Tampico (James A. Michener Fiction Series) (15 page)

And there were no women and no friends, and it was Carlos who did most of the food shopping, and though occasionally they went to restaurants in Provincetown, they went early and to quiet places. It was reading in the evenings, and quiet music, and the manuscript collection. And it was early to bed and early to rise and Gordon Strickland sitting on the deck in robe and slippers, drinking coffee, a book in his lap. Then it was Strickland flying to Philadelphia for a week or two, then coming back for a few days, then leaving again.

“I studied up on AIDS,” Carlos said. “In his library.”

“Books about that?”

“Oh, plenty. Journals and offprints too.”

The phone rang, startling both of us, and I rose and went to the wall beside the sink to answer it. Carlos was puffing at his cigar, reaching for the good brandy I’d brought to the table. It was Erica Plummer, her voice small and hysterical.

“I told him,” she said. “I had to tell him.”

“Easy,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“The cattails! It was his friend. He
made
me tell him.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she hissed. “He locked me in the closet, but I got out.”

“How long ago?” I said.

“Oh, I don’t know!”

I looked down at my watch. “It’s seven-fifteen.”

“Then I guess an hour, maybe more.”

“Just stay where you are,” I said. “Right there. I’ll call you back.”

I hung up the phone, then turned back to the table and heard the pounding. It was coming down the hallway from the front door, and I thought of the Steyr in the desk in Sara’s sewing room, then heard glass shattering. Carlos was on his feet now, and I held my hand out to stop him.

“This will be difficult,” I said. “Why don’t you try for the basement?”

But he didn’t move, just lowered his snifter to the table and smiled faintly, and I heard his feet on the carpet behind me as I headed down the hall and into the living room, where I saw a foot on the floor, grinding in broken glass, a work boot and the leg half through the window, and felt Carlos brushing by me as he headed there. Then I heard wood splintering and turned and saw the axe head in the door.

Its blade dipped and withdrew, then it ripped in again near the middle hinge, and I saw the frame splitting and the door torquing and wobbling and twisting inward and saw thick fingers at the edge, a hand shaking the door, and turned quickly and headed for the hall closet and Sara’s old bow and quiver. I saw Carlos as I turned. He had hold of the man’s leg and was lifting it. The foot was above the floor now and the toe of the boot reached down like a dancer’s, searching again for purchase, and I saw a fist come through a central light, glass and broken mullions in the air before it. Then hands gripped the frame and the man’s body filled it as he came through, his face cut and bleeding, shirtsleeves in shreds at his bloody arms. He kicked out at Carlos, catching him on the hip. Then he was in the room and very large and Carlos disappeared under him as they fell down in the broken glass. I saw the man buck, his hips rise as before a sexual thrust. Then they were rolling and Carlos had his fists in his hair, and I saw his broad forehead bang against the man’s nose, and more blood, and the man rolling away from Carlos, his hands over his face, as I reached into the closet and through the winter coats and found the bow.

I had to string it and get an arrow in place, and once I’d done that and
turned again the door was falling inward and the man with the axe was climbing it and coming through and another was behind him, and as I pulled the bow and the door banged on the carpet just inches from my feet, I saw Carlos under the window at the baseboard. He was sitting across the man’s legs at his knees, pounding him repeatedly in the stomach. The man’s hands reached down to guard himself, and Carlos reached over them and hit him in the face, and I saw his hands slip from his chest and fall down beside his body into shards of broken glass.

The man hesitated on the fallen door, the axe held at the ready at his shoulders, and stared at me in half vacant surprise before his eyes focused. His hair was carefully combed, a thinning black, grey-streaked and oiled, and his head seemed too small above his thick shoulders and neck, and I thought I saw remnants of plugs at the hairline. His features were delicate, a pointed nose and thin lips, and his blond feathery brows seemed feminine and recently plucked. He was large and barrel-chested, broad through the stomach and hips, and his hands gripping the axe were thick-fingered, and I could see them in Erica’s hair as he dragged her child’s body over furniture and hard tile toward the toilet.

The man entering behind hardly budged him when he bumped into him, and I saw his head over Plummer’s shoulder, the cattail man, younger, as he reached out for the other’s arm and touched it, and they both glanced over at Carlos, whose palms now rested on the chest of the still, prone figure, just long enough, and I sent the arrow through Plummer’s thigh.

He looked down at it, the quivering feather end. Then he looked up at me. There were tears in his small eyes, saliva on his lips, and I knew that though he’d had no plan to kill me, just to come here and beat me, he had one now.

He lifted the axe up and staggered forward, and as he came at me and the cattail man reached out to stop him, I saw Carlos moving low over the carpet, then saw the cattail man falling, his legs in the air. His head hit the floor with a thud and Carlos was on him, his hands in his hair, and Plummer turned at the sound, and I stepped forward and grabbed the axe handle near the blade and swung the bow and hit him, hard across the cheek. Then I kicked out at his healthy leg and heard the patella crack, and once he’d fallen to the floor beside the cattail man I stood over him, the bow in one hand, the axe in the other. He looked up at me in wonder, then down at the feather. Then he stared at the ceiling, his eyes watering in pain and disgust.

I got handcuffs and duct tape and we secured them. Then I went to the
phone and called the station and told the duty man we’d need an ambulance too. Then I called Warren at home. Carlos had a few glass cuts on his arms, and he went to the bathroom to tend them while I waited, and when Warren and the others arrived and we heard the ambulance in the distance, I went to the kitchen phone and called Erica Plummer.

“Can you leave in a few hours?” I said.

“Is he all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “He’ll be okay. And the others will too. But they’ll be locked up for a while. Is there anyone else?”

“I can’t say,” she said. “I don’t know. He has more friends like those. He may have called someone.”

“Just a minute,” I said, and put down the phone and went to talk with Warren, then came back again.

“An officer will come to the house,” I said. “You met him at the station in Provincetown. Then it’s the motel I told you about. You might have to sit tight until Monday, but I’ll call if I can get the lawyer there earlier.”

“Okay,” she said, her voice stronger now.

I called the lawyer in Providence then, but there was no answer, just the machine saying he’d return after the holiday weekend. Then I went back into the living room. The ambulance had arrived and they were loading the three men into it, Plummer and the one who had come through the window on stretchers, the other ambulatory. I could see the red taillights through the opening where the door had been, hear punches of static on the cruiser’s radio. It was a clear night, and starry, and a cool breeze came in and rustled the pages of magazines that had fallen from the coffee table. Warren was in the doorway. He waved his fingers and called me over.

“Who the hell
is
that?”

“You mean Carlos?”

“The little guy.”

“Right. Well he’s a friend now. He’s moved in here. We’re living together.”

“What for?”

“Well, to get some work done on the place. He’s a handyman, a carpenter. He used to work for Strickland.”

“Really?” Warren said. “Well he must be a tough little fucker, that’s for sure.”

“I just found that out,” I said. “And a good thing too.”

“So they’ll want you at the station, I suspect tomorrow.”

“Right,” I said. “And thanks for going after the Plummer woman.”

“Least I could do,” he said. “I put you onto her after all. Strickland, and now this. We’re batting a thousand.”

He gestured at the mess, then smiled at me and nodded to someone behind me, and then he turned and left. It was Carlos, and he was carrying his bag of tools and a few boards under his arm.

“I found them in the basement,” he said.

And before I could bring up our recent engagement, he had me holding the door as he spread the tarp. He removed the lock and knob, then got to work on the splintered panels, the door flat on the carpet, and while he was gluing and clamping I stood above him and counted my errors, considering the fiasco of my first real case as a private citizen detective.

The waning moon sat over Kelly’s house. It was early evening, no stars yet, and Gino could see the car in gravel near the porch and lights in a few windows, and then he saw a figure on the porch, carrying something and heading down the steps and toward the cliff, and he thought it must be Arthur. He looked over at the lighthouse. It was darkening in dusty shadows, and the structures and vehicles at its base were coming under shadow too, losing definition, and he could see the glowing string of night lights swelling up in the darkness at the perimeter. He heard the engine faintly in the sky then, one of the small Cessnas out of Provincetown. That’ll be the seven-o-five to Boston, he thought, connections to New York and Philadelphia. He knew all the schedules, and he knew it was a foolishness to know them, but it was something to do, though he was getting sick of it all, this doing something that was nothing.

“Yoo-hoo.”

It was that bugger Larry, farting around again, and Gino thought he wouldn’t turn, but then he did, his pipe between his teeth, and looked at the two of them. John was in his wheelchair, a blanket on his legs, and Larry was shuffling a pack of dog-eared cards over the small metal table he’d pulled up to his chair. He looked over at Gino.

“Back with us again?”

They heard a whisper of cloth slippers in the hall and they all glanced to the doorway. Then Frank shuffled in with the information and they were all there.

“Just the one now?” John said.

“That’s right,” said Frank. “I
knew
I heard that fucking ambulance. They think they’re keeping something from us? As if we were children? Those asshole doctors.”

“Maybe they planned for pillows under the sheets,” Larry said. “You know, to fool us?”

“Right, and a pumpkin for a head.”

“Anything about the other one?” John asked, lifting his chin to where the screen had been. There was nothing there at all now. They’d rolled out the bed and the IV pole, and he could see a horizontal gouge in the wall under the window where that bed and others had scraped it.

“I was here when Kelly came in,” Gino said. “Just stood there and looked, and then left.”

“Kelly’s upset, I think,” Frank said. “I don’t know. But the guy came around is how I hear it, and now he’s gone.”

“Who says?” said Larry.

“Kelly.”

“And we were watching the frigging Congress on the cable,” said Gino. “Wasting our time as usual.”

Frank was pulling an IV stand and mop string had caught in the wheels, and he jerked it up beside his chair as he sat down and the metal fitting on the bag clicked against the pole. He got the tube arranged and glanced up at the drip, and Larry put the cards down and Gino lit his pipe and John fished a cigarette out of a crumpled pack, straightened it with his fingers, then tapped it on the edge of his coffee can.

“What is it?” he said.

“Fucked if I know. Something about my electrolytes,” said Frank.

“It’s glucose. And probably a little potassium,” said Gino.

“How in the fuck would you know?”

“A little respect,” Gino said, as he tamped the tobacco down and lit the pipe again.

“Carolyn was surely pissed when we got back,” Larry said.

“Right. She was. But she was faking it some too, like an indulgent daughter.”

It was John, and his cigarette was in his tracheotomy tube again, sticking
out of his throat, ash falling down to the blanket.

“Some daughter!” Gino said.

“I had a son once,” said Frank.

“You told us about that.”

“Not Frank Junior. He died in the war. I mean another one, still alive I think.”

“You said ‘had,’” Larry said.

“That’s the way it is. He was a plumber. Then he became a contractor. Too fancy for me I guess. He married some chippy, ten years ago or more. I haven’t seen him since then, haven’t heard from him either.”

“The right name for it,” Gino said. “Plummer.”

“That’s an old joke,” said Frank.

“Where is he?” asked Larry.

“He was over in Taunton, last I heard. Only a few lousy miles from here. But that was ten years ago, and I don’t know about now.”

“Children can be nasty fuckers,” Gino said. “My daughter for one.”

“Where is she?” said John.

“I told you. I have absolutely no idea at all.”

“Carolyn, on the other hand,” said Larry, winking.

“Well, now,” Gino said. “That’s another kettle of fish entirely.”

They settled into Frank’s revelation, yet another marker for each of them, even Larry, who had traveled in circles devoid of children, and John too, who had managed to miss family without ever trying. It was a marker of abandonment, the real thing and not the one romantically named as such, all those who had left them to go into death, quite naturally. There was nothing at all to be said about it, but to rail against it, and none had a taste for that because it was useless and undignified and seemed a childish thing even to consider. They weren’t thinking these things, though Gino took his pipe from his mouth once, then demurred, tapping the stem against his teeth, and Larry shuffled the cards absently. Frank held some papers in his lap, the tip of his pencil moving like a pointer over then, and John took the cigarette from his throat, coughed, then spoke.