An Equal Opportunity Death (3 page)

As I sat waiting for Sheriff Wescott, I thought how odd it was I was here, staring at Frank’s corpse, when I had imagined I’d be sitting at the bar with Frank, apologizing for behaving like a jerk. I felt a tear roll down my cheek. It was irrational, I knew, but I hated to think that the last time Frank Goulet saw me I was slamming out of his bar. I took a breath and reminded myself that someone had come here afterward and shot Frank. There had been more important things on Frank’s mind than my pique.

The section of Frank’s Place where I sat held only eight tables.
Legal occupancy 44,
a sign said. It was cold by the window; Frank would have put the heat on an hour ago to warm the early customers. In another hour he would have turned it off. There would have been ample heat by now. I would have apologized; Frank would have shrugged it off and given me another hot buttered rum. I could use that now.

The sheriff sat in the chair opposite me. He was a neat, compact man about thirty-five with just the beginnings of age apparent on his face. His light, curly mustache was almost the same color as his skin. In ten years his hair would be dusted with gray and he would be described as “handsomely weathered.” Now his features merely looked un-smoothed, as if he needed one more run through the factory before he could be marked finished.

“So you were here around noon, right?” he asked.

“Yes, but how did you know?”

“Tell me about that,” he said, paying no heed to my question. But I didn’t need his explanation. Coming out of the kitchen was Rosa Fortimiglio, Chris’s mother. Chris had promised me silence. He meant it then. But Chris was no match for his mother, and gossip was as integral to the Fortimiglio clan as fishing or pasta. Now Rosa Fortimiglio was carrying two large jars of salmon-colored sauce toward the door. So the “audit-trail” of gossip was clear: Chris had told Rosa, and Rosa, making her evening delivery for Frank, had mentioned my stop to the sheriff.

As Rosa reached the door, she noticed me, stopped and, both arms full, nodded. There was no suggestion of embarrassment, no hint of a confidence broken. I knew that Rosa’s mention of my being here at noon was not intended to incriminate me, but was rather a vote of confidence. It hadn’t occurred to her that I might have been involved in Frank’s death, so there was no less reason for her to mention me than to mention Chris.

“You were here at noon, Ms. Haskell,” the sheriff said, his voice growing testy. “You were the last person to see Frank Goulet alive.”

“No. Someone killed him. That person saw him alive.”

“Someone.” He let the word hang. “Tell me about your visit. How did you happen to be here on a Tuesday?”

I leaned forward on my elbows, ignoring the police officers who bustled around the other part of the room. “I came to talk to Frank about his electric meter. I’m a meter reader for PG&E.”

“So you were on your rounds?”

“No. I had taken a sick day. I mean, I was sick. Nothing serious, but I was too sick to spend all day climbing up and down slippery stairways in the rain.”

“You were too sick to go to work, but well enough to come here to a bar.”

“There
is
a difference. You don’t get pneumonia in a well-heated bar.”

He sat back a little. “Okay, we’ll skip any further medical diagnosis. You said you came here to talk about the electric meter. On your day off. Couldn’t you have done that during your regular work hours? Wouldn’t that have been more reasonable than dragging yourself out of your sick bed?”

“My employer,” I said with exaggerated patience, “does not encourage us to make special trips to tell patrons they are paying too much. When a customer discovers he has been overcharged, he is not pleased to be informed; he is irate that he wasn’t told sooner. We have to send someone out to make sure that the meter itself was not running too fast. We might have to check the appliances or the wiring. In any case, it costs PG&E money. And it’s a hassle. So while we do inform customers, we don’t go out of our way. You understand?”

“I understand.” His tone mimicked mine. “But you
did
go out of your way.”

Sheriff Wescott had been suspicious when he started questioning me. Everything I said seemed to make it worse. He was right—I had gone out of my way. “Well, Frank was a friend. And I was bored, and my house was cold, and I couldn’t go anywhere else, because I was … sick.” And this certainly didn’t help.

“So you were here on a social call?”

“You could say that, but I did mention the meter.”

“And how did Goulet react?”

“About the meter? He said fifty dollars one way or the other was no big thing.”

“What else did you talk about?”

I tried to recall Frank and the bar at noon, when it had been so cozy and the rum had warmed me. “We talked about my being sick. He gave me a drink. We talked about San Francisco. Both of us lived in the city before coming here. Frank said he was going there late this afternoon, and he invited me to come.”

“So that’s why you’re here now? You were expecting to meet him to go to the city?”

“Well, no. You see, he changed his mind.”

“Then you talked to him after that, after you were here at noon?”

“No. He changed his mind while I was here.”

“He invited you and, before you left, he told you not to come?” The exasperation in his voice was clear.

“We chatted about the city.” I said deliberately.” He invited me to come, maybe to see a foreign movie. Then the phone rang, he talked, and when he came back he said he couldn’t take me.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

It seemed illogical that I hadn’t. “No. I had had two drinks. I was annoyed because I wanted to go with him. I figured Frank had talked to some girlfriend in the city and lined up something better than just an afternoon with a friend.”

“Then why were you so angry?”

“Because I wanted to go to the city. Because I’d had two hot buttered rums. Because the day, which would have been so nice, was turning out rotten. I didn’t discuss it with Frank. I just told him he was being inconsiderate, and I left.”

He glanced down at a notepad. “‘Slammed the door coming out’ is how a witness described your departure.”

“Dammit, that’s the type of thing you do when you’re angry. But Frank was alive when I left. Chris was here after me. I saw the laundry truck pull up. Talk to them.”

The ambulance men were lifting Frank’s body onto a stretcher. The cloth covering his face caught on the rail of the bar. As they lifted him, it pulled back. His face was already gray. I could see the black of the gunpowder and the maroon of the dried blood on his forehead. I remembered Frank standing behind the steamy bar, his hand on my shoulder telling me that hot buttered rum was just the thing for a “sick lady.” I cried.

When they carried Frank’s body out, I looked back at the sheriff. I expected him to go on questioning me. It was apparent that he didn’t believe me. But he only demanded an account of my time (not something that made me any less suspect, since I so carefully kept out of sight all day). And he told me not to leave the area.

I must have still looked weepy as I headed for the door because Rosa Fortimiglio, coming back in, stopped, put an arm around my shoulder and informed me that I was coming to her house for dinner. “I got all this fettucini,” she said, nodding toward the kitchen, “that’s not going to be eaten here.”

The Fortimiglio house was at the west end of town, nearer to the inlet and the fishing docks. In the summer, the entire extended family sat on the long porch. But now, in winter, they congregated in the oddly shaped living room that had resulted from the latest remodeling plan. The room was oblong, with a couple of unexplained nooks and an indentation around the stairs to the family room. At one end, by the kitchen, a brick fireplace occupied most of the wall. It provided more cheer than heat. Tonight an electric heater buzzed at the other end.

It was only seven o’clock. Rosa and I had been out of Frank’s Place less than half an hour. Frank’s body had been discovered only at four-thirty when Rosa brought the fettucini, but the word had spread and people had come here as if beckoned by a church bell. Chris and his brothers-in-law were in the kitchen, beers in hand, cadging tastes of fettucini. Skip Bollo stood talking to the Fortimiglio daughters while their children scampered from them to their grandfather, in the kitchen. Chris’s father, Carlo, sat near the fire, his left leg propped up on the ottoman. He had injured it five years ago. No longer steady enough to stand all day on a fishing boat, he now drove his old truck around town, checking and bolstering the stilts under low-lying houses, carting summer people’s possessions to higher ground, or taking debris to the dump. A quiet man in any season, he seemed to save his few words for his family and now, after a long day of pre-flood work, even responding to his grandchildren seemed an effort.

Rosa bustled to and from the kitchen, carrying plates to the card table, adjusting silver, piling up paper napkins. No one but Madge Oombs helped; we all knew the rules.

I walked over to Paul and Patsy Fernandez. They stood by the steamed windows that looked out onto the porch. With their long, straight black hair and bright, blue eyes they resembled a set of matching dolls. They looked more like brother and sister than the married couple they were. In jeans, workshirts, and cowboy boots, they were even dressed alike.

“It’s hard to believe Frank is dead,” Patsy said. “Killed. Shot. It’s so … gangland.”

“Like something you’d find in Oakland or San Francisco,” Paul said.

“Frank came from San Francisco,” I said.

“Yes,” Paul agreed, “but that was two years ago.” Involuntarily we both glanced toward Patsy. Normally pale, tonight her skin was almost as gray as Frank’s. She clutched a glass of red wine. Patsy had liked Frank. In fact, when she and Paul had taken over the canoe rental here last year, there had been speculation about her and Frank. It had died quickly when Frank was seen with several attractive summer people.

Patsy looked like she would have been better off with a quiet drink at home this evening, but I suspected neither Paul nor Patsy had seriously considered declining a free meal. They could be generous and they could spend money (those cowboy boots weren’t cheap) but there was something about them—a stain of the sixties—that would always make a free meal irresistible.

“Frank had left the city behind,” Paul said. “This was his place now.”

“If you think that,” I said, “then it would follow that someone here shot him.”

“No, I don’t …”

“Of course not,” I said quickly. “Did the sheriff question you?”

“He tried,” Paul said defiantly. Another vestige of the sixties. Beside him, Patsy shrank back and stiffened.

“We couldn’t tell them much,” Paul continued. “We were in Santa Rosa all day getting supplies. As soon as the river floods, the county will commandeer our canoes. And they’ll bring them back banged up. They’re always pleased to have them for their rescues, but no one’s ever around when they need to be repaired.”

Patsy nodded absently.

“And our county government doesn’t feel any responsibility to pay. They shifted us from one department to another last year when we asked,” Paul said.

“How well did you know Frank?”

He stopped, startled. I had heard the monologue of complaint before and knew it was nowhere near half done. Still, it amazed me how quickly he had forgotten Frank.

Regrouping, he said, “Frank was always friendly; he was helpful, if it didn’t put him out. You know what I mean?”

I nodded.

“We saw him at the bar mostly.”

“Did you know him in San Francisco?” I asked.

“No. No way. Frank wouldn’t have been living like we were, not in the Haight, not eating off food stamps, not going door to door collecting for whatever cause was paying solicitors. Frank must have lived pretty high there. After all, he could afford to buy a restaurant here.”

I almost commented that they had afforded the lease on the boat rental concession, but that would have directed Paul back to his finances, and I didn’t have the patience to listen to that, much less sympathize with it.

Fortunately, the fettucini was on the card table and people were lining up. Rosa Fortimiglio ladled the noodles and Carlo, her husband, the clam sauce.

“Poor Frank,” Rosa said, as she piled more noodles on my plate than I had any hope of consuming. “This was one of his favorites. He was always pleased on the days I brought him fettucini. But the calamari, that was the only thing he ever asked for.”

I nodded. Rosa’s delivery service had been a good arrangement for both Frank and Rosa. For Frank, it kept customers from leaving to find dinner, and then perhaps not returning. With Rosa’s dinners, many of us spent all evening at Frank’s. And for the Fortimiglios, it provided some steady income to offset the capriciousness of fishing.

I sat down next to Madge Oombs and Ned Jacobs, the ranger at the state park near town. Ned was dark, wiry, and reminded me of one of the chipmunks it was his job to protect. He was about my age, a bit over thirty. His family had had a summer place here when he was a child, and though his winters had been spent in Oakland, it was the Russian River that had stamped him. He had studied not law, as his family had intended, but forestry, then taken the necessary jobs in less desirable areas until he had the seniority to get back here. Now he was home.

“How could something like this happen?” he was saying. “Here. To Frank. It must be some connection from when he lived in San Francisco. Or maybe one of the new people.” Ned always referred to the homosexuals and other emigrants from San Francisco, who had “discovered” the Russian River a year or two ago and were on the way to making it their own, as the “new people.” He wanted to make it clear that he didn’t care about their habits, he cared that they were disrupting his town. “Maybe they tried to get Frank to be a middleman in a drug deal, and Frank refused, and then they killed him. That would make sense, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose it would, as well as anything else,” I said. “There are enough drugs in the area. And Frank was shot.”