There Must Be Some Mistake (14 page)

“There's talk among the natives,” I said.

“Foul play?” Morgan said. She was spearing her shrimp with a man-size toothpick that had, apparently, come with her dinner.

“Something like that.”

“Have you talked to the surviving spouse?”

“I have, finally. I expressed my condolences. She appeared to be in a state of shock. Or maybe…
acting.
”

“Should happen to more men,” Morgan said.

“Hmm,” I said.

“Men are pigs,” Jilly said. “Present company excepted.”

“Thank you, darling,” I said.

She nodded at me. Morgan rolled an eye. Somehow she could do one eye at a time. When I first saw it, a hundred years ago, I didn't believe it was humanly possible.

“You figure something's fishy with the suicide?” Jilly said.

“I don't know. It's possible. There was another piece in the paper, but it was circumspect. Said the death was ‘thought to be' a suicide. Very tentative.”

“No threat to Mrs. Parker, then,” she said.

“I don't think so,” I said.

“Has the dancing girl made an appearance?” Morgan asked. “Like at the funeral? That would be a solid clue.”

“I have not seen her,” I said. “No one has mentioned her to me.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Interesting.”

“Does anyone know anything about her?” Jilly said. “I mean, from the first dance in the driveway? Was there ever any report on that?”

“No,” I said. “Security took her away and that was the end of it.”

“Well, there you go,” she said. “Find out.”

“What, I'm going to ask Parker?”

“Well, where is she? Doesn't live here, right?”

“Not that I know of. But what difference does it make? We know from the horse's mouth she was diddling Parker.”

“Diddling?” Jilly said.

“A term of art,” Morgan said. “Among shamuses like Dad.” Here she tap-pointed at me.

“Sorry,” I said.

“We'll ignore it,” Morgan said. “We'll be graceful for you. You can count on us.”

“Girl's a fucking skank-ho,” Jilly said.

They kept after me for a bit, eventually settling down some. Jilly was curious about Morgan's interest in school and got Morgan to tell her pretty much the same thing Morgan had told me. Jilly was still working at Point Blank but was starting an online business she wanted to develop. She was also working with the coder she'd told me about, though they didn't have an app yet.

“You could move down here,” Morgan said. “Shack up with Dad.”

“Not sure that's happening,” Jilly said.

“Aw, c'mon,” Morgan said. “You've been working up to it lo these many years.”

“He's seeing someone,” Jilly said.

“Well, no wonder he hasn't been calling every five minutes,” Morgan said. “Who you seeing, buster? Somebody I know?”

“Ms. Chantal Chinese White,” Jilly said. “Lives on-site, mostly.”

“Oops,” Morgan said.

“I feel repelled,” Jilly said. “Crushed with repellent.”

“You are repellent,” I said. “And I'm not ‘seeing' her anyway. You'd like her.”

“How come she wasn't invited to this meal then?” Jilly said.

“Please,” I said. “She runs a business. We can go down there if you want. It's close enough. I'll take you there. Lay bare my highly controversial and deeply personal life.”

“Me so tired,” Morgan said.

It was closing on midnight when we got back to the house. Jilly and Morgan sat up for a few minutes chatting in the living room while I repaired to my home office and cranked up the computer. I did my e-mail, which included a note from Diane reporting her scheduled arrival, twenty-six identical inexplicably late-arriving press releases from an unknown source about the merger of two publishing powerhouses, e-mail ads for a few apps, diverse speculative Twitter notifications, a “nothing happening” note from Chantal, and assorted chocolates. Also an e-mail from Bernadette Loo and the HOA board entitled
EXPLODING FIREWORKS
that set out the rules for same in our little development, including that only sparklers approved by the Texas State Fire Marshal were legal for consumer usage; that it was illegal to use exploding and flying fireworks in Texas, which included shells and mortars, multiple tube devices, Roman candles, rockets, and firecrackers; that, as a general guideline, anything that flew through the air or exploded was not allowed for consumer use and Texans should not sign “waivers” in order to purchase fireworks, because signing a waiver would not clear a consumer of responsibility should one be caught illegally using fireworks, a first-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail and a ten-thousand-dollar fine; that there was still a risk of injury with the use of legal sparklers, as, when lit, some sparklers could reach temperatures between thirteen hundred and eighteen hundred degrees—at least two hundred degrees hotter than standard butane lighters; that a list of hundreds of sparklers legal to use in our area was available at the State Fire Marshal's website; that we should use sparklers and other legal novelties on a flat, hard surface and not light them on grass; that we should light only one item at a time and never attempt to relight a “dud”; that it was a good idea to drop used sparklers in a bucket of water; that we should never carry sparklers in our pockets or shoot them off in metal or glass containers; and that we should never have any portion of our body over a firework device when lighting the fuse.

IN THE
days that followed the police decided the suicide was most certainly a suicide, and the veil of suspicion, which I had not known to be lowered, was lifted from Mrs. Parker, who promptly decided to travel somewhere, Alaska or northern Canada, or both, on one or more of those boat excursions you see advertised everywhere, beautiful scenery, lots of ice in the water, snug cabins, and quaint ports of call. I got that from Bruce Spores, who had become my ideal friend in the wake of recent events.

Bernadette Loo, who had now taken over from Mr. Parker as permanent president of the HOA, was delightfully quiet, apparently understanding her role in the community to be a leader who was seen and not heard. This was much appreciated by some of us, and a significant change. Roberta Spores was not happy about missing out on the presidency but cozied up to Bernadette, and they became fast friends, or so Bruce reported.

I was busy making small pictures, collages, postcards, and other almost miniature objects, mostly flat and drawn but often printed after a lot of manipulation on the computer. I'm not sure I thought these were actual works of art. In fact, they seemed something short of that, insufficiently dense, maybe, not resonant enough to earn the name. Still, I was making them at a good clip, so much so that I quickly had a bit of a storage problem in my home office. The condo had four bedrooms, but three were allotted on a permanent basis, to me, Morgan, and Jilly, and the fourth—the den—was still cluttered with Diane's leftovers, three years after the fact, which I was sure she'd want to clean up when she returned, which was scheduled for any minute.

I saw less of Chantal, though she occasionally came for dinner or for an evening of television, which was OK. Things were a bit restless when we were together. I had tried to put aside the anxiety about her past. She had a new manager at the Velodrome and was spending less time there, but it wasn't clear where she was spending
more
time. Once or twice I drove down to the restaurant, stayed up in the Airstream. It was still a favorite, like a tree house a person might have had as a kid. The interior had been refurbished to resemble a much older trailer. I found a book about it in one of the cabinets. It was a 1958 Flying Cloud 22 but inside was redone to look like something out of the thirties or forties. It had that industrial modern look, flat colors, some aluminum-faced cabinetry, pastel panels in sky blue, a few weird curves in the built-in stuff giving it that 1939 World's Fair look. On the whole it was endearing and seductive. I'd studied the World's Fair in architecture school, where much was made of industrial modernism by my professors—the future as Zeppelin. They were retro way before retro. We weren't encouraged to replicate the clichés in our design problems, but the occasional nod to one or another past motif was always appreciated.

Chantal joined me up in the trailer late one night. She was a little drunk. “You think they got it right? The Parker thing? I don't. I don't think they did. I think she killed him and she's getting away with it, that's what I think.”

“That's what you think, eh?”

She sat at the linoleum-topped foldaway table built into the front of the trailer holding her drink with both hands and looking out the windows there at the lights down by the harbor. “You?” she said.

“No idea,” I said. “He was in my house telling me about how he wanted to get away, but it's too grisly to think she killed him.”

“Would make more sense if he killed her,” she said. “You ever know people who killed some people? It's hard. Especially if they're close. Like you have to look at them a lot and you never forget what they did, I mean, if you know for a fact.”

“Ah,” I said. “I can only think of the one person.”

She ignored it. “I guess there's a chance she did it,” Chantal said, rubbing her eyes. “Guy can go out in the middle of the night and shoot somebody in the head in a parking lot. And he's a regular guy, seems like, I mean, like Parker. So if she kills him and makes it look like suicide and everybody agrees that's what it is, that's it. It's shit, really. Could happen to any of us at any time.”

“This girl held a gun on me one time. Her name was Fatima and she thought I screwed her sister. I was supposed to be screwing her and she had this other idea because her sister was always around the house. What was I going to do, cover my eyes? So one night Fatima came at me with a pistol and was saying how she could shoot me in the face. We were drinking some, I guess. So we're in her den, or her family's den, and she comes with the gun, and, you know, I didn't have any idea whether or not she would pull the trigger. No clue. You don't believe she will, but you know it's possible.”

“I know,” Chantal said.

“I was afraid to move. She could have made a mistake, held it too tight, whatever. It could go off. This went on for a while, like half an hour, a little more. It was dark in that den, there were a couple table lamps in there, and a pass-through to the kitchen where some light was on. I remember looking at the barrel of the gun. She wasn't that far away, it's not like she was across the room or something. She was on a stool and I was on a stool; we were at the bar she had in the den. I couldn't do anything and I didn't want to—too risky.”

“Would have been stupid. Good thing you didn't.”

“She was blond,” I said. “Sixty percent pretty. A little pasty, maybe. Too much jaw. I remember she looked too white, light colored, with that dark wood paneling behind her.”

“So what happened?”

“She was talking and asking me if I'd slept with Lorraine, the sister. Saying stuff like ‘You like her?' and ‘You think she's pretty?' and smiling that smile that's not a smile at all, that's all about anger and heartbreak. Mocking me, sneering that way that gives you away.”

I opened the door of the Airstream then, stood in the rounded doorway, and looked out over the odd rock-like roof of the Velodrome at the dark sky, the stars. There was a breeze and the breeze was cool, like there was a front blowing through.

“I'm guessing she didn't shoot,” Chantal said.

“No. Kept waving the gun and talking about me being interested in Lorraine. I think she was trying to gauge how much interest I had, and I figured if that was what she was doing I would probably end up OK because I didn't really have much interest.”

“Some, but not much,” Chantal said.

I looked at her and she looked back, and I couldn't quite read her. I said, “The hole in the barrel was small. I remember that. It was dark, too. There was a front sight on the top of the barrel, like cap guns I'd had as a kid, only those were always chrome looking, and this barrel was near black. Anyway”—I backed away from the Airstream door and got my beer off the countertop—“anyway, she didn't shoot. Eventually she stopped pointing it at me and told me she wasn't going to shoot. She was a little crazy, this girl, which is why the thing was scary. Some girls you wouldn't even give it a thought, you'd know you were safe even if they pointed a gun at you. Not Fatima. I had no clue what she might do. She ended up committing suicide. I was long gone by that time, but Lorraine, the sister, told me, sent a clipping.”

“That was so sweet,” Chantal said, without looking at me. Threw the line away.

“Anyway,” I said. “That's probably as close as I come to knowing somebody. Fatima, I mean. Kind of takes one to know one, doesn't it?”

“Would you kill yourself?” she asked. “Can you imagine it?”

“I think about it. I've been here long enough—you know that idea? On the planet. Letting it all go. Sometimes I think I'm ready.”

“The thrill is gone,” she said.

“Sure, but also after a while the end is a lot closer than the beginning, and you've spent all your time planning for the future, and suddenly there's only about thirty minutes of future left, and while it's not ghastly, it's not a delight, either. And the idea of doing stuff, planning stuff, looking forward to stuff, all of it is out the fucking window, isn't it? You're watching the clock wind down.”

“Whoa,” she said. “Did we go over a cliff or something?” She was sitting back, lounging on the fold-out, looking like her pictures downstairs but much older. “You sound like you need twenty milligrams of something by mouth PRN. Man, you're darkly dark right now.”

“Tired. We get swapped out, all of us. The replacements run the world, let a few folks stick around, but most go to storage for the concluding years. It's like at work, they don't really care what you've done, what you can do, how the work is or isn't, all they care about is getting you out the door, replacing you and starting over. The company lives forever.”

“Where's that guy who liked being locked up?”

“Still with you,” I said. “At your service. Maybe we ought to break for snacks downstairs or something. Maybe we ought to go get some cinnamon rolls, huh?”

“I could do a cinnamon roll,” she said. “Close that door, will you?”

So we shut the Flying Cloud and went down the stairs into her apartment, and then down to the restaurant and out into the parking lot. It was a relief to be out in the open, suddenly. There were bright lights on tall poles, and we could hear the boats jostling one another across the street in the Small Craft Harbor, ropes and riggings banging against masts, water slapping the pier, spraying, half-unwrapped sails snapping in the gusts of wind. We headed for the car and rolled down the windows the minute we were inside. She pointed toward the coast road and I pointed the car in that direction, rubbed a hand over my scalp, and wondered where Ella Maria Parker was at that exact moment, wondered what she was thinking about, wondered what was next.