Sandy Gingras - Lola Polenta 01 - Swamped (4 page)

“I didn’t have anything to do with anything,” I say. “I just tripped over him. It was an accident.”

She purses her lips and nods. “You just moved into Ted and Fritzie’s place, didn’t you?” she asks.

“I think so,” I say. Ted and Fritzie?

“They were homosexuals,” she tells me lowering her voice. She says the word “homosexuals” like it’s two words—both of which need to be handled carefully.

“Oh,” I kind of whisper back. “I’m Lola Polenta,” I tell her, sticking out my hand.

“I’m Marie,” she says switching the watering can to her left hand and shaking my hand limply. She doesn’t look like she’s been crying. Still, there’s strain around her mouth.

“I don’t know what to do with myself. I just can’t believe this,” she says.

“It is unbelievable,” I say.

“It must have been some kid on drugs or something.”

I’m glad she doesn’t say it must have been me. “Maybe Ernie had an enemy?” I ask her. Even I know that you’re supposed to ask that question when anybody gets murdered.

“Enemy?” she asks.

It does seem like a weird word.

“He only moved in with me this past year.” Marie leans forward and tells me, “His wife kicked him out of their house in Ohio. She met another man in her yoga class. Ernie walked in one day on them and there they were stark naked on the living room couch. She kicked Ernie out. She was mad at HIM, can you imagine? She told him he invaded her privacy.”

“That’s nervy.”

“I had to take him in. He had nowhere else really to go.”

She pinches a dead head off a purple flower. “He never talked about her. He kept everything to himself. Well, he was always that way. Secretive, you know?

“And then, he was out so much of the time, working. And at the bar. He had a group of people he hung around with there. Coconuts, it’s called.” She pauses. “Maybe one of them didn’t like him.”

“Enough to kill him?”

“He got so angry recently,” she muses.

“He changed?”

“He pushed at people too hard.”

“He did seem a little pushy,” I say.

She peers at me. “Someone told me you had an argument with him.”

“Yeah, but…”

“I wish I knew what happened.” She glances toward the maintenance shed. “The police seem to have no idea,” she says looking at me.

“Give your business card to everyone,” the Private Investigator Training Institute advised. “Everyone has something they secretly want to know more about. You’ll be surprised at the business that comes your way….”

I reach into my pocket, and hand her my bright yellow business card that I had made up at Staples the day I signed up for the course. It was a fit of optimism. It says:

ANSWERS

LOLA POLENTA
, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

QUESTIONS RESOLVED… CURIOSITY SATISFIED…

There’s a picture of Curious George in the corner next to my cell phone number.

“Answers?” Marie says.

I thought it was a great name for a business. It’s such a seductive word. “Who doesn’t want answers?” I say.

“I never heard of a female private investigator before. Is this really your job?” she asks.

Just then, a black Ford Expedition pulls up. It’s the detective. He gets out of his truck. I’m not doing anything wrong, but the way he’s looking at me makes me feel like a criminal. “Well,” I say brightly to him, “we meet again.”

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

“I’m talking to Marie,” I say. “I’m walking my dog.”

He continues to stare. He has these green eyes that remind me of a field of grass. They’re nice eyes. But when he uses them in this manner, it’s off-putting.

“Marie and I were just talking about if Ernie had any enemies,” I say.

Marie pipes up. “She’s a private investigator.” She flashes my Curious George business card at him. He looks at her hand and the card. I didn’t mention any of this to him when he questioned me. I just said I was in Florida because I was taking a summer vacation from my life, separating from my husband, visiting my father. Which is kind of true.

“Can I see that?” he asks. He takes it, glances at it, and one eyebrow goes up.

I wave at Marie and start walking backwards.

Chapter 7

“You again?” another voice says as I turn to walk away.

It’s the old guy from last night—Joe. He’s in plaid shorts with a white belt and a beige polo shirt tucked in neatly. He’s got a pair of big cataract sunglasses on.

“Morning,” I say.

“I’m out for my daily constitutional. I had a heart attack two years ago and now I have to walk.” He indicates his white running shoes with blue racing stripes down the sides.

“Snazzy,” I tell him.

He smiles down at his shoes. “My daughter sent these from Michigan.” He smiles and hikes up his shorts a bit although they are already too high up on his waist.

Just then, the detective turns from talking to Marie. He walks up to us. “Curious George?” he asks.

“Yes?” I say.

He holds up a roll of yellow police tape. “I’m putting this across Ernie’s doorway.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Stay out of things,” he tells me.

“I’m not doing anything,” I say.

Joe’s head is ping ponging back and forth.

“Do you have a P.I. license to operate in Florida?” the cop asks.

“Um,” I tell him. Really, no. It’s a detail I haven’t thought about yet.

“We do things differently here in Florida than they do in New Jersey,” he tells me.

“Yeah, I never heard of death by putter in New Jersey,” I say.

Joe pipes up, “Ernie got hit by a putter?”

The cop steps back and looks at us. “You think this is funny?” he asks.

I really don’t. I don’t know why I’m acting so frivolous.

The cop is standing in front of me like a giant wall of judgment. He’s really a very handsome man. I’m staring at his chest. He’s wearing a navy blue polo shirt and some chest hairs are escaping out of the neckline where the top two buttons are unbuttoned. It gets very quiet. I try to pretend like I’m reconsidering my sinful ways or praying or something. Really, I hate to admit it, but I’m thinking about the chest hair thing.

“Are you right-handed?” the detective asks me.

“Why?”

“Because Ernie was hit by someone from the right.”

“I’m left-handed,” Joe pipes up.

“That’s good to know,” the detective tells him.

“I just moved in,” I say. “I was napping.”

“Are you going to arrest any of us, Detective Johansen?” Joe asks as if that would be the highlight of his day.

“Not today, sir,” he says and then he walks back to where Marie is watering.

“Are you really a private investigator?” Joe asks me.

“Well,” I say.

He says, “Because I may need your services. Looks like I’m the number one suspect. I found the body,” he says proudly.

“I thought I was the number one suspect,” I say.

“I touched Ernie’s body to see if there was a pulse,” he says.

“My fingerprints were on the murder weapon,” I respond.

“I was the one who called 911. They always suspect the person who calls 911.”

“Yeah, but did you have Ernie’s blood all over you?” I ask. “”Ugh,” I say, “That was bad.”

He says, “Maybe we could both use a P.I.”

“But, I’m only on Lesson Two.”

That deflates him. Still, he asks me for one of my cards. He chuckles when he sees it. “That’s catchy,” he says.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Would you care to take a tour of the grounds with me?” he asks, waving his arm at the panorama of the trailer camp before us.

“Is it in nature?” I ask apprehensively.

“You don’t like nature?” Joe asks me.

“I have a fear of it.”

“ALL of nature?”

“Except for the neat kind. Like a lawn, for example. And hedges that are in squares, bushes round like you used to draw them in kindergarten, you know, flowers in rows…” I trail off.

He looks at me.

“I’m from New Jersey,” I explain.

“I see,” he says.

It’s a one-mile walk, and I’m drooping by the first half mile. But Joe is chugging along nicely in his white shoes. “I have to get a pair of those,” I tell him. I’m wearing my snappy pink flip-flops that I bought at a rest stop on I-95 when I crossed the border. They have big plastic hibiscus flowers on the strap. I think my judgment was overcome by my arrival in a tropical climate.

“So, did you find out anything from Marie?” Joe asks me.

“She said that there was a change in Ernie recently?”

“Oh yeah. He got real bossy in the last few months. And nosy. He rode around on that mower in his Spandex pants like he was in charge of the world. And he bulked up. I think he was on steroids or something.

“He told me the other day that I should wake up at 4 a.m. to be out on the street when the garbage men came by so that I could put my garbage cans back in their bin immediately. He told Clara Billy that her flowers were growing crooked, and to straighten them up.”

“Steroids make you aggressive, don’t they?”

“Very.”

“Maybe he got too aggressive with someone?” I say.

“He was always snooping around. He always wanted to get dirt on people. Back when my wife was dying, he hinted around that he knew I was running around with Millie Turttlehaus.”

“Oh,” I say. “Were you?”

“No way. Ernie was just stabbing in the dark. It was a bunch of lies. I told my wife. She thought it was funny.

“Millie’s on the Homeowner’s Beautification Committee with me. Truth be told, she’s a little obsessive about mowing grass. And she’s got these hooded eyes.”

“Why was he hinting around then? What did he want?”

“I don’t know. I just laughed at him. But now that I think of it, I wonder if he did try that kind of thing on other people. Ernie was a control freak; he would have loved to have something on anybody. I wonder if he wanted money or something from me.”

“Blackmail?”

“Could’ve been…”

I say, “He’d have money if he was a blackmailer, right? Maybe that’s why they’re sealing off his trailer. Maybe he kept his money in there.”

“I doubt it. Marie cleans that place non-stop. I don’t think he’d be able to have a hiding place in that little trailer.”

“What about a bank account?”

“I don’t think blackmailers want any record of their… uh… transactions.”

“You’re probably right. Did he act like he had money? I mean, he was living with his sister in their trailer, that doesn’t sound like he had a lot.”

“He was actually pretty cheap.”

My mind is whirling.

Joe says, “I know some people that he worked for, who don’t speak highly of him. I always wondered why they kept him on. “Why don’t I hire you to investigate?” he says, his face brightening.

My breath catches. “But, I wouldn’t even know where to begin,” I say.

“I know a lot of people here,” he says. “I could help you.”

“What about the cops?” I say.

“Oh, the cops,” he says.

I tell him, “Listen, it could be dangerous. Ernie ended up with a golf club in his skull.” But this is what I wanted, right? Adventurous, exciting.

“Everything is dangerous at my age,” he says.

We walk a bit. Oranges hang off droopy trees in neat little yards. Garden gnomes and little concrete Dutch girls stand in conversational clusters under palm trees. There’s a concrete mother duck leading a concrete family of ducklings along the walkway to an aqua trailer.

“What kind of work did Ernie do for people?” I ask.

“A couple years ago someone broke into the Amazanini’s house in the summertime when they were back in Ohio. The guy stayed in their house for two weeks without anyone knowing anything. He was an alcoholic. He drank beer and then threw the cans in the Amazanini’s bathtub. He ate Spaghetti O’s out of a can too. He must of eaten on the couch because Jo Amazanini said her couch was stained. He didn’t make any garbage because he just threw everything into the bathtub. He turned on the water to their house from their outdoor hook-up. He even called Comcast and got their cable hooked up. He pulled all the shades and just lived there. He left at night, I guess, to go to the Quickie Mart to buy what he needed. Their house is out by the highway, a little apart. Nobody noticed a thing until the Amazanini’s got their water bill. Then they knew something was odd, and they sent Sal over to check.

“After that, people hired Ernie to look after their homes. He’d go by every day or so, open up, make sure everything was okay. Sometimes turn the water on for them when they were coming back down. That kind of thing.”

“He had a lot of access to people’s lives,” I say. “Didn’t he?”

It’s like there’s a war going on inside of my stomach right now. Excitement is churning around with fear. The idea of being an investigator is tumbling around with my rational mind and my father’s voice and the detective’s warnings. It’s a wrestling match between my new self and my old. One of them, I know, is going to get pinned.

We’re walking along a chain link fence that encompasses Alligator Estates. Beyond it are mown fields and a grid of empty streets. There are stop signs at every corner, street signs on every street, but there’s only one lonely stucco house in the middle of it all. It’s pink and there’s a tricycle and a plastic slide in the backyard and an old van in the driveway. “What’s all this?” I ask.

“It’s a lawsuit. The Tidewater Dam project in the 70’s created hundreds and hundreds of acres of swampland where it was supposed to create a lake. The Army Corps of Engineers thought the water would stay in a contained area, but the area never seemed to fill. It just made a big swamp and then went underground and sprawled out and made its own rules. In this development, some of the lots and a few of the houses are actually underwater. There’s a street here that dead-ends in a pond. This development was one of the worst casualties of that project, but even now there are sink holes mysteriously appearing in people’s backyards in Alligator Estates, and flooding coming out of storm drains on Rt. 41, and swamps taking over orange groves down in Mystic Shores. This is a development that was all sold out, and was just starting to build. Now it’s stalled out in the courts. If you come by here at 7 p.m., all the street lights still click on up and down the empty streets. It’s eerie.”