Death in the Polka Dot Shoes (8 page)

As she finished circling my office, her only response was, “This is it?”

“Diane,” I said, “this isn't Simpson, Feldstein and James. It's Ned Shannon. And it's all mine. All me. I do it all, from the phones to the research to the briefs.”

“Oh brother, I've seen it all now,” she said. “Well, the boys at Simpson send their regards. They think you're crazy.”

“I may be Diane, but it feels good, and I'm glad to see you.”

“Ned, here's the good news. Chesapeake Resorts International wants to hire you, on retainer for a thousand a month.”

“What do they want?” I asked. “Take on the eco-freaks, challenge the Democratic party of Maryland, and clear the land for the building.”

“No, they want you to cooperate with the environmentalists. They haven't gotten to the fighting stage yet. That will come. But CRI needs an inside guy. Someone to help them with the permits, to smooth the way with the locals.”

“Do you know what you're saying?” I asked. “The permitting process alone will take years, with meetings and fights like you can't believe.”

“All the better,” she smirked. “That monthly retainer just keeps coming in. And besides, what about those seventy-five acres you own. This experience will show you how to do it. How to develop.”

I let the matter stand. She paced and remarked, “You are the luckiest guy I ever met.”

“You've been given several million dollars in land,” Diane said. “Plan now to do something with it. Help Jimmy's wife Martha develop her land. She probably needs the money now.”

“You're right about that,” I replied. “I should be helping Martha. She's the one who grabbed my brother by the collar and said, ‘let's make something of ourselves.' And she did it the only way it's real, by hard work and good dreams and never losing sight of the goal. She prodded Jimmy to clean that boat up. She put everything on a computer so he knew how many crab pots he had, and where. She figured out how to get three hundred dollars a day for a three hour fishing trip, and sell those city slicker fishermen a crab cake sandwich for another ten dollars and call it a Chesapeake Deli. And then he died. Gave away the boat and half the land and left her with a baby girl besides. For crying out loud, Diane, you're right again.”

“Thank you. Now go make some money.”

But money just wasn't my motivating factor. Diane was a student of capitalism, and she wasn't motivated by sentimentality. In fact, Diane was laminated with invincibility. There were no soft spots for vulnerability, or sentimentality. In spite of my affection for her, and my respect for her judgment, she had an air of superficiality manufactured by money and pretension. I once had a girlfriend who would call Diane a “fancy” lady. After we quit dating, this girl always asked if I had taken up with a “fancy” lady. She meant any woman with enough money to buy all the parts of an ensemble, understand how they fit together, and wear them. Diane was that woman. I even thought that someday I might lust for her, but I knew she would crawl into bed with earrings, bracelets and sharp elbows. So we had better stick to law.

I gave Diane a quick tour of Parkers that took in the auto body shop, the Post Office, three crab houses that passed for restaurants, and Flossie's grocery store. Flossie's had been a fixture for forty years. It wasn't large by modern standards. The aisles were narrow and never as long as you expected. The store had been enlarged several times over the years, with wings extended in every direction like spokes on a wheel. Sometimes while wheeling your cart, you would hit aisle four, I think, and it would extend the full length of two wings, including all the breakfast cereal, all the canned goods, and a few crackers. The next aisle over might be only a third as long and it would seem like another building. Sometimes Flossie would rearrange the stock and you could walk for miles in search of peanut butter, and no two aisles would be the same length.

We were passing Flossie's when Diane pointed to the side of the road and exclaimed, “My God, look at that.”

“Ned,” she said, “that woman is smoking a corn cob pipe. And those two scraggy dogs. What is that?”

“That's the pipe lady,” I said. “I don't know her name. I used to ask, but no one ever knew. Just “The Pipe Lady.” You say that, and everyone in town knows who you're talking about.”

The pipe lady pushed a grocery cart along the side of the road every day between Flossie's and her home on Strawberry Point, or so they said. I never actually knew where she lived. Once I decided to follow her home. A little sleuthing. But she moved so slow that I gave up after about a mile. It just wasn't worth it.

The pipe lady had two dogs that followed her, in single file. The black Labrador retriever -- or it could have been some mongrel combination of a lab and several other breeds -- was always right on her heels. Behind the lab was a small shaggy animal with hair that protruded in every direction, covering scars and raw spots where raccoons, possums and muskrats had tried to pick off the little guy at the end of the caravan. Or the little dog had tried to pick them off on some dark night. Rumor around town was that the little dog was a killer, at least of animals its own size, and fearless in defense of the lab and the pipe lady. With those two dogs, the pipe lady was protected on every flank.

Not that she needed it, of course. I never saw anybody with the pipe lady, or even talking to the pipe lady, although she did talk to herself a lot. She wore black trousers, always, and a white starched blouse, always, sometimes under a summer-weight jacket or a threadbare tweed coat in winter. In winter, she wore a black stocking cap and allowed her gray hair to fall out on all sides of the cap. It seemed to me that life might have been easier if she had cut her hair short. Less effort in the morning, at least. Washing it was another matter, although the pipe lady wasn't dirty, that I could tell, unless she had been walking beside the highway for some distance. Then the dust kicked up by cars tended to collect on her white blouse. That was the most remarkable aspect of her ensemble, that starched blouse. It seemed like her one great effort at conformity in the world, an anchor perhaps against totally slipping into the abyss of her reclusive life. Although she wasn't a recluse, in the sense of hiding or staying home. Indeed, she often waved energetically at passing motorists, to the point you wondered if she knew you, or recognized your car, or perhaps needed help. I stopped once, but she kept on walking, and the dogs never even looked my way. There was something otherworldly about all three of them, detached from our life by their own self sufficiency. Perhaps that's why they didn't have personal names, just the pipe lady, the lab and the mutt.

“Ned, this is all quite fascinating,” Diane said, “but I can't handle any more mammy yokums today. I better head home. I'll draw up a simple retainer contract and get it to you tomorrow. Also, there's a public meeting on the new resort next week. You better plan to go.”

“Diane,” I said, “you're a peach. If I get too far into this place, I'm counting on you to pull me out. Drag me back to the Willard and pour scotch down me until I come to my senses.”

“Mr. Neddrick Shannon, Esquire, I will do that,” and she kissed me on the cheek.

Chapter Five

When the public relations man for Chesapeake Resorts International said his new hotel would bring better highways and streets, a twelve-foot slide flashed on the screen showing a spaghetti pattern of Los Angeles freeways at rush hour. Some young business school graduate no doubt put these slides together, thinking the string of cars inching along six lanes of traffic would be a wonderful backdrop to the words. But to the citizens of Parkers, gathered in the local elementary school to hear the future of their town, it was explosive.

Six hundred people gasped. Air gushed from the gymnasium. And then as one body, as if practiced in some philharmonic hall, every farmer, waterman and wife in the place screamed “NO-O-O-O.” And it didn't stop for long minutes. People stomped on the wooden bleachers in the gym. One lady screamed, “My God. My God.”

“My God,” I said, turning to my brother's wife, “what are the briefers doing? They can't be this stupid.”

“Does CRI think we want more cars and roads?” Martha gasped. “They're crazy.”

The briefer was turning whiter than the free throw line below his table. He just sat with his four colleagues and said nothing. After several minutes, the audience settled, and he tried to make a joke.

“I guess we took a wrong turn back there,” he said sheepishly.

“No Shit!” someone screamed. And then the crowd roared again. The briefers could do nothing but wait until everyone settled down, and hope to start again.

Martha got a babysitter for Mindy so she could accompany me to the first public briefing by the Chesapeake Resorts International, my newest client, concerning their hotel and shopping complex to be built on Jenkins Creek. I invited Martha because my brother had also worked for CRI, but I never heard exactly what he did for them. Maybe Martha could tell me, plus I remembered she had mentioned meeting the corporate brass at some reception. I also thought it would be nice to give her a night out, even if it was work related. That's how I assuage my guilt in these matters.

We arrived at the Parkers Elementary School about seven, and cars already filled half the parking lot. The bleachers in the gym pull out from the walls and one side will hold about 500 people. When we walked in, the corporate public relations people were setting up a slide screen and arranging their papers on the folding table in the middle of home court. I didn't introduce myself, even though I had met most of them the day before in Washington. Rather I wanted to stay in the background, sit high in the bleachers so I could measure public reaction. The CRI boys told me to expect some opposition, primarily from “enviro freaks,” as they called them. But they felt most people wanted the resort, the jobs that went with it, and the shopping where none now existed. One of the PR guys, who seemed a bit too cocky in his Levi's with no socks, tasseled loafers, pink polo shirt and blue blazer, said the slideshow would blow them away. He no doubt produced it.

Martha and I sat in the sixth row, near the top of the bleachers. The place was filling up fast, like the last minutes before a basketball game, with neighbor greeting neighbor. And there were a few signs, mostly negative, referring to the HIJENKS project. One of the last remaining tobacco farmers in the county sat right in front of me, wearing Sears overalls with a blue long sleeve work shirt, unraveling at the cuff and a small coffee stain on the pocket. He must have stopped at the convenience store on the way. His missus quietly sat beside him in blue jeans and a leather jacket, slightly more stylish than her husband.

The CRI fellows looked a little nervous as the crowd kept coming in. Some of the people in the stands shouted at them, as if the briefers were foreign invaders. I made a note that CRI needed some local faces at the table, probably mine. Next time. I asked Martha if that's what they hired Jimmy for.

“Yeah,” she said. “They wanted a waterman. Jimmy went to one of these over in Tobyville and it went pretty well. But people here are afraid of growth. Truth is, most of the people against the resort are a bunch of rich hypocrites who moved to Parkers, bought the little houses that our daddies built, tore them down to build mansions on the water, and now they want to lock the door. Call themselves environmentalists. What baloney.”

“Martha, I didn't know you were so worked up about this.”

“Best thing Jimmy ever did,” she said. “We need the jobs. I don't want a bunch of new highways and higher taxes either, but I'm tired of the rich folks taking over.”

“Want it both ways, huh?”

“Yeah,” she said, “we need the food stores, but we don't want to be Orlando.” Then came the spaghetti slide of cars and more cars.

When the briefers started again, they were serious to a fault, measuring their words carefully and watching the crowd for any sign of mutiny. But as only the fates of the wicked would have it, they moved into the economic benefits of the shopping center. Just as the words “food centers” reached the audience, the slide appeared of a TACO TAKE OUT, complete with neon sombrero standing about twenty feet above the store. This time the briefers gasped. But it was too late.

The farmer in front of me yelled, “Bullshit.”

“No fast food,” someone shouted.

“Get out of Parkers,” was the next scream, later shortened to just “get out.”

The CRI man stood and motioned for attention. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” he screamed. “These are just representative.”

The boos were rising above him until people started to be embarrassed by their own shouting, and then it died down.

“We're going to abandon the slides,” the CRI man said, and the crowd screamed its approval. Then the chant started, “No Hijenks, No Hijenks.” People were red faced, flushed with anger, and neck veins were dancing around the gym like thermometers of mercury. People were standing and some started to leave, until the briefer begged them to stay.

“We want to hear you,” he said, finally understanding the concept of a town meeting. “Everybody can talk. We'll stay here as long as it takes.”

My neighbors began to settle down, like sheep after a thunderstorm. Some were strolling around the gym, some talking and grumbling, some picking up their hats and coats in case they decided to exit. It took awhile for the adrenalin to drain away, but the show finally got underway again. .

Martha said she needed a smoke break, which seemed like a good idea to me, even though I don't smoke. Notice that I don't consider one cigar a day as “smoking.” I followed her to the lobby, across the highly polished entrance with the trophy cases full of athletic achievements, and out the double doors. Her cigarette was lit almost before the flush of cool air hit my face.