The Fisher Boy (14 page)

***

That night, we were too tense to make love. We lay awake in each other’s arms until sleep abducted us. The next morning, while we were readying the muffins, Roger Morton reported the news he’d heard on his scanner—the man being held for the museum stabbings was dead. He had killed himself in his cell at the police station.

Chapter Seventeen

There were no bars to serve as a desperate man’s gallows; his cell was sealed behind a panel of Plexiglass. He’d worn no belt, and the laces of his rotted sneakers had been confiscated by the police. So he’d choked himself to death, swallowing a plastic bag he’d secreted on his person.

He died after being in custody less than twelve hours, after extensive police questioning had produced no information about who he was, why he’d attacked the people at the museum and slashed the frame of one of the paintings—not
The Fisher Boy.
No evidence yet linked him to Ian’s murder or to any earlier events.

Yet, in the court of public opinion, in the restaurants, bars, and guest houses of Provincetown, he’d been tried and convicted, executed by his own hand. We could all get back to “normal.”

“He got what he deserved, the bloody bugger,” said one of two Australian lesbians at breakfast on the back porch of the White Gull the next morning.

“He’d have been more useful alive,” I said.

I was helping Roger and Roberto water the pots of fuchsia, which sported trailing vines with pink flowers tiered like pagodas. I kept soaking the plants so that they quickly became incontinent, splattering the premises with muddy droplets of water. “Sorry,” I’d mutter, half to myself, half to Roger and Roberto.

“You’re dangerous around liquids,” Roger commented, alluding no doubt to the incident at Quahog.

We were all ignoring the Australians’ diatribe about the violence of American society, “the Wild West cast to the culture.”

“The autopsy will tell us a lot more.” Roger was scanning an article in the
Cape Cod Times
written just after the body was found. It was frustratingly vague.

“Do you believe the fundamentalists are behind this?” I asked Roger.

“Mark doesn’t,” Roberto said.

Roger read aloud: “The suspect refused to answer questions posed by police. Instead, he quoted the New Testament concerning the Apocalypse. At a press conference in San Diego, Hollings Fair of the Christian Soldiers adamantly denied the suspect had any affiliation with his organization.” Roger said, “Hey, suicide bombers seldom carry IDs.”

The suspect’s photograph was on the front page of the newspaper.

I said, “Why hasn’t anyone claimed the body?”

“The Christian Soldiers are preventing his family from claiming him,” Roger theorized. “One of their own took their rhetoric too literally and right now they’re dreadfully embarrassed. They’ll wait until the furor dies down, then they’ll claim him. Please don’t drown my plants, by the way.”

“Forget that vagrant! Polish your sketches,” Roberto told me. He began filling the birdbath using the same watering can he’d used for the fuchsia. I advised him to empty the birdbath and start again, since the liquid plant food the fuchsia enjoyed might well prove fatal.

***

I tried to squirrel myself away with my coil notepad and flesh out a sketch for our planned two-man show. It would be scripted, about a tourist who’s allergic to all the scented tsochtkes in his guesthouse, the sachets and soap roses and so on. The White Gull of course was nothing like this because Roger Morton loathed sachets and the baskets, Victorian dolls, peacock feathers, and jars of shells, the sort of Haight-Ashbury-meets-Pollyanna clutter that often passes for period decor on Cape Cod.

But my thinking of sachets made me think of the Elizabethans, who carried sachets to mask their aversion to bathing. And thinking of unwashed flesh made me remember the man at the museum again, his acrid smell, sharp as spoilt cheese. I remembered his yellow teeth with their tartar deposits, untouched by a dentist’s instruments for years. His slovenliness, his sheer dirtiness, distinguished him from any of the fundamentalists I’d seen here
.
He was just too filthy to be one of them.

I wanted to tell this to Roberto, but he was busy at the desk, booking an elderly straight couple into their room. So, I decided to hit Adams Pharmacy to buy a Boston paper’s account of the suicide. It was arctic in the drugstore as usual, and the papers were up front, by the window, held in the same wire dispenser caging the tabloids, an inadvertent comment on the state of American media.

Sallie Drummond pushed open the door, bringing in the heat of the street.

“Never a dull moment,” she said, in her petulant, deadpan way. She retrieved a
Globe
. “So do you think this wraps everything up?”

She’d usurped my question. “Do you?”

She was skimming the paper. “‘No positive identification,’” she read. “’The suspect was a white male, twenty-eight to thirty-five years old, blond, clean-shaven, with a tattoo of
a cross
on his upper right arm.’”

I hadn’t seen the cross. I said, “Lots of people have crosses. Hell’s Angels. Street gangs.”

“Did you know this…man?”

“Of course I didn’t know him.”

“So you hadn’t seen him…preaching in the street or at some bar.”

“No.”

She was staring at the
Globe
again, as if dismissing me, as if I were the servant who’d brought the morning coffee and should now be gone. “I’ve hired a home-health aide for my father,” she said, glancing at the sports page. “She’s with him now.” There was a catch in her voice. A bruise was healing beneath one of her eyes. “My father is getting out of hand, physically. He’s so paranoid.” She’d realized I’d noticed the bruise.

We paid for our newspapers and went outside. “I wish I could say this felt like a bad dream, but it hasn’t felt like a dream at all. It’s been hideously real from day one,” she said.

This brief sharing of thoughts made me trust her momentarily, enough to risk confiding in her a bit. “I saw him at the museum,” I said and related my encounter with him, that strange, reeking man.

She stood in the sunlight on Commercial Street, in a Talbot’s dress with spinnakers on it, more suitable for Edgartown or Chatham. Hugging the newspaper against her chest, she looked intense, controlled again, like an athlete competing, like a tennis star concentrating at Wimbledon. “He was nothing like these fundamentalists. He was more like a street person.”

“You think they’re all squeaky clean?” she said. “I guess there’s one way to find out—if he was one of them, I mean.”

“What’s that?”

“Go ask.”

She was actually serious. She’d read their denials, heard Fair on the news, but she was “a believer in showing up in person.” She strode along at a pace suited to power-walking, getting an admiring glance from the Australian lesbians, which she ignored.

Sallie knew the location of the fundamentalists’ office, opposite Spiritus Pizza. Some queer activists, people who could’ve passed as skinheads given their shaved skulls and studded armbands, were staring threateningly at the little storefront, at its dotted Swiss curtains and posters of the Holy Land.

By poetic justice, Sergeant Almeida was doing guard duty at the office.

“Hello, Ms. Drummond,” he said. So he knew her.

“Miss Drummond,” she corrected him.

“May I go inside?”

“For any particular reason?”

“Just looking,” she said, sternly. “I’m not carrying any weapons. Want to frisk me?”

“Go ahead.”

Most shops in Provincetown were cold compared to the street. Sweaty tourists like chilly shops, but this was ridiculous. It was like stepping into a meat locker: bloody sides of beef should have lined the walls. Instead, they were bare, eggshell-white.

The room was sparsely furnished, containing two metal desks and two folding tables crowded with telephones and Cape Cod directories. A Lucite stand held crosses “fashioned from olive wood from the Garden of Gethsemane” for sale.

A young woman, thin, wan, and smiling, rose from her desk, shy but eager. Properly patriarchal, she said, “Good morning,” to me first.

Sallie answered. “It’s a rather troubling morning, actually.”

“Pardon?” The woman frowned.

“The violence in this town,” Sallie said.

The woman’s expression became sympathetically clouded. “Oh, I know,” she said. She was alone in the outer office, wearing pink barrettes and a mustard seed suspended in a clear globe of glass on a chain around her neck.

“My brother was attacked—” Sallie began.

“Is your brother Mr. Peever?”

“My brother never worked in that museum!” Sallie snapped. “And he obviously wasn’t eighty years old!”

“I didn’t know the ages—”

“Was that creature a member of your organization?” Sallie demanded in a loud, husky voice. “That creature who killed himself in jail?”

“No, ma’am, he certainly was not,” said the tall man in camouflage gear who nudged past the bead curtain left over from the Chinese take-out place.

“There are lots of rumors,” Sallie said, her voice still hard with anger. “My brother was Ian Drummond. He was murdered.”

The man in camouflage resembled all the other Soldiers I’d seen earlier and had the clipped, all-business manner of most zealots. “We have never believed in violence to achieve our ends,” he stated.

There were other people behind the bead curtain. I could see figures moving behind the plastic jewels. Their backs were to us: a man changing the cartridge of a copying machine and a girl stacking cardboard boxes.

“Miss Drummond’s brother was stabbed to death,” I said. As I spoke, I kept an eye on the figures behind the bead curtain. I kept thinking we were in danger, that somehow this was a set-up, but of course that was nonsense, we had come here of our own free will. I said, “There’s speculation in the media—”

“The media!” the Soldier scoffed.

“There’s speculation that the man who attacked the people in the museum also killed Ian, Miss Drummond’s brother.” I was playing, I felt, to my most hostile audience ever.

Then the man changing the cartridge of the copying machine turned, and, head bent, examining the spent cartridge, pushed through the bead curtain and tugged at the Soldier’s arm. “What should I do with this?” he asked.

It was Edward.

Chapter Eighteen

His hair was darker, a tawny brown, and he had lost weight, so that he looked somber, delicate, and, somehow, desperate. He kept his gaze fixed on the Soldier, as if the Soldier owned him.

“There’s a carton out back, by the thermostat,” said the Soldier. “Put it there.”

Before Edward retreated to the back room, he glanced at Sallie, then at me. His face registered no change of emotion. Did he recognize me? He acted drugged. Perhaps the bag of white powder he’d stashed in Arthur’s bathroom really was narcotics. He might be innocent of stealing Madame Récamier’s candlesticks, but was he guilty of other crimes besides hypocrisy?

What, in God’s name, was he doing working here? In God’s name, exactly. Had he been one of them all along? Did this somehow explain the dog’s corpse on Arthur’s doorstep? Did this somehow explain Ian’s murder?

“I’m a Christian,” I heard Sallie say to the Soldier. She used the word in the exclusionary way that weighted it with aggression, with politics.

The Soldier nodded sympathetically, and I felt the tension in the office subside. The woman at the desk began moistening stamps with a little yellow sponge and sticking them precisely onto envelopes with a logo that said ONWARD in red lettering.

“This town, and what it stands for, is, frankly, alien to me,” Sallie told the Soldier.

Then the bead curtain rattled and Edward was in the outer office once again. He deposited another pile of envelopes on the woman’s desk and she said “Thank you” with such enthusiasm that his gesture might have come as a complete surprise. He might’ve been a stranger who’d dropped by to donate these office supplies as some spontaneous act of largesse.

I was by the Lucite stand holding the olive wood crosses. I thought of the cross tattooed on the man from the museum, the man lying chilled in the morgue. “These crosses are beautiful,” I said to Edward, forcing him to acknowledge me. “You must have a hard time keeping them in stock.”

He paused and looked at the crosses and me with the same vacant expression. “They’re from the Holy Land. They’re cut from trees from the Garden of Gethsemane.”

He recognized me, I was sure, but acted stupefied. I felt like shaking him. I was relieved to see him alive and angry to find him here. I wondered all sorts of things I couldn’t ask aloud: Had he heard about Ian’s murder? Where was he living? Had he been a Christian Soldier all along?

“Do you have chains to go with these beautiful crosses?” I asked.

The woman at the desk stopped stamping the envelopes. “Oh, Paul is fairly new here,” she told me. Then, to Edward, she said, “Paul, the chains are out back, on the shelf with the booklets about Armageddon.” She said this as cheerily as she’d thanked him for bringing the envelopes.

Paul, she called him. Was that his real name?

While Edward was getting the chains, the woman at the desk confided, “They’re not solid gold, they’re just electroplated with gold. But nothing on this earth lasteth forever.”

I wanted to make conversation. “How large is your staff?”

This question caused her to become as businesslike as the Soldier, who was now discussing theology with Sallie Drummond. “We don’t divulge that sort of information,” she said. “It’s just policy.”

“Policy,” I said, “not theology.”

Her smile was contracting.

The man I’d known as Edward returned, holding plastic envelopes containing chains. Without looking at my face, he explained, “We have three styles to choose from: light, medium, and heavy mesh.”

“I think the heavy chains are more masculine,” said the woman at the desk.

Of course, masculinity was highly valued in this culture, Christianity at its most muscular. Sallie and the Soldier were now discussing the Book of Isaiah.

“This is all very interesting,” I said to Edward. At last he looked me in the eye but gave no sign of emotion; he might’ve been under anesthesia. “I’ll take a cross and your heaviest chain,” I said.

“The chain is ten dollars,” Edward said. “The cross is twelve ninety-five.”

“Don’t forget the sales tax, Paul,” the woman at the desk said cheerily.

I thought of asking to use a credit card, so that I could write Edward a note asking why he was here, but, at second thought, I shuddered at these people having access to my name or address. They might not be killers, but they held their own sorts of danger.

Edward was at the other desk, scribbling a record of the sale onto a pad of paper. When no one but Edward was looking, I seized his pen and wrote on a fresh page: “Why are you here? Where have you been? Do you know anything about—”

Then he snatched back the pen and scribbled onto the pad beneath my questions: “Be careful. You’re in danger from the Golden One.” All dullness had left his expression, replaced by the tautness of fear.

Now Sallie was at my side. “Let’s go,” she said.

“I bought a cross,” I said, covering our writing with my hand.

She studied the crude cross, made of light wood the color of cocoa, and wrinkled her nose with disapproval.

I gave Edward thirty dollars and he gave me my purchases and my change. “We don’t have bags,” he apologized.

“But we will,” said the woman at the desk. “We’re expanding.”