Beach Strip (12 page)

Mel shook his head. “Couple of saleswomen said he assaulted them in the backroom. Nothing serious, just copping a feel. He tried to keep it quiet, but they started to press charges, took civil action, and he had to close the business. He moved …” He angled his head toward the front door of Tuffy’s. “You know that old place up the way, next to the empty church? Big round turret, painted dark red?”

I pictured the house. The blinds were always lowered, the grass uncut, the roof sagging. “I thought it was abandoned.”

“Honeysett moved there, alone. His wife died a couple of years before the thing with the saleswomen, and he bounced around in that old place, finally moved into the basement. We’d catch him now and then, outside houses on the beach strip at night, hiding in bushes near windows—”

“Or in garden sheds?”

Mel nodded. “He seemed harmless. He’d get a warning, his family would ask that we give him a break, let him stay with them, and the judge would agree. Then, a couple of months later he’d be up to his old tricks. Getting nuttier all the time. Last month, the city seized the old house for back taxes. He moved out. We didn’t know to where, but apparently he was sleeping under the lift bridge. Which just proves how nuts he was.”

“That doesn’t mean he was suicidal.”

Mel looked annoyed with me. “You an expert now?”

“I’m getting to be. Hayashida tells me you’re becoming sceptical about Gabe shooting himself, right?”

Mel took a long swallow of Coke and set it down. “But not Honeysett. That’s suicide, not murder.”

“Why not?”

“You don’t kill somebody by holding his head on a piece of concrete while a bridge comes down on it.” He frowned and
looked down at the table, as though blocking the picture from his imagination.

“Then how insane do you have to be to climb up there and do it yourself?”

“People can be that crazy, Josie. People can be that desperate.”

Perhaps they can. But I could not believe anyone would be capable of either act. So I stopped trying, and said, “Who’s Grizz?”

Mel breathed twice—I counted them—before answering. “You don’t need to know.”

“Yes, I do. You said you’d tell me. So tell me.”

“We think he’s a dealer.”

“Drugs.”

Mel nodded. “We just know his name. Gabe and I. We knew his name.”

“You guys aren’t even on the drug squad. How do you know about him?”

Mel looked back toward the bar and the pool tables, where everybody had resumed their games and conversations. “They found a body a month or so ago, in an alley off Barton Street. Gabe and I, we were called in on it. It looked like a hit, an execution.” Mel raised his right hand, the index finger extended, and touched his head just above his ear. “One shot, here.” He brought his hands together and stared out the window as he spoke. “We asked around, the usual people on the street, and they were scared. These guys, they’re usually pretty tough, but this time they weren’t acting that way for a change. Somebody told us a guy named Grizz did it. That’s all we had, his supposed name, his street name. Plus that he’s a dealer, and he scares the hell out of a lot of people who don’t scare easily. Gabe was doing some stuff on his own, checking out the guy in the alley, looking for some connection we could use. I told you I can’t do undercover anymore, but Gabe did. He made some contacts on the street, working on his own.”

“So why was this creep at my door this morning asking about
Grizz? If this Grizz scares people so much, why is this guy looking for him?”

“What did he look like, the man asking for Grizz?”

“Asking? He was
demanding.
He was something else too.”

“Desperate?” Mel said.

That wasn’t the word I was looking for. I pictured him again, unwashed, bearded, dressed like a street bum, pushing against the door, more frantic than intimidating, more pleading than threatening. I recalled his face, and how he didn’t get angry when I refused to let him in or when I told him I didn’t know anybody named Grizz. Did he know Gabe? Did Gabe call himself Grizz? Boy, that hardly made any sense, but …

“Hey.” It was Mel.

“What?”

“I asked you twice.”

“Asked me what?”

“How old this guy was, the one looking for Grizz. Where were you just now?”

“Thinking.”

Mel’s eyes softened and he lowered his voice. “About Gabe?”

I nodded. I was always thinking about Gabe.

Mel sat back. “We can talk about this some other time, okay?” He looked around and leaned toward me again.

“Sure.” Now I couldn’t stop thinking about Gabe, and about something Mel had just said. “This guy, Grizz.”

“What about him?”

“Where was he shot?”

“Where was who shot?”

“The guy you think was killed by Grizz.”

“I told you. In an alley.”

“Not there. Where did the bullet go?”

Mel looked at me as though I had just asked what brand of underwear he wore, before raising his finger and touching his temple again. “Like I said. Here. Why?”

“That’s the same place Gabe was shot, isn’t it?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“That’s what you said. Gabe was shot once the same way, wasn’t he?”

“Josie, what the hell are you getting at?”

I didn’t know. That’s what I told Mel. I didn’t know. I only knew, and I was more certain of this than ever, that my husband had not killed himself, that he had been executed while kneeling naked on a blanket, waiting for me to arrive and love him.

I finished the coffee, told Mel to take care of himself, and asked him to wait until I left. I didn’t want anybody at Tuffy’s to see me leave with a man. I especially didn’t want them to see me leave with a cop.

I
had avoided reading newspapers since Gabe’s death, but over the next three days I scanned them for news about Wayne Weaver Honeysett. The first day’s coverage reported that a man’s body had been found beneath the lift bridge and police were investigating it as either a suicide or homicide. What was the other option? Natural causes? The victim’s identity would not be released until his next of kin had been notified, but he was believed to have been a resident of the beach strip.

The following day, the newspaper carried a much smaller story, saying only that the police were investigating the possibility of foul play in the death of the man found beneath the lift bridge on the beach strip. “Foul play”? It sounded like something an announcer might say when covering a baseball game on television. Crushing a man’s head to the thickness of a sheet of paper was well beyond “foul,” no matter how it happened.

That evening, it rained in the manner that told me summer was on its way back home to Florida. It wasn’t the soft, warm rain of an August afternoon, but the hard, cold rain of a September night, arriving early and unwelcomed.

The rain and cool weather made me feel desperate enough to call Tina. Her husband, Andrew, answered. Most men named Andrew are called, at some point in their lives, Andy or perhaps Drew. Andrew is always called Andrew, except, I assume, when he is called Dr. Golden.

Andrew informed me that Tina was either shopping or visiting
the anthropology museum, and he said it with a total absence of irony in his voice. These two activities, after all, bookended the values of Tina’s life: either filling her head with things to talk about at bridge parties or filling her closet with Prada to wear to the bridge parties.

Andrew told me he was very sorry to hear about Gabe, whose company he said he had always liked, which struck me as an unnecessary and unusual thing to say, then promised to inform Tina of my call “the minute she returns.” Dr. Andrew Golden, I suspected, had the bedside manner of a kitchen appliance.

Minutes after I hung up the telephone, the damn thing rang again, and I assumed that Appliance Andy had contacted Tina on her mobile phone and she was calling me back. On a silly impulse I picked up the telephone and said, “So what’d you buy me?”

Instead of hearing Tina’s giggle, followed by a shopping list, I heard a male voice with a distinctive leer in it saying, “What would you like?” I know a leer is a facial expression and you’re not supposed to be able to hear one, but the leer was definitely there.

Naturally I asked who it was.

“Who would you like it to be?” the voice asked.

Damn. Get rid of one pervert and another takes his place.

I hung up the telephone. It didn’t ring again. Not even from Tina.

The following day, a story in the newspaper confirmed that the man whose body had been found beneath the lift bridge had been Wayne Weaver Honeysett, a former jeweller and prominent businessman who had suffered from depression since the collapse of his once-thriving business and the death of his wife. His two daughters were arriving from out of town to attend his funeral service. Police, the report said, were still trying to determine how he had died, which I found either chilling or amusing, depending on my mood and the time of day.

Tina called at noon, apologizing for not getting back to me sooner and asking what I wanted. I told her I wanted to know how she was doing. She said she was well. I said, “Good,” and hung up. When the telephone rang less than a minute later, I assumed it was either Tina or Pervert Number Two. Talking to either was equally uninteresting to me, so I let it ring.

Later, Mel called a couple of times, “checking in,” he explained. Harold Hayashida called as well, to ask if I had seen the newspaper reports and if I could recall anything else about the night that Honeysett, if that’s who it was, spoke to me from beneath the bridge like the troll my father had teased me about when I was a child. I answered “Yes” and “No,” in that order, then asked if the police still believed it had been suicide.

“That’s the general consensus,” Hayashida replied.

“Is that the same as a verdict?” I asked.

“The file’s staying open.”

“So you think there’s a possibility that he might have been murdered.”

Hayashida said something that grew first more sinister as time went on, and eventually more perceptive. “The question,” the detective said, “is how.”

The next morning, the newspaper carried Honeysett’s death notice:

The next day was Wednesday. I decided to attend. I was, after all, perhaps the last person to whom Honeysett had spoken. And he had known me. Maybe going to his funeral would make up for not having one for Gabe. Or maybe I just needed a reason to wear a dress again.

IF FUNERAL HOMES HAVE NO RIGHT
to look pleasant and inviting, McRae’s was doing it correctly. Its original red brick exterior had acquired a patina of black soot, and the building had been designed to look like something between a small prison and a large animal shelter. Its front door opened directly from Barton Street with neither room nor intention for landscaping to soften the impact of its facade. Stepping inside from the late-morning sunlight, I wasn’t surprised to encounter darkness. But when my eyes adjusted to the dim interior, I was amazed to encounter a familiar face. It was Harold Hayashida, who was more shocked to see me than I was to see him.

“I was unaware that you knew the deceased so well,” he said, wearing that half-smile people display in a funeral home.

“And I didn’t know police officers attended the funerals of suicide victims,” I said.

We were in an alcove with plaster walls the colour and texture of oatmeal, and I looked down the corridor to see a small sign reading
honeysett
above an open doorway. I turned back to Hayashida, who was scribbling something in his notebook, just as a middle-aged couple entered and stood blinking and looking around, waiting for their sight to be restored, as I had.

If Wayne Honeysett had been a groper, he had made friends in spite of his perversion. Or maybe they enjoyed it, because the room was crowded with sombre people speaking in low isn’t-it-awful tones, and most were women. I saw this while standing at the entrance, waiting for two blue-haired women in dark textured suits to finish speaking to two younger women, whom I assumed were Honeysett’s daughters, Wendy and Joyce.

When the first younger woman greeted me, I offered my hand and looked into attractive grey eyes set in a round face framed in thick golden hair. I had nothing to say, except, “I’m so sorry.”

“How did you know my father?” the woman said.

“We were neighbours,” was the best I could answer. “On the beach strip.”

She smiled, nodded, and dropped her eyes, which would have been a cue for me to step forward and greet her sister, who was taller and heavier, with short dark hair, except that the first sister still gripped my right hand. When I tried pulling away, she tightened her grip, looked at her sister, and said, “Joyce.” Joyce smiled at me, then she too dropped her eyes to my hand.

They were looking at the ring I had decided to wear, the ring Gabe had given me a few weeks earlier, the black opal that Tina had commented on. I managed to pull my hand away from Wendy’s grip and fold it within my other hand. “Where did you get that ring?” Joyce asked.

“It was a gift,” I said. “From my husband. Why do you ask?”

“Because,” Wendy said, “it belonged to our mother.”

“That’s impossible,” I said, and walked to a corner chair some distance from the door. I’m not good at improvising dialogue. I was remembering what Gabe had told me about the ring.
I got it from a jeweller,
he said. And it hadn’t been stolen, he promised.
That ring cost thousands,
Tina said.

A carved wooden box sat at the front of the room among several long-stemmed roses. The box, I assumed, contained
Wayne Honeysett’s ashes. Was everybody cremated these days? Were we that short of land that nobody was buried anymore? Flanking the flowers were two large sheets of plywood covered with snapshots and advertisements for Honeysett’s Credit Jewellers. Behind the display a door led down the corridor to the left. Small knots of people moved past the photographs, bending to examine them closely, dredging up memories. I waited for the flow to ebb, then rose from the chair and walked across the room to the display, planning to check out a couple of pictures, put a face to the man who had died without a head, then leave through the door.

How did we remember people before photographs? And what will they be doing at funerals fifty years from now—watching 3-D videos of Uncle Farley riding his tricycle or cutting a birthday cake? I didn’t know, but with cremation becoming as popular among old folk as sweatpants and athletic shoes, we need those pictures to remind us of who we are mourning, and why.

Wayne Honeysett may not have been a large man, but he had been something of a cutie. He also looked familiar, and I realized I had probably seen him on the boardwalk or somewhere on the beach. He had a warm smile, crinkly eyes, and, I noted in the family photographs, an attractive wife who wore her hair shoulder-length, as I did. They looked like a close family, the girls as small children and in their teenage years, smiling and laughing in a manner that said they truly loved being in the company of their parents. I mentally slapped down the cynic in me, who suggested that no one would display photographs of the family in any other mood but happy at a time like this.

I wondered, standing there admiring the father, mother, and two attractive daughters whose ripening with time had been recorded by the camera, if our lives traced an arc of happiness, if at the end of our allotted time on earth we could look back and recognize the summit, the day and the place where we had
achieved the highest level of joy we would experience, and place our finger on it, touch it, and say, “I was never happier in my life than I was on that day.”

I was actually reaching out to touch a snapshot of the Honeysetts, taken somewhere palm trees grow, when I felt a hand at my elbow and heard Hayashida speak in the special voice police officers use when they are being polite but would rather not. “Mrs. Marshall,” he said when I turned to look at him, “do you suppose we could step into the hall for a moment?”

He moved aside and indicated the open door leading to the corridor, where the two sisters were standing, their arms folded across their chests, and their expressions no longer reflecting the pleased-you-could-come look they had applied to greet mourners. He herded us deeper into the funeral home, past the coat racks and into a small office area with one desk and two chairs. “May I see that ring?” Hayashida said, closing the door behind us.

I removed the ring and handed it to him. He took a small penlight from his pocket and shone it onto the inside of the ring, near the front where the stone was mounted. “Describe your father’s mark, please,” he said. He was not speaking to me.

Both sisters began to speak, but it was Wendy who raised her voice to drown out her sister. “It’s a W over an H,” she said. “The sides of the H, the upright parts, spread into the W above it. My father put that inside every ring he made.”

I remembered seeing the tiny mark and thinking nothing of it. It was just as she said—a trademark, a maker’s mark, whatever they call them.

Hayashida, squinting to see the mark, nodded and looked at me, his eyebrows raised.

“Okay, so your father made it,” I said. “That doesn’t mean it’s stolen.”

“Nobody said it was.” This from Joyce, the bigger and now angrier sister. “Funny you should suggest it was stolen, isn’t it?”

Hayashida held his hand up to silence her. “Where did you get it?” he asked.

“It was a gift from my husband,” I said. “From Gabe.”

Joyce hissed, “Bullshit!” and Hayashida waved his hand in her direction again.

“These ladies, Mr. Honeysett’s daughters, say that the last time they saw this ring it was on their mother’s finger.”

“Right here,” Wendy said. “In this funeral home. It was on my mother’s hand while she lay in her coffin.”

“I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about,” I said to Hayashida. “So Honeysett made the ring. So what? Maybe he made more than one—”

“He did not!” Joyce spat at me.

“We have a picture of it,” Wendy said. She was calmer now, and she rested a hand on her sister’s arm, as though to restrain her. “My father had all of our jewellery appraised and insured. The photograph with the appraisal shows the markings on the black opal. Every opal is unique. The markings will match, for sure.”

Hayashida looked at her. “How much was the ring appraised for?”

Joyce took a deep breath, as though she wanted to reply with all the power available in her impressive chest. And she did. “Six thousand dollars.”

“Was Gabe in the habit of buying you gifts that expensive?” Hayashida asked.

I had been eyeing a particularly ugly wooden chair set against the wall, thinking that a chair so dark and elaborately carved could only have been made for a funeral home. I walked over to it and sat down. “Gabe was not in the habit of giving me gifts that expensive,” I said. “Except for my wedding ring, that’s the only jewellery he ever bought me.”

“Did he say where he bought it?”

“No.”

“Or how much he paid for it?”

“No.”

“Was it a special occasion when he gave it to you?”

“No.”

I would have answered Hayashida the same way if he had asked if the earth revolved around the sun. The truth is, I wasn’t hearing him. I was hearing the voice calling to me from the shadows beneath the bridge, the voice that I knew had belonged to Wayne Weaver Honeysett.
I know what happened,
the voice had said.
Listen to me. I know what happened.