I think. He walks up my steps and I back into my trailer. “Where’d you get this?” he asks. He picks up Ernie’s whirligig carving of the woman on the whale from my counter.

“Um,” I say.

He looks at me intently. “There wasn’t any police tape,” I tell him.

He frowns at me. He takes out a pair of tweezers and a little brown paper evidence bag. I want to get a sample of your dog’s fur.” He goes over and plucks. Dreamer thumps her tail and rolls over onto her back.

“I don’t understand,” I say. “You can’t seriously consider me a suspect, can you? Look, there’s a whole bunch of people who Ernie was probably blackmailing. Why don’t you go over to their trailers and bang on their doors?

“There’s Dick and Gladys. I don’t know about you, but I don’t trust people who call themselves Dick. And look at their wives with their over-raccooned eyes. They look scared of something.… And Richie with his super-duper hedge-offshore-investment-twenty-percent-I-can-put-you-on-a-cruise-fund. That seems suspicious, no? And how ’bout Feather, who’s so tight you could snap her in two, and Cauliflower Fred who keeps feeding her drinks. They wear matching outfits, who does that? And this Gene Swan,” I point to the list, “has a scary forehead. And how about Miss Tilney, with her blue eyebrows. She’s very strange….” I trail off.

“Cauliflower Fred?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“I don’t consider Miss Tilney a suspect in spite of her eyebrows. She doesn’t have the strength to hit Ernie the way he was hit,” the detective informs me.

“So it was a HE?”

“I didn’t say that. You dropped this,” he tells me. He hands me the little billfold I’ve been using as a wallet. “Out where the whirligigs were dumped. I went back there this morning to check on things.”

“I didn’t…,” I say.

He just looks at me.

“It must have dropped out of my shirt pocket last night when I was bending down looking around,” I say. “I didn’t bring a pocketbook to the blackmailing party,” I explain.

“Blackmailing party?” he asks.

“Just a turn of phrase,” I say.

“You keep getting in this deeper and deeper.”

“I didn’t do ANYTHING,” I insist.

He frowns. “I’ll think about your, um, assessment of the suspects,” he says.

Dreamer and I follow him down the stairs. “Miss Tilney!” I say surprised. Miss Tilney is out in front of the next trailer. She’s lugging a huge pair of clippers in front of her. The clippers are almost as big as she is, and they are weighting her forward. She’s pretending to be clipping her hibiscus bush, but she can hardly lift the clippers. “I didn’t know you lived right here,” I say to her. I’ve never actually seen anyone in that trailer, just lights going on and off. And I’ve heard the rumble of the air conditioning and the TV blaring so loud that the whole trailer shakes like a stereo woofer.

“Is everything all right?” she ignores me and asks the cop. “Because ever since SHE moved in,” she struggles to indicate me with her clippers, “people are dying right and left.”

“Only one,” I object.

“She’s a problem,” Miss Tilney announces.

“I know,” he says.

She leans toward the detective. “She’s not sixty-five,” Miss Tilney says.

She’s wearing orange leggings and a lemon yellow tee shirt with “Da Bomb” printed on the front in sequins.

“You look lively,” I tell her.

“Citrus is very ‘in’ this year,” she informs me.

“Really?” I say. I’m wearing black Capri pants and a black tee again. My P.I. uniform. The truth is, I really don’t know how a female P.I. is supposed to dress. The ODTI hasn’t given me any indication.

“You’ll never get a man if you don’t add a little color to your wardrobe,” she tells me. “And get out in the sun some. You look like a vampire.”

“I don’t want a man,” I say.

The detective looks at me.

“What do you think?” I say. “Do you think I would benefit from wearing more color?” I don’t know why I ask him this.

“Benefit?”

“You’re nuts,” Miss Tilney says. “Who wants to live with a bunch of old farts like us. You should be living in one of those snazzy cohabitating condos.”

“You mean Coco Hablo Landings?” I ask her. It’s a complex over near my father’s condo.

“You should be out at the Buck Off Bar riding the mechanical bull.”

“What?” I say.

“That’s what I’d be doing if I didn’t have arthritis,” she insists.

“I’m living in a loony bin,” I mutter.

“Why ARE you living here?” the detective asks me.

He looks at me. Miss Tilney looks at me. Dreamer looks at me. “I like it here,” I say. I look at the trailers lined up like cereal boxes in a pantry, Miss Tilney’s assortment of potted plants in her yard, jaunty marigolds and leggy red geraniums, a rainbow-colored umbrella shading her picnic table. I make a point not to look at the swamp.

Is it my imagination, or is everyone shaking his head at me. Even Dreamer.

When the detective leaves, I stand there watching his back, which is broad and kind of ripply. If he didn’t think I was a murderer, he’d be kind of cute. I twirl my wedding band around.

Miss Tilney looks at me and then looks at him driving away, “He’s a hottie. I’d jump on him if I were you.”

Chapter 20

When I get to work, my uncle Paulie pulls me into his office. “Come and sit down.” He swivels a little back and forth in his chair. He teepees his fingers on his belly.

“You know Tweenie is part-owner of the diner, right?”

“Right.”

“Well, she has the chance to buy out the other partner. He wants to retire. And it’s a great business opportunity, Lo. You have to come and have dinner with us there. You’d love it.”

“Okay.”

My uncle swivels around and looks out the window. The traffic is slurring along on Rt. 10. He swivels back. “The only way we can pull this thing off though, is if I work with Tweenie. If we run the business together.”

“That’ll be nice.”

“That’s what we really want to do.”

“You really want to run a diner?” I ask.

He nods. He smiles and adjusts a button on his shirt. It’s an inner smile, the kind that radiates out, rather than just sits on your face. “I already cook there two nights a week.”

“Really?” I say. I remember my Uncle Paulie cooking for us in our kitchen when I was a kid. I remember his back most of all, how sturdy and silly it looked because he’d tie my mother’s flowered apron around him with a big bow in the back. He’d sing along loudly to the opera she’d listen to on WQXR radio on Saturday mornings, even though he didn’t know anything about opera, and he’d make mini-flap jacks with blueberries or bulls-eye eggs. And when my mother would clean up afterwards, she’d say smiling, “I don’t know why your uncle has to use ALL the pans and all the bowls.”

“That’s great,” I tell him.

“I already told your father I’d be leaving. I’ll phase out over the next month or so. I told him it was an opportune time. Because now you’re here.”

“What?” I say.

“Well I can’t do both jobs,” he explains.

Somehow I wasn’t getting where this was all leading. “You’re leaving?” I ask.

He nods. “I can’t do both jobs.”

“But I don’t even know what I’m doing…” I’m at a loss. “I might not even be staying.”

“I thought you wanted all this,” he gestures around the office.

I look around. I think of my flimsy trailer with no furniture, my office in the storage closet. Somehow, it all seemed much more appealing when it wasn’t a permanent thing. Just a temporary break from my real life.

“I’m not sure,” I tell him.

“Oh,” Paulie says. “I thought you wanted a new life.”

“A new life?” I say. “I wanted to just float for a while. But Jeez, the minute I got down here, everything just started to BECOME something. You know what I mean?”

“Not really,” he says.

“I was just trying out a new life,”