Thorazine Beach (3 page)

I’d actually begun going back to freelance editing. Theses and dissertations, mostly. Tenure-hunting Memphis State assistant profs scrambling to squirt journal articles out of unreadable, turgid dissertations.
The
and
an
and
a
for Tamil- and Hindi-speaking engineers who thought their English was
almost
good enough. Verb tenses for work-all-night lab scientists from cold northern Chinese cities, smart enough to know their English blew. And from a Princeton business PhD, the most exacerbating case of gratuitous philological exhibitionism I’d ever seen. At first, all that wordsmithing was just to keep my hand in—we had more than enough money, on the home front, to ensure I needn’t worry about that.

Then there was the call from Lynette. That night we’d be dining out, she’d told me. Restaurant, reservation time, separate cars. There’d been in recent weeks, maybe months, a little…
distance
, for lack of a better word. The trial. A certain…
fatigue
. Not to mention Lynette’s travelling—rather more travelling than usual, of late, rather farther afield. And there were, as Lynette put it, “some things” she’d “heard,” arising out of the Garrison affair and its admittedly embarrassing aftermath. Lynette, I knew, had lost real estate business over it. But still, we had…

I was halfway through a middlingly enthusiastic blackberry cheesecake when she bit the matter off. I felt the heat of shock on my own face. A half-assed protest. “No, Jack. You don’t understand. I
have
left.” No, Jack, you haven’t “done anything wrong.” No, we couldn’t “talk,” there’d be no “working it out.” The house? “Sold,” she said. “You’ll need to be out by the eighteenth.” But, Lynette, where will you…? “Out of the country,” she said. That and “Martinique” and, more quietly, “I’ve met someone.” Then a sudden reach across the table and, so very, very oddly, she kissed my hand, set it back down, wiped her mouth on a clean napkin. Rose. Left. And that was that.

That and the twenty K—now nearly gone—she’d dumped into my account a week later from some bank in the Cayman Islands. Was it given out of guilt? I never knew her motivation. But I’d spent all but a bit of the money.

“Earth to Jack…”

“Sorry, Eileen.”

I looked up. She smiled again—this time a warm one, stripped of any sarcastic edge.

“I’m sorry, Eileen, I was just—”

“I know where you were, Jack.” That smile again, a softer voice, and sad eyes.

Then a rather deliberate-looking perk-up. She leaned in. Grinned. “Whatcha got that’s juicy?”

Eileen liked the divorce case report. Laughed at a couple of lines. (Couldn’t resist, I told her—English major, you know.) “Good enough evidence for trial?” I asked her.

“Never gonna go to trial,” she said. “Wife just wants her suspicions confirmed. Said she’d take my word for it, didn’t even want to see the evidence. Now what about the insurance thing?”

I sat back. “You got a sense of humour today, Eileen?”

“It’s Friday afternoon. Why not?”

“Then you might appreciate this,” I said, reaching for a parcel I’d brought in with my files, the parcel neatly wrapped in brown paper.

Eileen gave it a querulous look and a grin. “You open it,” I said. She did, and laughed out loud.

“My fifteen minutes of boss-annoying lateness,” I said, “was owing to my needing to stop in for the frame.”

“You know my tastes in art
very
well, Jack Minyard.”

“EVERYBODY!” she shouted. “Get in here!”

They did, and a dozen women dressed in everything from smartly tailored suits to Wal-Mart sweats sat on chairs and table-corners or leaned, arms folded, against walls, and listened with smiles and laughs as Eileen told the story.
Weeks
on this investigation. Said the insurance company “just knew” the guy was a fraud artist, though the doctors hadn’t caught him. I’d watched him for weeks, shadowed him as he went for this discovery, that doctor visit, physical therapy. Perfect perfect perfect—a wheelchair every time, helped into the car and out, the aching slowness, all the right moves and grimaces. All the right failures to grimace, too—this was neurological, after all, and there are some things you just don’t feel, if the nerves are gone. The totality of evidence—a rapidly building mound of evidence—pointed in the direction that Dwayne Poteat was legit, the forklift accident had left his bottom half paralyzed, and everything I was gathering was making things
worse
for our case. Sure thing for a big six-digit lump-sum payout, or seven digits in structured settlement. Dwayne’s attorney was going for the lump. But now…the picture was a coup. The picture would do it. Giant Bloodsucking Insurance Group of America would be, Eileen told me,
very
happy indeed.

I’d blown up my best shot to eleven-fourteen, had it put in an eighteen by twenty-four frame. Eileen kept the picture to her chest, didn’t show the girls till she told how I’d noticed a four-wheel in Poteat’s back yard one day, missing the next, back the day after. I’d managed to cash in a favour with a sweet girl at Dwayne’s bank. Decently, mind you—she was married, Baptist, two-point-four children, what can you do? Thanks to her, I’d seen credit card charges, not Poteat’s own but let’s say “connected,” up Dyersburg way. Too far out of Memphis for anyone to follow, he’d probably figured. And surely
one
indulgence of an old hobby couldn’t hurt—hell, I could
feel
the guy’s own rationale. Eileen turned the framed picture around and showed it. Dwayne Poteat’s idiot leer, larger and wider than in the file photos—funnier, too—got them all on their feet applauding. “You go, Jack!” A couple of whistles, even.

Eileen, the last card I held, had outright declined to hire me back when, desperate as I was. Said she simply wouldn’t have me as an employee, that I’d be “an occasional agent,” with Red Line, sometimes Eileen herself, as my client, even though she’d set it up so my licence came under her aegis. No, she said, I was to do those sorts of things—”tacky” things, she’d said—that she wouldn’t ask her employees to do. They were an office bunch, mostly—employment drug screenings, credit checks, background checks for everything from drug company vice-presidents down to Kroger bagging boys. Me—I was to do what they, Eileen’s “own people,” wouldn’t do, shouldn’t do, in Eileen’s conception of the world. Anything that might get dirt on your shoes, dirt on your reputation, dirt in your mind, anything that might make you trip in the dark or even see something unseemly—that was where I’d come in. It meant a certain distance, a certain un-belonging, between me and Red Line.

But today I felt twelve feet tall, heard a couple of dozen iterations of
Way to go, Right on
. Today, I belonged. A cheque, albeit a small one, and the promise of more in the next week or two or three. I met the new girl, the shy one. Verlie. Averted eyes. A stutter. But something sparkled there.

Met the one guy, Tommy, new, the geek, the IT man—the only male employee I’d ever seen working at Eileen’s. Nice guy. Took an interest. He asked me a couple of questions about what it’s like to be a detective. “Private investigator,” I corrected. “Only the police get to be detectives.” A certain admiration, on his part, I thought. I Barney-Fyfed my way through a couple of answers, beyond what he’d asked, till his smile began to wane and it looked like he wanted to get back to work. Or back to something.

The crowd thinned. Eileen took a call, waved us all out of her office. On the way from the stationery closet to her desk, Jackie even hugged me. Verlie offered me some homemade peanut brittle, and Christy bagged me a coke from the break room. More smiles, congrats, but quieter, now.

“Who’s up for a drink?” I asked. “Dinner? Thought I might hit the Hunan Grill. The works. Anyone? My treat.”

The ones with husbands and kids offered those by way of excuse. The ones without looked at watches, busied themselves with purses, with papers on desks, a couple with
nothing
on desks.

There would be no takers tonight.

“All right, then,” I said, trying for cheeriness. “Thanks, y’all.” I never have been able to manage a convincing
y’all
. After nineteen years here, I’m still too damn Canuck.

As I passed her desk, Jackie looked up. Smiled faintly, looked me in the eye, looked away, back briefly again. “Jack, you take care, now.
Good
care. Some Friday night, you and I, we’ll…”

“Sure,” I said. “Love to. We’ll…”

“Absolutely. We will.”

Years
ago, it was, that I’d first heard that from Jackie.

“You have yourself a good weekend, now,” one of us said.

“You, too,” said the other.

I forget which.

The bell on the office front door. Their voices disappearing as the door closed behind me. The heat and noise of Summer Avenue.

I could
hear
it flip. The room was. That. Quiet.

It’s an old alarm clock—eighties, I think. One of those kinds that displays digitally, but not with an LED-thingie or any of that. It was mechanical, a rolodex kind of thing. And, every minute, the number would flip. Voila! New number. I was keeping meticulous track of the minutes—thirteen…fourteen…fifteen…sixteen. But not at all of the hours.

Fascinating. Listen closely enough, and you could
hear
that flip. Was it really louder than my breathing?

The TV was on. Always was. What, I couldn’t tell, else I’d have known the time. I’d turned down the sound, all the way, to listen. I was looking at the ceiling, at that dead, black, legged beast inside the glass globe of the room light. It sickened me, that dark, horrid thing, the very notion of it, though I never knew what it was. All I saw of the TV was flickering blue light, bouncing off the walls. Plato’s cave, featuring Oprah, the five o’clock news,
Jeopardy, American Dad, Family Guy
, all in a reflected blur.

I fumbled left of me, on the bed, to find the remote. There. No. That was my pills. Thorazine. Three left, I think.
This will even you out, Jack
, the shrink had said. Would I go to AA tonight? Maybe not. Maybe I’d missed already. Not much turned on it.

Hadn’t I planned to play with stamps tonight? Today? Whatever time it was. I enjoyed slipping them lovingly inside the stock sheets. And there they’d stay. Reliable. Constant. Always there for you. They’d never drift, though I often did.

I was here in Memphis—that much I knew—and lying on a bed. Except I was lying on a chaise longue. A motel in Penticton, peach country, years and years ago, but still so bright. Lying on the motel’s own beach. Slightly off-season. Warm, not hot. The occasional boat, the occasional splash in the water, a jump off the floating raft. Quiet. With—who had it been? Gina, surely. I couldn’t quite
see
her.

But there she was, her own chaise longue beside mine, a table in between for drinks, hats, sunscreen, motel room key.
Our
room. Her car.
Our
weekend. Gina or whoever—Gina, surely—was reading a P.D. James, I think. And I had
Day of the Triffids
and an issue of
Sky and Telescope
, and kept switching between. We were right on the beach, had moved our seats and things just a spit away from the little, lapping waves at the lake’s edge. Something dark, human-sized, moved by in the water. I would look up at her, say
Hey—did you know…?
She would look up, say
Listen to this, it’s funny
…We’d look up, sometimes, and just smile.

Three days there, I remember, exactly. Three or four. And each day lasted, like…a whole
day
.

We were lying there. And these three days were the only part of our year and some together that wasn’t, for me, about
getting
Gina, wasn’t about
losing
Gina.

Two minutes became twenty, twenty-five. I’d already moved to a table, set up my laptop and started on my reports. Typical MacDonald. He’ll knock on your door to the pico-second, given a timed party invitation, before you’re even ready. And he’ll turn up unannounced, anytime and anywhere he pleases. Crime scene—johnny on the spot. But make an
appointment
with the bugger…

I presumed the SUV that pulled in was MacDonald. He’d bought a brand new car, I guessed. A big Cadillac Escalade—certainly showy enough for Mac. Black, freshly washed and waxed. No, I realized—an ultra-dark purple. Custom paint job, no doubt. The Escalade parked facing the street, its back to me. The occupant—tinted windows, I couldn’t see clearly—looked in the rearview mirror, looked again, backed out, turned right, and left the lot.

I’d got half-interested in some half-assed talk he’d been engaging in lately. Some commission thing. Memphis PD had commissions, studies, and task forces on bloody near everything. No small number were inward-looking, ultra-sensitive things. There’d been one on cops’ involvement in drug transactions—stuff disappearing from the evidence lockup, finding its way back into the hood. And another when, under the reign of the previous mayor, King Willie, the lieutenant in charge of the mayor’s bodyguard found with bundles of drug money stashed in the rafters of her garage.

Then there was the “new commission.” That’s all the name MacDonald had ever given it, though a couple of times he’d said “task force.” He’s a passive-aggressive conversationalist, is our Mac. Half the time tells more than he knows, half the time less. Plays his cards close to the chest, then lays them down face up when he goes to the can. He’d been alternately withholding and leaking vague stuff about “import-export,” a coy reference here and there to “cargo” that I somehow knew wasn’t about plastic Hello Kitty purses or illegal knock-off cell phones. I knew better than to dig—he’d tell me when he needed to. Or wanted to. Or painted himself into a corner and had no other choice.

Then, a few minutes and half a hastily scrawled report later, I saw him.
Heard
him. He turned off the ignition, but the engine had other ideas, ran on a good thirty seconds. MacDonald ignored the splutter and walked right in like he owned the place. How he makes a dress shirt stay crisp in hundred-degree temperatures is beyond me, but he does it. The man’s a clothes-horse. He said he’d just ordered some tailor-made shirts from England, last I saw him. It was one of those he was sporting now, I guessed. A loud, blue- and scarlet-striped, British-exec kind of thing, with an equally loud lemon-yellow tie that didn’t
quite
go, but somehow was perfect. He sat.