Dark Nantucket Noon (27 page)

Kitty took to her at once. Mary Kelly had an amplitude and an untidy luxuriance of parts that was both august and pleasing, and a calm that seemed embedded in the marrow of her large bones. To Kitty she seemed a vessel or a bowl in which one could be cradled and contained, a receptacle for the truth. In Homer's presence Kitty had tried to keep up a show of courage and confidence, but in the company of his wife no unnatural posture seemed necessary.

The two women spent a good part of the month of August together. Kitty took an interest in Mary's feminists, and Mary in turn joined some of Kitty's expeditions around the island. One hot muggy afternoon Homer rented the Scout from Mr. Woodrow and took them clamming in the Great Point Lagoon. Enthusiastically he splashed around in the shallows with his clam rake and bucket, while Kitty and Mary drifted idly in the middle of the lagoon in a dinghy they had brought along in the back of the truck.

“I have these dreams,” said Kitty.

“What dreams?” said Mary.

“I dream that I have my clothes off, and then people say such terrible things to me. Oh, I don't blame them. People shouldn't go around with all their clothes off. I keep wanting to explain that they should just let me go home and get dressed.”

Mary reflected, looking down at the wobbling patterns of light on the ribbed sand under the water. “Maybe it's like that passage in Paul in the Bible. ‘Thou shalt be as one stripped for action.'”

Kitty brightened. “Yes, I like that. Stripped for action. I'll tell them that, next time I have the dream.” She inhaled a deep shaky breath. As the time before the trial grew short, she was aware more often of a rising sensation in the chest, a fluttering in the lungs. “What should I wear to the trial?” she said, trying to sound jaunty. “What would be the fashionable thing for an indicted murderer to wear in court?”

Homer was wading beside them, handing a bucket of clams to his wife. “Red satin,” said Mary firmly, clasping the bucket between her knees.

“Good!” said Homer. He picked up the painter and began towing the dinghy to shore.

“I know what I'd like,” said Kitty. “One of those big dusters people wore in horseless carriages. And a huge hat and goggles. And I'd get an umbrella, a gigantic black umbrella, and hold it way down over my head so the prosecutor would have to peer up under it to ask me questions.”

“Then you could spit in his eye,” said Homer.

They drove home along the sandy track. Kitty leaned forward from the back seat, made bold by the presence of Mary Kelly. “Look, Homer, it's high time I paid you something. That money is piling up in my bank account. It's the wages of sin. And surely the state of Massachusetts isn't paying you enough to keep you going for months and months like this. I'm feeling worse and worse about being a charity case. I shouldn't be cheating the state of Massachusetts when I've got four thousand dollars in the bank.”

“Look, girl, I'm already embarrassed by those bundles of hundred-dollar bills you keep sending me in the mail. The last one was ridiculous. I don't know why you're so—What did you say? The state of Massachusetts? I'm not a public defender for the state of Massachusetts.”

There was some kind of gap in understanding. Homer glanced back at Kitty. Mary Kelly looked from one to the other. “You mean you
haven't
been sending Homer those bunches of hundred-dollar bills?”

“Me? No!” Kitty put her hand to her head. “But aren't you—I thought you were the lawyer officially assigned to me because I didn't have one. You mean it wasn't the police who called you to come to see me in that jail cell?”

“Jesus Christ.” Homer stopped the truck, and for a moment they sat looking out at the low wind-swept forest of junipers that rimmed Coskata Pond. “It was a note in the mailbox. You mean you didn't ask one of the police officers to get hold of me?”

Kitty couldn't speak. She shook her head.

“Well, who in God's name did?”

They sat staring at each other.

“Homer,” said Mary, “are you sure it wasn't somebody in the Nantucket Police Department? The local judge?”

“But why would they pick on me? I'm not on the list of Nantucket attorneys. There's a bunch of regular court lawyers who do this sort of thing as a matter of course. Why me?”

“What did the note in the mailbox say?” said Mary.

“Hardly anything,” said Homer. “It was typewritten. ‘Katharine Clark has been arrested and needs your assistance.' Something like that. And it must have said where she was, in the jail. I assumed she had asked for me and some policeman had put the note in the Doves' mailbox after he couldn't reach me on the phone. Mmm. I wonder if it could have been Fern. No, I don't see how he could have kept on shelling out so much money all this time. What about Arthur Bird? He could afford it.”

The truck was hot. Kitty opened the back door and let the onshore breeze blow in. “Impossible,” she said.

“Well, good. I'd hate to be beholden to Arthur Bird. But it had to be somebody who knew about the trouble you were in. What about Dick and Letty Roper? No, that's out of the question unless they're a lot less simple than they seem. How about Joe Green?” Homer gave Kitty a sidelong glance. “Let's just think about Joe Green for a minute.”

“He hates me,” said Kitty.

“Well, maybe.” Homer started the engine.

Kitty slammed her door. “No maybe about it,” she said.

Mary laughed. “Maybe somebody hired Homer because they were sure he would louse the whole thing up.”

Homer groaned. “Oh, God,” he said. “You may be right.”

Back in town, Mary and Kitty left Homer washing sand out of the clams while they went off to Main Street to buy salad greens from Mr. Bartlett's truck. Homer abandoned the clams half washed and called up Bob Fern. Maybe Bob would know where the money was coming from.

Bob didn't know. Bob was flabbergasted. “I just assumed she asked Chief Pike to call you in,” he said.

“You assumed, I assumed, she assumed, we all assumed,” growled Homer. He called Richard Roper and Arthur Bird and Joe Green, hoping to surprise one of them into an admission of having been Kitty's benefactor (or Kitty's enemy, depending on what view you took of the competence of that bonehead Homer Kelly). They all denied it.

It was damned peculiar. Homer ate his gritty chowder and thought it over, while Kitty and Mary giggled about Mrs. Pankhurst's daughter Christabel, who had gone to prison too, and had had feeding tubes stuck in her too, and had been marvelous, altogether marvelous. Then Homer took Kitty home. When he got back to Vestal Street someone was reeling up to his door.

“Good God,” said Homer. “Mr. Brown. I didn't recognize you at first. Come right in. Meet my wife. Mary, I told you about Mr. Brown. He has in his custody a certain very precious bolt or a castle nut or something like that. Have we got a little something for the gentleman? I think there's some beer in the back of the icebox. Well, how's the astute automotive engineer this evening?”

“Oh, fine, I'm jush fine. But I thought I better tell you. The adjushm'n' link bolt'sh mishin'.”

“What? The adjustment link bolt? You don't mean—you mean, the one you showed me? With the nice clean threads? It's missing?”

“Shomebody shwiped it. Well, they shwiped the whole cashe a beer. It wazh in a can of axshle greashe, you know, in a cashe a beer in my Coke machine. Shomebody shwiped the whole cashe a beer.”

“Oh, goddamn.” Homer stared at Boozer Brown in dismay. “But the car—the car's all right, isn't it? I mean, you've still got the car?”

“Car? Wha' car?”

“What car? Joe Green's car. The wrecked car. The one the bolt came out of. You've still got the car?”

“Oh, oh, tha' car. Sure, tha' car. No, car'zh gone too. Mizh Magee got a court order. Made me get rid of it. Zheezh, I didn't know you wanted the car. I juzh paid shigstyfi' dollarzh, they hauled it away. Prob'ly all shqueezhed by now, there on the mainland, in one of those big machinezh. I'm shorry.” Boozer wagged his head, his bleary eyes alight with friendliness.

“Oh, Boozer, my God.”

“'T'shall right. I'll teshtify.” Boozer held up his greasy right hand and rolled up his eyes. “Sh'welp me, God. Don' worry, Mizzer Kelly. Oh, thanksh, Mizh Kelly, don' min' 'f I do.” Boozer swilled down his glass of beer, accepted another, told a couple of dirty stories and departed. Homer shut the door behind him and looked at his wife for sympathy.

Mary laughed. “He'll look great on the witness stand,” she said.

“Jesus X. Christ,” said Homer.

It was a hot night. Moths were blundering against the window screen. Homer sat beside the window watching his wife rearrange her notes at the dining room table. He thought long and hard about Mrs. Magee, who had been responsible for the disappearance of the car that had been doctored to cause an accident in which Helen Green might have been killed. Had she also stolen the bolt in the can of axle grease? How would she have known about the bolt? Of course Boozer was a loose talker. Maybe the whole island knew about the linkage bolt in the can of axle grease in the case of beer in Boozer's Coke machine. And then again maybe it was just some thirsty kid who had stolen the case of beer. Homer watched the moths walking feebly up and down the window screen. One of them had pretty turquoise wings, and suddenly he had a vision of Mrs. Magee in a turquoise-colored golfing outfit swinging a golf club gracefully, watching the ball lift over the low undulations of Saul's Hills, which were now all velvet patches of green with little flags sticking up out of them. Helen Green's land! Homer still hadn't found out who in the hell it was who had been trying to swindle Helen Green out of her conservation land. Tomorrow he would call up that legal firm, Chalmers and Partridge. They would be back from vacation by this time. And it was Chalmers and Partridge who had hired the surveyors who were now planting red-topped stakes all over that land, according to Alice Dove. Maybe Chalmers and Partridge could explain what the stakes were for, identify the shareholders in the Boatwright Trust, or tell him how in the hell he could get through to the mysterious trustee in whose care Helen Green had left five million dollars' worth of magnificent Nantucket land—the Swiss banker himself, Hermann Dankbinkel.

34

… innocence and guilt … in effect changed places.

Billy Budd

It took Homer three days to get through to Jarvis Partridge of Chalmers and Partridge. Mr. Partridge was upright and discreet. He refused to discuss the business matters of any client of his with another party. Was Mr. Kelly a shareholder in the Boatwright Trust? No? Well, then it would be highly improper for Mr. Partridge to reveal the private business matters of the trust to an outsider. Homer hung up in a rage, resolved to go after Dankbinkel in earnest. After all, he told himself, Dankbinkel had an office there in Zurich with a telephone in it. And here he was, Homer Kelly, sitting in a chair in a house in Nantucket with a telephone in his hand. They were both human beings, after all, born of woman, fellow mortal souls. He would try presenting the matter to Hermann Dankbinkel himself, as man to man.

Alas, it was already night in Switzerland. Early the next morning, he placed his call. He spoke to Dankbinkel's assistant in the Zurich office of the Schweizerische Kredit Anstalt. Joyfully Homer offered up to her his high school German.

(Here follows an English translation of the transatlantic conversation between Homer Kelly of Nantucket and Frau Magdalena Kranzli of Zurich.)

“Good afternoon, dear madam! Or perhaps miss? How goes it? I am Mr. Homer Kelly, of the United States. May I spoke with Mr. Dankbinkel?”

“I am sorry, but Mr. Dankbinkel is not here. Can I help you?”

“I love, please, to know the names of the peoples who have the parts in the Boatwright Trust, in Nantucket, Massachusetts, in the United States.”