There Must Be Some Mistake (20 page)

“Who isn't?” Chantal said. “Watch TV news much?”

“I suppose,” I said.

We rode in silence for a while, the sound of the air whizzing by the car, the motor, the tires buzzing on the highway, the cars passing us going the other direction, trucks, echoes off bridges and overpasses, a small plane, big horns from the water. I got the feeling that I wasn't so comfortable anymore. I was aware of it not as the discomfort but as the awareness of the discomfort, and that it was happening with Chantal, whom I'd been fond of so quickly, and then afraid of. I still liked her, but now things were sputtering, like we were being ejected on different paths from target material due to bombardment of the target by energetic particles—going off the rails—and there was no stopping it. It wasn't a onetime thing, either, not a bad night, but something larger, something about our whole act. The best thing to do, I figured, was to get away from it, see if this particular minute, this evening, this drift, would blow over, and see if we could get back to normal at another time, a day later, a week.

“I think we ought to head home,” I said. “I'm getting winded here.” I waved out the car window so she'd know I was making a phony joke about being buffeted by the wind.

She delivered the slightest of smiles, a twitch, really, that barely creased her face. She slowed the car.

“I'M NOT
sure what I can say to you tonight,” Bernadette Loo said, opening the emergency meeting of the Forgetful Bay Homeowners' Association. “We've all been unnerved and saddened by recent events, and surprised, too. And confused, and even frightened, I dare say. We've had an appalling parade of unlikely events here in the last few months, and everyone is on edge. I don't have to rehearse these events today as I suspect they are uppermost in all of our minds. I have asked Detective Jean Darling, a member of our community and of the Kemah police force, to bring us up-to-date on the situation in which we find ourselves. Then I hope we will take questions and try to lay all the cards on the table. With that, let me turn the meeting over to Jean.”

Jean Darling rose from her seat in the first row of folding chairs and turned to address the group. As she did, there was some commotion in the back of the room. When I turned to look I saw Hilton Bagbee on the floor with two people on their knees alongside him. There was shouting. “Call 911,” somebody said. The guys down on the floor were yanking at his shirt, waving at other people gathering around. “It's his heart,” someone shouted. “Spread out, spread out.”

Everyone in the room was by then paying attention to Hilton in the back of the place. Jean and Bernadette Loo were both heading back there, as was Bruce, and some people were dragging chairs out of the way, scraping them on the floor, making a racket the way metal folding chairs will when banged into one another.

“Is he OK?” Bernadette shouted as she pushed through the crowd.

“He's not breathing,” someone replied.

A guy who looked like a jock leaped into the melee and pushed a woman aside and started mouth to mouth. It was as if there were an explosion at the back of the place, and every sound in there echoed like crazy, ricocheting around the room.

Jean Darling pushed open the front doors of the clubhouse and shouted, “Everybody out. Let's get out of the way, please. Outside! Please!” She started pulling on people, ushering them toward the door. In the rush several others in the room fell to the floor and in the effort to get out were scuttling along like crabs. Bernadette Loo had been pushed out of the way and she was try to funnel bodies toward the front. People were grabbing their stuff and screaming for one another to move. The thing was pandemonium. Jilly and I both tripped on a folding chair and landed on the floor.

“You OK?” she said.

“Go,” I said.

Bruce and Roberta had been sitting next to us, but now I couldn't find them in the crowd as we went for the doors. A few people were back with Hilton, and the rest were rushing out. Jean got rocked by a heavyset woman I didn't recognize, and went down for a second in the doorway, but was up quickly and was torqued around, pushing people past her.

“I'm OK,” Jean said. “Get out, get out.” She was reaching for her radio, which had fallen a little ways into the room. I scooted the radio toward her and returned to Bernadette, who was behind me by now.

“Is he all right?” I said.

“Don't know. Can't tell anything.”

A chubby kid with lots of hair was on the floor between two rows of chairs that were still more or less upright. “Who's this?” I said to Bernadette, tugging her arm and pointing to the guy.

“Nasser,” she said. “Lionel Nasser. He's a teacher.”

The place was clearing. I went through the two rows shoving the chairs out of the way and didn't have to get too close to Nasser to see that he was OK but had a nasty cut on the side of the head, lots of blood.

“You all right?” I said, grabbing at his shoulders.

“I hit the chair,” he said. I was glad that was it and I didn't have to check for a pulse because I probably couldn't have felt a pulse if he'd had one. Helping him up I got blood for my trouble and wiped it on the back of his shirt.

“They're coming,” somebody yelled, and I heard a siren in the distance.

“Is Bernadette OK?” Jean said, her voice raspy.

“She's fine,” I said. I looked around the room and almost everyone was gone. “Everybody's out, looks like, except the guys working him.” I waved toward the back of the room. “You ready to go?”

“Yeah,” she said. “I think so.” She started to go out and tripped over something, and I tried to help but seemed to be in the way. She shook me off and got to her feet. She was wobbly.

“Bernadette,” she said.

She was right alongside us, heading out. “We're OK,” Bernadette said. People outside the doorway were bunched in little groups.

Cops and EMTs arrived. People were gathered in the circular drive, talking, smoking, lots of gestures and exclamations.

There was a deep rut across the lawn where a motorcycle had torn up the grass between the pool gate and the drive. The emergency people were inside pretty quick.

Jean Darling was limping around talking to other cops. Bernadette was sitting on the bench in front of the clubhouse talking to Jim and Elizabeth Sims, two other longtime homeowners I'd met recently. Jilly was there with Bruce and Roberta.

“So, is he all right?” I said.

“I think he wasn't breathing,” Roberta said. “He fell like a shot.”

“That's what I thought, too,” Bruce said.

“I couldn't tell. That big guy was doing cardio,” I said.

“That was a less than orderly exit,” Roberta said.

“Was Chantal inside?” Bruce said. “I didn't see her.”

“No, I don't think so,” I said.

Bruce said, “People are dropping like flies.”

“Bruce,” his wife said.

“What about Parker's wife?” Bruce said. “Where is she, anyway? What happened to her?”

“Didn't see her,” I said. “She's back, but I didn't see her tonight.”

“Bernadette should put it in the newsletter,” Roberta said. “If she wants to update us, do it there. Or online. I'm not coming to another meeting.”

“Me neither,” Bruce said.

The medical people came trotting out of the clubhouse with Hilton on a stretcher and slammed him into the back of the ambulance and sped off.

I circled the drive toward where Jean Darling was talking to Bernadette and a woman I didn't know.

“Rosa Lima,” Bernadette said, pointing to the woman.

I nodded hello. “How's Hilton? What did they say? Anything?”

“I was inside a minute. It's not good,” she said. “I guess that's obvious.”

“Not good at all,” Rosa said. She had an accent. It wasn't as overdone as an overripe TV actress's, but it was there. And she had the look, too. A certain looseness about her shirt. She looked like she could use some bananas on her head.

“You guys OK?” I asked, speaking to Jean and Bernadette at the same time.

They said “Yes” simultaneously.

Rosa said she'd heard about me.

“Oh?” I said.

“The Real Housewives of Forgetful Bay,”
she said, dropping her shoulders.

Bernadette made a face, then said, “I didn't see this coming. Hilton, I mean. He's older, but I thought he was healthy.”

“We're all older,” Jean said. “A run of bad luck.”

“Some run,” I said.

“People die,” Rosa said. “I mean, they do. I've lived in places where people died. When I was a kid people died in the neighborhood. One year three or four people died on our street and the next one over. People my parents knew.” She fluffed up her hair, sort of shaking it behind her head. “Really you've only had a couple of people die here, and one was probably suicide, so that doesn't count.”

“Does too,” Jean said. “Just as dead.”

“What about Peterson,” Bernadette said. “That's the scary one.”

“A lot of times when people die you don't know them,” Rosa said. “They live down the street and they die, and it all gets taken care of and you really don't take much notice of it. Somebody will tell you and you might send a card.”

“Miss Buzzkill,” Bernadette said.

“I've seen lots of this sort of thing,” Rosa said. “Some places there are many more troubles.”

It was kind of quiet out there in front of the clubhouse. The cop cars were running, but you couldn't really hear the engines, and the lights were silent as they flickered around, strafing the clubhouse and the other buildings nearby and some of the residents. I heard police radios, but they were like background. The whole scene sounded like a small party with people talking, excited voices rising and falling. It was peculiar, even a little festive, as if we were gathered in the garden of someone's nice home in the glow of an early summer evening. A lawn party.

CAL LOOKED
silly in the orange jumpsuit. His slip-on sneakers were three sizes too big, a thing that looked to be typical of all the sneakers on all the inmates we saw in the cells that lined the waiting area of the Pilgrim County Correctional Center where Cal was being held in preparation for transfer to one of the state farm units. Diane had insisted that I join her for a visit with Cal, scheduled to last at least fifteen minutes and maybe more if the guards were feeling generous. The fact was I'd never set foot inside a county jail before, though I'd seen my share of police stations from the inside, and the PCCC was not a bright spot in my ideal tour of administrative wonders. It was surrounded by a pair of fifteen-foot chain-link fences thirty feet apart, both of which were topped with comically unappealing razor wire. Both fences were electrified, we were told. There were parking lots outside the fences and inside the fences, but we didn't get to go inside in the car, so we had a healthy walk to a ramp that led up to the entrance to the facility. Inside, there were exhibits, as if it were a state welcome center. There were maps of outlaw territories and historical photographs of famous outlaws and good-for-nothing low-down scoundrels—some hanging from makeshift gallows in these pictures, some standing on similar gallows with thick ropes around their necks and expressions of dissatisfaction on their dirty faces, some leaning in proud nonchalance against the doorways of old taverns and what may have been whorehouses. There were airport-style racks of chairs around, high windows that showed only sky and the cutthroat wire, and a large glassed-in section at the back behind which were dozens of uniformed individuals dealing with six lines of raggedy people at six little barred windows such as you might have found in a busy train station years ago.

We took our turn in one of the lines, and after handing over identification and getting in return photo passes, we were escorted down a stairway behind an unmarked door to a level belowground, where there was another, smaller waiting area lined with holding cells that were fitted with electric doors with keypads and big sheets of double-pane chicken-wire glass, in which cells were what I took to be criminals awaiting disposition.

In this smaller waiting area we got in a new, shorter line, presented our materials again, and waited for an officer to fetch us and take us down a long, slightly sloping hall to a tiny room in which sat Cal, looking forlorn. We were well and truly underground by now, and we were ushered into the adjacent room, equally tiny, and settled at a narrow table pushed up against an opening into Cal's room. This being an old and temporary facility, there was an actual grille between the rooms, and we could talk to each other without the telephones you always see in prison-visit scenes on TV. There were guards in both rooms.

“You look great,” Diane said. “Prison suits you.”

“Gee, thanks, doll,” he said. “I've got that sun-don't-shine look.” He raised a hand and pointed at me. “Hello, Wallace.”

“Hey,” I said. “How is it so far?”

“It's been worse,” he said. “They're transferring me out west is what I hear, I got no idea why. I can tell you this is no place for an innocent man.”

“I expect not,” I said, figuring whatever he said I was going to go along with.

“So what's doing out in the big wide world?” Cal said.

“Seems like people are dying willy-nilly at Wallace's fancy-pants resort community,” Diane said. “Mr. Oscar Peterson, no relation, died last week of unknown causes. In his car in his garage. Coroner has not provided a cause of death.”

“Fewer than a half-dozen fatalities,” I said. “Counting car crashes.”

“Not including Dan,” she said. Then, to Cal, “Someone collapsed there last week, causing more yammering.”

“She could be held on suspicion of yammering,” I said to Cal.

“Ha,” he said. “He's a funny guy, ain't?”

“Not,” Diane said.

“You guys should take it easy,” Cal said. “I'm the one in jail here.”

He had a point. Our nerves weren't helping him. I wasn't bent on helping, but I didn't want to pile on. He was having a hard-enough time, even if he had messed up more often than anyone ought to be allowed. I signaled the guard asking him to let me out of the room. “I want to give them some time,” I said, drawing a thumb over my shoulder at Diane and Cal. “That OK?”

The guard got the door for me. “Stay right out here, will you?” Then, as he closed the door with me in the hall, he said something I couldn't hear into the radio attached to his shoulder, to his epaulet. In a minute another guard appeared and stationed himself across the hall from me.

“How you doing?” I said.

“Fine,” he said. “You related to this one?” He leaned his head toward Cal's room.

“Not hardly,” I said. “She's my ex. For some reason she's seeing him, or was. I don't know what the deal is. I'm along for the ride.”

“Huh,” he said. “Your ex. That's something.”

“I guess it is. We were married ten years, now divorced. The guy was married to this other woman I know, who I used to work with.”

“Threesome, huh?” He grinned. Joke.

“If you believe in time travel,” I said. “You been here long?”

“Twenty years, give or take.”

“So you've seen it all.”

“Pretty much. It's all reruns after the first couple years.”

“I'd go out of my skull,” I said.

“You got an iPhone?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, reaching for it, then remembering I'd put it in the basket with my other things upstairs. “Why?”

“Thinking of getting one,” he said.

“They're good,” I said. “I've had one since the fours.”

“Trouble innovating,” he said. “Apple. That's what I hear.”

“You never can tell what they've got up their sleeve,” I said.

“Maybe. No flies on Samsung, though.”

The conversation went on like this, barely keeping its head above water. I was watching Diane and Cal chatting in the two glass rooms. They seemed to be having a good time. I had let Diane hook me into coming. It was like she wanted me to see this scene, her and Cal in the prison, me out of earshot. I was hoping she'd hurry up, but she was taking her sweet time, and the head guard, the one who had let me out of the room, didn't press her.

“Is there a time limit on this visit?” I asked my guy in the hall.

“Up to Jerry,” he said. “I've seen 'em go hours.”

“No shit?”

“Days,” he said. “Jerry's very empathetic.”

The guy smirked and then I got it. I settled down on the floor and shut my trap.

When Diane was done we drove to the Chinese place in Kemah that was about to go out of business because it refused to do a buffet, which, as everybody knows, is the only way to make money on a Chinese restaurant in Kemah. The owners were a couple who had come from China, he from the north, she the south, and they'd been running this restaurant outside town for a half-dozen years. At first they'd done a lunch buffet and a dinner buffet, but they dropped the dinner buffet because the woman, who had taken the name Betty, said that the buffet was wasteful and that they ended every night throwing away too much food. It was profitable, but wasteful. That was her line in the sand. Thereafter they did a lunch buffet for a time, but eventually gave that up, too, and for the same reason. We were friendly because Jilly and Morgan and I were constant customers at Mandarin House. Betty and George—that was the husband's American name—invited us to all their Chinese New Year celebrations, where the food wasn't American Chinese but something a lot more Chinese. Maybe too authentic for crackers like us. Still, we went each year, picked around the edges of some strange and occasionally offensive food, encouraged everyone there, being mostly their Chinese friends, to make fun of us, and in that way navigated the event and kept up our part in the friendship. We did try, but Anthony Bourdain we weren't.

So after the trip to the prison Diane wanted to meet Morgan and Jilly at Mandarin House, and we did that, took our usual round table in the back corner of the place and tried to stare down the menus, which at least three of us knew by heart. Finally Diane said, “Cal's doing OK in there.”

She turned to me for confirmation, and I nodded and said, “Yeah, he seemed good. I mean, within the prospects available to him. I got kicked out of the room so the two of them could, you know, talk.”

“There wasn't a need,” Diane said. “I thought you wanted out.”

“I was uncomfortable,” I said. “It felt crowded in there. Besides, I had a nice talk with a monosyllabic guard.”

“No hill for a stepper,” Jilly said.

“I wanted to get cozy with him,” I said

“Cal seems to have made his peace with the plea deal, the sentence, the whole thing,” Diane said. “He's one hundred percent with the program. He even wrote a letter to the girl apologizing and all that.”

“Oh, ick!” Jilly said. “Double ick!”

“And that's just for starters,” Morgan said. “I knew that girl, that girl was a friend of mine.”

“Girl was a dirty leg, pardon my French,” Diane said. “That's what she was.”

“Whoa!” Morgan said. “It's the Wayback Machine. Nineteen and fifty-eight.”

“I'm rehabbing it,” Diane said.

“How long you figure he'll do?” I asked. In the car she'd said two years, tops. But she wanted to talk about Cal at dinner, so I was helping out.

“He got three years. Some things the lawyer said sounded like that was too much, other things like it was a bargain. I think they make half this stuff up as they go along.”

“That sounds right,” Jilly said. “No news there.”

“She's a little bit cynical in her old age,” I said, smoothing the stained red tablecloth on my part of the table. It was cotton and frayed, but friendly. “Anyway, I thought he was going to do less than two?”

“That's the hope,” Diane said. “But we don't know for sure. They have to do lots of meetings and petitions and reviews and all kinds of crap. It'll help if the victim writes something undiscouraging. Sometimes they come to all the meetings and cause a ruckus.”

“Those damn victims,” Morgan said. She had a light touch with the line, shaking her head with a confused expression on her face. She was good at that.

“I'd rather have him out than not,” Diane said.

I looked at Jilly and she was silent on the point. She looked back but wasn't giving anything away.

“You really don't want anybody to spend time in jail if they don't absolutely have to,” I said. Then I stopped and said, “Sorry. Possessed by Anderson Cooper. Please disregard this message.”

“Cal's all settled in there,” Diane said. “It sounds crazy, but he's looking forward to it. Like going on a retreat, a religious thing. Go to the mountains, sit by a stream, reflect.”

“That would be better,” Morgan said. “By a stream.”

“I agree,” Jilly said, finally. “I married him once.”

Betty brought out a plate of steamed dumplings and a set of plastic appetizer plates, small and oval, and we passed the dumplings around and ordered while we were doing it. Betty was pleasant and funny, repeating our orders in her broken English, swatting Morgan on the shoulder and laughing when Morgan answered some question Betty asked in the same broken English.

“You make fun,” Betty said. “You come China, try speak. You leave Betty alone. I do fine. You want pancake?”

Morgan had ordered
moo shu
pork and did want pancake and said as much, then turned to me. “So what is latest in Land of Walking Dead?”

“You already know everything,” I said.

“Give us a rundown,” she said.

“Oscar Peterson died. They think it was natural. Parker is ongoing. Hilton Bagbee, heart attack. Parker's wife returned. Someone said she was living at Candlewood.”

“What about Miss Chantal?”

“Nothing,” I said. “The detective, Jean Darling, thinks it was a spoof.”

“Art violence,” Jilly said.

“Not sure Jean gets that particular aspect,” I said.

“What aspect?” Diane said.

“The art aspect. The special blue and all that.”

“Oh, yawn,” Morgan said. “Double yawn.”

“Now, children,” Diane said.

The food arrived and we began to eat. There was less talk during the meal. It was as if everyone at the table was suddenly pouting, or maybe we all got tired at the same moment. I was worried about Diane and what she was going to do with Cal in prison. I was hoping she'd go back east. With Cal tied up in Texas that did not seem likely.