Jake's 8 (16 page)

Dallas let go of my hair to help his employer with the ancient pistol. Relieved of his support, I fell back into the clutches of Abbie. “Yes, my love,” she yelled ecstatically and firmly gripped a rear end cheek in each hand. “Take me.”

Kendra’s entrance at this point was really a bit much for me. But looking down at me between the legs of my old college girlfriend whose hands were firmly on my ass pulling me tighter and tighter against her with said girlfriend’s father and employee attempting to figure out how to fire an antique into my face was definitely too much for her. Her pretty face twisted into a grotesque of anger and confusion. She was finally able to say something. She said, “Wha… wha… wha… wha… wha?”

“Father, write that plain girl a check to go away and leave Jake alone.”

Luckily Patty and Billy, looking flush with a thin sheen of sweat across their skin, walked in. Patty was able to grab Kendra as she lunged for her sister.

Billy piped up. “Jake, really! Kendra is right
here
.”

I lunged for Billy but was kept down by the tangled web of Abbie legs and arms.

Then the doorbell rang.

“The police,” said Mr. Dunkirk.

We all froze in position: Me on top of Abbie. Abbie holding me. Mr. Dunkirk and Dallas looking at the gun. Patty holding Kendra from Abbie. And Billy standing with his arms folded smiling away.

“Get the door, Dallas,” Mr. Dunkirk said.

“Yes, sir.” Dallas went to get the door.

A few moments later, Dallas didn’t lead a pair of Cincinnati white-shirted officers as expected but my
jefe
, Prescott Carmichael.

“Excuse me for intruding,” he said looking around the room then asked, “Are you all playing a game?”

“Not a game,” said Mr. Dunkirk. “A trespass. Then a theft! Followed by an attack on my daughter. What kind of employees do you hire, Carmichael?”

He then looked at his daughter, “Let go of him, Abigail!”

Abigail, rebuked into sanity, let go of me. I stood, straightened my shirt and suit and nodded at Mr. Carmichael. Kendra, released from Patty’s clutches stepped over Abigail and stood next to me. We put our arms around each other. I gave her a tender kiss on the cheek. She pinched some of the skin on my back and twisted. I hid my wince, but her extracting a few ounces of flesh did form a tear in my eye. I wiped it away quickly. Abbie took in this declaration of solidarity between Kendra and myself and stormed out of the sitting room. Her sister followed.

“Mr. Dunkirk, can I speak with you privately?”

Mr. Dunkirk eyeballed me. “Do you guarantee he won’t steal anything or attack anybody?”

“I do,” said Mr. Carmichael.

Mr. Dunkirk turned to Billy and handed him the firearm. “You watch him! If he tries anything, shoot him. If it doesn’t fire… pummel him with it.”

“I will,” said Billy who smiled at me.

Mr. Dunkirk led Mr. Carmichael across the hall to the library. He turned, sneered at me and slammed the doors behind him.

Billy was the first to speak.

“It’s best you just shut up,” I told him. He shut up.

I turned to Kendra to explain how things got this way.

“It’s best you just shut up,” she told me. I shut up.

We all stood there equally shut up.

Finally, after a few minutes, the two men emerged from the library. Mr. D.’s stance was a bit more relaxed. He shook Mr. C.’s hand and headed down the hall. My boss crossed the hall to us.

“I think it best we get out of here,” I said to him.

“One moment,” he replied. He then stood in silence.

“Can I ask what we’re waiting for?”

“Dallas.”

“Dallas?”

“Dallas.”

When Mr. Carmichael doesn’t offer an explanation I don’t ask for one. We waited for Dallas. Finally, the man paused outside the door to the sitting room. Mr. Carmichael approached him. Dallas handed him something that looked suspiciously like a phone. Mr. Carmichael handed Dallas something that looked exactly like ten one hundred dollar bills. Dallas walked away and Mr. Carmichael walked back in.

“Your phone, Billy.”

“Thank you,” said Billy, “but...”

“Let’s go,” said Mr. Carmichael. I quickly followed pulling a somewhat stunned Kendra behind me.

At Mr. Carmichael's car, I opened the rear door for Kendra and let her slip in. I shut it and slid myself into the front passenger seat.

“Can you explain that?”

“Sure,” said Mr. Carmichael.

“Are you going to?”

Mr. Carmichael turned to me. He said, “I’ve been trying to earn the trust of the Dunkirk’s for several years. I know Dallas from… a prior life. After the phoneless Billy left my office today, I telephoned Dallas who said he had found the phone last week and, after seeing the pictures on it, decided to keep the phone a while to increase Billy’s discomfort. He’s not a member of the Billy fan club.”

“So you sent me on a wild goose chase?”

“No.”

“There was no way I’d find the phone.”

“You were not chasing down the phone, but the Dunkirk account. That obviously didn’t work out.”

“No, it didn’t. It almost got me shot though.”

“Yes, sorry about that.”

Mr. Carmichael turned forward, pulled his seat belt across him and started the car and began to drive away. We rounded the half-circle driveway and I looked up to the immense house.

Abbie was there standing at a window. Those features still didn’t look right. When she caught my eye she stuck out her tongue then slowly raised the middle finger of her right hand and wagged it at me.

A military transport truck stood by the east gate of the airport. Uniformed men lounged in the shade of the truck. I slowed the bike down to see if they were military or rebels. They looked at us to see if were was government or revolutionary. At two hundred yards, it was hard for any of us to tell. Soon, however, my complexion gave me away and two of them came to their feet and lifted up rifles.

“Hold tight,” I told her and felt her arms tighten.

I pointed the bike down an access road. I heard two shots far and distant over the buzzing of the Kawasaki. Wasted ammo, I thought. I glanced back and the men were not following. I sped on toward the south gate.

A Chinook lifted off from a far corner of the airport. It flew toward the north then banked west and flew toward the sea and a waiting carrier. I prayed it wasn’t the last flight out.

Her grip loosened and I caught her as she fell off the right side of the bike. I brought it to a stop and helped her to the ground.

“I won’t make it,” she said.

“Shut up,” I told her. I let the bike fall and carried her to a tree. I laid her down in the shade. I turned her over gently. There was a wound in her lower back. A damned lucky shot.

“I won’t make it, right?”

“No. You’re not going to make it.”

"Bésame,”
she said.
I kissed her.

She stayed with me for several long moments, then slipped away.

I felt no rage. I felt no anger. I felt only loss.

Gumshoe
wasn’t inspired by a cocktail. It was inspired by two things. The first was me going through a period of reading a few James M. Cain novels. He wrote
The Postman Always Rings Twice
and
Double Indemnity
among others. The second was being witness to the crack-up of a long-time marriage of two decent people.

James M. Cain made me want to write
noir
. Hell, Cain makes anyone who reads him not only
want
to write
noir,
but want to live
noir
. He’s a brilliant writer, insightful of the human condition and unafraid to tell how he sees it. Watching the marriage bust up made me depressed. They were good people—flawed but good. The divorce process made them cruel.

So with Cain’s novels and the clients’ divorce weighing on my psyche, I sat down at my desk, pulled over a coffee stained mug, poured in three fingers of Ancient Age bourbon and wrote
Gumshoe
.

Don’t add ice.

Don’t add water.

Drink until it’s drank.

Pour another.

Enjoy
Gumshoe
.

– Howard McEwen

Mr. and Mrs. Swanson had gone to bed much as they had every night for the last fifty years. While she finished up in the bathroom, he removed the seven decorative pillows from the bed and put them on the bench his wife had selected to be placed at the bed’s foot. He turned down the duvet, which he called the thick blanket, then the thin blanket and the sheet then, after kicking off his slippers, got into bed.

She came out from the bathroom smelling of Noxzema and Oil of Olay and joined him under the covers. He bent across and kissed her on the cheek then turned to his nightstand and picked up the TV remote and headphones. She found her place in the book club novel she had checked out from the library and began to read.

He clicked on the sports channel and fitted his headphones over his bald skull. She had finally agreed ten years earlier to a TV in the bedroom after he fell asleep once too often watching it in his livingroom easy chair. But the sound disturbed her reading and sleep so she asked him to wear the headphones. He agreed. He didn’t so much out of courtesy to her, but because after turning sixty, he was having trouble hearing. The headphones helped. She had started to nag him about getting hearing aids. He’d been resisting.

She returned his kiss by patting him on his long left leg which was stretched out to the end of the bed, then turned to her book. She was proud of the fact that halfway through her seventies she still didn’t need reading glasses.

She flipped the page and heard him suck in a sudden breath. She patted his leg again. “Excuse you,” she said.

A half hour later, she came to the end of a chapter, placed her bookmark, put her book on the nightstand and turned to her husband to lift a headphone from his ear and say goodnight.

He was slumped over in a way she’d never seen him sleep before. It was him, but not him. She looked at his eyelids and saw no movement. His chest didn’t rise or fall. She put her ear to his heart and heard nothing. She knew he was gone and that their life together was over. She took his right hand and placed it on her left breast. She wanted to feel the heat of his body one last time before it faded away.

It was the third time she’d told me the story of her husband’s death and the second time I listened to it as if hearing it for the first time.

Mrs. Swanson now sat in my conference room filling out forms. We needed to transfer her husband’s retirement accounts into her name, take his name off of their joint accounts, then update her beneficiaries to her three forty-something children. She had brought in three copies of his death certificate, complaining about the twenty-four dollars Hamilton County charged for each one. The children were all doing well and all had their own children. I listed each of their names followed by ‘share equal,
per stirpes.
’

My boss, Prescott Carmichael, had adios’d it out of the office yesterday. He didn’t say why, but he told me to clear his calendar for a fortnight. That meant my calendar was cleared for the same two weeks. Pretty much. Things like Mrs. Swanson’s paperwork needed to be done and while Mr. Carmichael liked to at least be present for these meetings, it needed done and he wasn’t around, so the task fell to me alone.

Our secretary, Mrs. Johnson, came in. I’d noticed she had on a scarf that she hadn’t worn earlier in the morning. It was arranged to cover her cleavage. Maybe it was out of respect for Mrs. Swanson’s grief. Mrs. Johnson always showed some cleavage, but never too much. She was never unprofessional. Just the opposite. However, she was self-aware enough to know she gave off a sexual charge and, in deference to Mrs. Swanson, may have taken the extra time and care to rein it in. Or she was chilly. I was guessing that thoughts of losing Mr. Johnson, who I’d say she had been married to for at least twenty-five years, were going through her mind. The scarf didn’t work completely. Even at her age, the woman was a traffic stopper.

Me? Yeah, I was thinking of my best girl Kendra. Would the two of us be lying together in bed several decades off when one of us ran down the curtain? I didn’t really want to be thinking of Kendra, but she kept flitting up into my frontal lobes.

I checked Mrs. Swanson’s paperwork one last time then bundled it together for Mrs. Johnson to run through the machine, mail the originals to the product companies and file the copies. It was eleven forty-five in the a.m., but no one else was on the schedule. I needed a walk. And a hamburger.

I hiked it down Seventh Street over to Plum and then up Central to Liberty where I walked into Ollie’s Trolley and ordered a Big Ollie burger with special sauce and fries. I propped myself up against a wall and gazed again at all the sun faded snapshots taped onto every spare space. After a bit of a wait and handing over a fin and change, I plopped down at one of their plastic outdoor tables and made my moves on the best prepared piece of cow flesh in Cincinnati.

Enjoying my second chomp, my phone rang. Caller I.D. said it was the office. Mrs. Johnson calling. I took the call.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Jack Weston is here.”

“He didn’t have an appointment.”

“No, he didn’t.” She said it in a sing song voice she used to signal Mr. Weston was hovering close by.

“He’ll have to wait. I walked up to Ollie’s for lunch. I’ll finish up and stroll back.”

“I’ll let him know and ask him to have a seat.”

I flipped my phone closed and wrapped my mouth around another bite of Ollie’s burger when the phone chirped again. It was Mrs. Johnson.

“Yep.”

“He left in a huff. He overheard you say Ollie’s and I think he’s on his way there.”

“Okay, thanks.” I hung up my phone again and wondered what could be the problem. Men didn’t leave Mrs. Johnson’s presence in a huff. Men took any opportunity to spend time with Mrs. Johnson. Men tended to linger and attempted to charm Mrs. Johnson. Men failed. Always.

I finished my burger and when he didn’t appear I decided to wait him out, so I went inside and ordered a slice of lemon cake. I brought it outside again.

Mr. Weston was getting out of a penis size supplementing SUV. It was one of those oversized numbers designed for the Baja or Sahara or the sands of Iraq circa 2003 that wouldn’t see any of the action is was designed for on the suburban Cincinnati streets it patrolled. He was suited up and had a bit of panic in his walk. I sat down at the plastic table and motioned for him to join me. He did and I shook his hand over my cake.

“Is there someplace we can talk? Privately?”

“There’s no one around now. Plus I haven’t finished my cake. If you want to make an appointment, you can call Mrs. Johnson.”

He flashed me a scrunched-faced annoyed look. He had twenty years on me. About fifty-five. He was a big man. He probably played college ball but had since built up a gut. Nothing too prominent. Just too many beers. His tailored suit earned its price by hiding it well. He made his money wholesaling office supplies and equipment. What that meant I wasn’t too sure.

“No, I need to talk now.”

“Alright, talk,” I said. I wasn’t being rude. I was following Mr. Carmichael’s example. He was all about ‘client service,’ but we weren’t at the client’s beck and call. If you allow someone to treat you like a servant instead of an advisor—and all upper-income folks will try to treat everyone as a servant—they will treat you like a servant instead of an advisor. And lose all respect for you. Nothing makes a wealthy person clamber for your attention like showing disinterest in them. In that way, they are a lot like women and cats.

“It’s about my wife,” he said. He stopped then looked around with this worried look covering his face.

“So what about your wife?”

“I wish Mr. Carmichael was in town,” he said.

“Me too but he’s not. You got me. If he was here he’d say be direct. So spit it out.”

He steeled himself.

“I think she’s fooling around on me.” He spurt it out then stopped again. He was waiting for me to say something. To offer condolences or placate him in some way. I didn’t. Most people have a need to fill quiet air. I don’t have that need, so I didn’t fill the air. I wanted him to fill the air. After a few moments of silence and another scrunched-faced annoyed look he blustered on.

“I don’t know for sure. I just feel something’s up. She’s been taking exercise classes. She’s never done that. She’s going to the salon all the time now. Not just to get her hair done, but the full works. You should see these bills. And, well, she’s getting waxed. You know, everywhere. That’s new. Surprised the heck out of me one night. There’s new clothes, too. Trendy, fashionable clothes. And she’s always in a good mood, but she’s gone for hours at a time. She floats around the house humming sometimes. I thought I was being paranoid, but then I ran into a friend of hers. Her teacher at a pottery class. My wife’s been taking her class for ten years. She asked how Kathleen was doing since she hadn’t seen her in months. But just the night before my wife told me her pottery class was going fine.”

He let the air hang empty again. I took a turn filling it in this time.

“You talk to her about it? Ask her?”

“No. I feel like a jerk. There’s nothing definite. What am I to say? You seem happy and are taking care of yourself so you must be whoring it up? After hearing about the pottery class is when I came to see Mr. Carmichael. But that could be nothing too.”

“You want we should start preparing your accounts for a divorce?”

“No. I don’t want a divorce. Not now at least. I first want to know if she’s screwing somebody else.”

“That’s not the type of work we do,” I said. I regretted saying it. I never had done this kind of work. We do investments, but I had my doubts if Mr. Carmichael would agree that it wasn’t the kind of work we do. He might classify it as ‘client service.’ It just wasn’t the type of work I wanted to do.

“I think it is the type of work you do, Mr. Gibb. Mr. Carmichael has a reputation. I’ll talk to him when he gets back.”

“Sit down,” I said. “You’re right. You get a divorce it affects your money, which is what we help with. I’ll look into it. I’m not some sleaze ball detective. I won’t crawl around in bushes. I won’t peek into windows. I won’t take any naughty pictures. I hope that’s not what you’re into.”

“Screw you.”

“You want my help?”

“Yes.”

“Then be polite.”

He nodded.

“I handed him my card. Email me her picture. I’ve not seen her in a while and married women don’t register with me. Let me know next time she’s going out.”

“Tonight. Her pottery class, well, what is supposed to be her pottery class. It’s at seven. She usually leaves about six thirty.”

“Okay. Email me that picture. I got your address.”

“You’ll get back to me?”

“Give me a week. Text me where she’s heading this week, if she heads anywhere. I’m not comfortable with this and I’m not one-hundred percent sure Mr. Carmichael would be comfortable with it. If I get a hold of him and he says stand down, I stand down. Otherwise, I’ll see what I can find out.”

He didn’t shake my hand but hoisted himself up, walked to that SUV of his and climbed in. He did a U-turn on Liberty causing three cars to tap their brakes.

I hit speed dial number one and left a message filling in Mr. Carmichael with half a hope he’d call back saying no dice on this one. I then dialed up Mrs. Johnson. I told her I’d be out doing some ‘client service.’ She didn’t ask what. I was glad she didn’t. She’s good like that. Competent, sexy and silent. My clunker wouldn’t do, so I asked her to get a mid-size sedan, black, nondescript, a Ford, if possible, and have it delivered to my place.

She’d have it done. I didn’t worry about that. I hiked it down Liberty to Main and hung a right to my condo. I showered, changed into a more relaxed look—Cincinnati summer time. Dockers and a button up shirt, a pair of leather boat shoes.

I went to grab some leftover Chinese out of the fridge. I saw the soy milk and then some week old sushi from Teak up on Mt. Adams that Kendra had bought. It made me think of her. I’d been trying to not think of Kendra. Like Mr. Carmichael, she was gone for a fortnight. Off to see her sister in Boston. I wasn’t convinced she was telling the truth about Boston or the sister.

Things had gotten serious quickly for us and now the worry finger in my brain was picking at an anxiety. About two months ago, Kendra stayed over and never left. I was fine with that. She seemed fine with that. She’d been renting an apartment out in Westwood with a friend from high school, but her office was in a tower on Fourth. By staying with me her daily commute was gone. Necessary items for daily living slowly migrated to my place—first toiletries, then clothes and more clothes. Jewelry and a few books and then a few knick-knacks appeared on my shelves. I was good with that.

We did the usual new couple thing. We stayed in, watched movies and went to bed before we were tired. We turned off the lights and threw it around to a regular routine we’d quickly developed then drifted off to sleep.

There was still the fingering worry. She said we were good. But after a few weeks, I noticed what I hadn’t noticed. No mood swings. No crankiness. No sexual hiatus. No white wrappers in the bathroom trash can. The more I noticed what wasn’t there to be noticed the more it seemed Kendra’s own worry finger was poking at something.