The Last Coin (27 page)

Andrew looked again at his pocket watch: almost one o’clock in the morning. Pickett was late. He had called from somewhere outside Bakersfield and had been driving for sixteen hours, all the way from Portland. He had sounded very mysterious, as if he’d learned something; he wouldn’t say what—not over the phone. That was at ten. Anyone could have made it from Bakersfield to Seal Beach in three hours, even in Pickett’s rattling old Chevy.

Andrew peered through the window at the deepening fog. Headlights loomed through the mists on the highway, appearing and disappearing like the glowing eyes of deep-water fish. It was eerily silent, as if the fog muffled all noise. He could just hear the drip, drip, drip of moisture plunking down into the saturated dirt of the windowbox from an overhanging branch.

The menus were finished. At first, until they got their sea legs under them, they’d offer a price-fixed menu—only two choices for the main course. There’d be a different theme, so to speak, every Friday and Saturday night, and breakfast served Saturday and Sunday mornings. But that wouldn’t start for a week or two. Andrew had ordered handbills with the idea of giving them out to early-morning, weekend pier fishermen.

On Saturday, when they opened, Andrew would lead off with Cajun food, which was in vogue—something that was irritating, since Andrew had fancied it for years. He couldn’t much stand the idea of liking things that were fashionable. People would assume that he liked them
because
they were fashionable, when in fact it was most often true that the opposite was the case. Cajun food though … He’d make a gumbo that would wake them up. With Rose and Mrs. Gummidge waiting tables, Andrew cooking, and Pickett generally maitre d’ing and helping out here and there, they’d do tolerably well. He’d have to give Mrs. Gummidge clear orders not to speak, though. He couldn’t have her start yammering in front of the guests; that would be the end of their patronage.

Andrew’s mind wandered, sorting through his list of current troubles. It seemed that there was always something leering in at the window, some ruinous little piper demanding to be paid. Rose still had no idea that he’d loaned Pickett the credit card merely to stock up on Weetabix. It would do her no good at all to know. She couldn’t fathom it, and for very good reasons, too. Yesterday evening, after his making up with Rose, Andrew had popped down to the supermarket to search out sesame oil and oyster sauce in anticipation of Chinese night, and there in the import foods aisle he’d run into a shelf of Weetabix. His information had been wrong. They weren’t contraband at all. They were a dollar and a half a box. With a dozen biscuits in a box, and two in a serving at ninety cents per serving, that was a profit margin of two or three hundred percent, not subtracting for overhead. Andrew sighed. He had sent Pickett after the Weetabix in good faith, anyway. He couldn’t be expected to know
everything.

Pickett wouldn’t have charged more than sixty or eighty dollars in gas. Andrew would have to keep the thing silent and nab the credit card bill before Rose got to it. He couldn’t afford to forget—as he’d forgotten about the coffee filter under the bed. She had found it later in the evening while searching for a bedroom slipper. After trying in vain to dream up a lie, Andrew had said simply, “You wouldn’t believe it if I told you,” and she had nodded in agreement, not asking him to try. It depressed him, though, her having to protect him with her silence and her continually taking the long view. The house painting had made up for some of it. And when this whole thing was over, he would quit staying up late every night. That would help. She rarely said anything about it, but he was certain she felt his absence, so to speak, and he was happy she did.

Tonight, though, he had business to attend to. Rose was long ago in bed, and it would be a simple thing tonight to unload the cases of Weetabix like he’d done the whiskey, stow them away, and later on pretend that they’d come from some standard issue distributor in Los Angeles.

But where was Pickett? He’d been on edge when he’d called, had mumbled something about a newspaper clipping from the Vancouver
Tribune
, about a murder, about a curious book he’d bought in a Gastown bookstore. Andrew had pressed him for details but Pickett had clammed up.

Headlights swung round the corner and there sounded briefly the churning rumble of the Chevrolet. Then the lights blinked out and the motor coughed quietly and cut off. Andrew stepped out onto the side porch just as the pale bulk of Pickett’s car coasted out of the mists and slanted in toward the curb. The door opened and Pickett hunched out from behind the wheel, carrying his leather briefcase. He grabbed Andrew’s elbow and hurried him back in after shutting the car door softly behind them but leaving the window down. He stood inside the cafe, watching the street.

Andrew started to speak but Pickett shushed him, still holding onto his arm. His grip tightened as another pair of headlights appeared, and a taxi, navigating through the fog, stopped at the curb opposite. The door opened and out stepped Pennyman, smoking on his pipe. He handed the driver a bill, then counted change out of his open palm before tapping across the street with his stick, up onto the lawn. They heard the front door swing open and then shut, and then Pennyman’s tread sounded for a moment on the stairs.

Andrew stepped across to the bar and with a shaking hand poured Pickett a glass of bourbon, neat. Pickett looked as if he needed it. His suit was rumpled and moist, and his hair had been blown silly by the wind on the open road. His shirttail was hauled out in back, and he made a gesture at tucking it back in, but accomplished nothing.

“He spotted me out near Leisure World,” Pickett said, wrinkling up his face. “I saw him through a gap in the fog just as I was pulling off onto the boulevard. That beard of his is a dead giveaway.” Pickett stared into his glass, then rapped against the bar with his fist. “What does he want? That’s the trick. We don’t know what he wants.”

Andrew nodded as if giving Pickett’s question serious thought. He determined to play the fool. It would be better all the way around to cool Pickett down. He was fatigued from the trip, and so all the more likely to make a mistake. There was no room for mistakes now. “Maybe he doesn’t
want
anything. It’s not much of a coincidence, is it? Nothing odd about Pennyman’s being out and about this late. Night before last he didn’t come home at all. Tonight he could have been anywhere. Mrs. Gummidge tells me he’s got a relative of some sort in Glendale. That would be about right. If he came home down the Long Beach and the San Diego freeways, then he’d have every reason on earth to be passing Leisure World. You don’t put enough faith in simple coincidence.”

“He didn’t come home at all night before last?”

“That’s right. He’s a grown-up. He can stay out all night.”

“Mrs. Gummidge has been telling you this, about relatives in Glendale?”

“That’s exactly what she’s been telling me.”

Pickett looked steadily at him, then brushed his hair back out of his face. “And you believe her?” He asked the question in a flat sort of tone, as if he’d been wondering whether it might have come down to this at last.

Andrew thought for a moment and then said, “No. I don’t suppose I do. But it’s possible just the same. We don’t want to overreach ourselves, do we? We don’t want to get jumpy now. Our big advantage is that he thinks we’re largely ignorant.”

“Maybe,” said Pickett. “Look at this.” He handed Andrew the newspaper clipping that he’d mentioned over the phone—the grisly account of a murder, of a man sawed in half lengthwise, so cleanly that the precision of it utterly baffled the authorities. He’d been frozen first. That was the consensus, although a coroner had speculated that a laser scalpel might have done the trick. He’d been found—both halves of him had—holding a silver quarter in either hand, for reasons no one could fathom. Had he been murdered in the midst of making change? It hardly seemed likely.

Andrew was almost giddy with dread as he skimmed through the article, wondering why on earth Pickett had brought it along and knowing why at the same time. It was ghastly, to be sure, and was the sort of utterly unlikely incident that would give the gears in Pickett’s head a good cranking. But beyond that, beyond all notion of reason and of reasons, was a muddle of instinct and gut fear—nothing but more unwoven threads from a tapestry they only suspected the existence of.

“The name,” said Pickett. “Look at the man’s name.” Andrew staggered against the bar. It was August Pfennig who’d been sawed in half. August Pfennig—dead. That made it certain, didn’t it? It made
something
certain anyway. But there was no way on earth that Pickett could know that Andrew knew the name. When had Andrew gotten the phone call, after all? Pickett was in Vancouver himself at the time. “This Pfennig—who do
you
think he is?” asked Andrew, giving his friend a sharp look.

“He was Moneywort’s cousin,” said Pickett flatly. “We met him that night in Belmont Shore, at Moneywort’s shop. You remember. No, strike that.
I
met him. You weren’t there that night, were you?” Andrew shook his head and said nothing. Pickett continued: “He had a tricolored koi that he’d paid a fortune for. I thought at the time that it was pretty weird, all of them fascinated with a big carp …” He stopped and looked edgewise at Andrew. “Who in the devil did
you
think he was, for goodness sake? You knew the name. How many August Pfennigs can there be?”

Andrew told him about the phone call, about the coin business. Pickett listened, his eyes narrowing. He slammed his fist into his open palm and waved Andrew to silence, then paced back and forth across the floor.

“It doesn’t matter. All of this proves a theory of mine. I called the authorities in my official capacity as a member of the press. I asked them straight out whether the murder was connected with the recent death of Pfennig’s cousin—Leyman Moneywort. The officer on the phone professed ignorance of any such cousin and insisted that I come around to talk. Then he covered up the mouthpiece and mumbled for a moment before another detective got on and said he knew all about Moneywort, and that the murders were unrelated. A string of bad luck for the Pfennig-Moneywort family, that’s all. He accused me of sensationalizing the case—as if it needed such a thing.”

Andrew nodded. “And this didn’t satisfy you?”

“Satisfy me! Heavens yes it satisfied me. What could the denial be but confirmation of a
connection
. Pfennig isn’t two days dead, and here’s the police professing the certainty that the two murders are unrelated. That was a carefully calculated tale; you can take it from me.”

Andrew shrugged. “Let’s haul those Weetabix in before the fog through the open window turns the boxes to mush.”

Pickett shook his head. “Wait a bit. Let your man upstairs fall asleep first.” He put his finger to his lips to silence Andrew, then crept across toward the door that led to the kitchen. He snatched it open and stepped back, as if he were certain that Pennyman would be crouched there, perhaps with a glass tumbler pressed to his ear and a look of surprise on his bearded face. No one was there. Somewhere overhead a clock tolled—once, twice. “Two o’clock,” said Pickett, and then pushed the door shut and turned once more to face his friend.

“Let me tell you about my little bit of detective work. I found a telephone book is what I did. And do you know what? There was a listing for August Pfennig Books and Arcana in Gastown. The man was dead—horribly murdered—but the shop was open for business as usual. That’s where I bought this.” Pickett snapped open his briefcase and produced an old book. The cover was ochre-colored morocco, brittle and torn with age. Pickett set it onto the top of the bar and then nodded at it, as if to say, “Look at
that.
”

There was gilt writing on the cover, but it was so faded and dim that Andrew opened the book to the title page.
Le Cochon Seul
it said, translated by the Marquise de Cambremer. Andrew looked up at Pickett. “No author?”

“I think it’s all old legends. Probably a pocketful of authors, like the Bible. I imagine that this marchioness had nothing at all to do with the writing of the thing.”

“Sounds rather like a cheese, doesn’t it?”

“A cheese?” asked Pickett, mystified.

“This woman’s name.”

“That’s Camembert, the cheese is. This has nothing to do with cheeses. And it’s not her name we care about anyway. It’s the book itself, for heaven’s sake.”

“It’s Greek to me,” said Andrew, grinning.

“Well hold onto your hat, then. The title means ‘The One Pig,’ or something very much like that. I can’t quite figure it as a title, but look at the frontispiece. That’s what struck me. The clerk was studying it when I came in.”

Andrew did. There, badly drawn in sepia-colored ink, were back and front drawings of a serrated-edged coin with the likeness of a man on one side and of a moon-enclosed fish on the other. It was a crenelated-looking fish, like a sea serpent, perhaps, like the Leviathan, and it was swallowing its own tail.

Pickett looked moderately pleased with himself and started to talk again. Andrew stared at the picture, disbelieving in its existence. His chest felt hollow all of a sudden, and he found that he was breathing in little gasping breaths. He started to speak, to interrupt, but then he didn’t. He decided to let Pickett go on. Pickett had been driving for nineteen hours, waiting for the chance to confound Andrew with this book, with whatever bit of coin lore the French text revealed. Andrew wouldn’t upstage him yet.

“Well, the fact that it was an illustration of a coin struck me straight off,” said Pickett, warming to his story. “But what fetched me up short was that I’d seen such a thing before. You’ll never guess where.”