Black Duck Page 9

  It was only as I stared at this object that a faint sense of recognition arrived in my head. I put the pouch aside and began trying to unroll the thing. Seawater had stiffened it and collapsed the ends. I managed at last to spread it flat on my desk, and there, in a flash, the exotic greenish design turned commonplace. Before me lay one half of a fifty-dollar bill.

  THE BILL

  I LOOKED IMMEDIATELY FOR THE SECOND half. Nothing else was in the pouch. The bill had been neatly torn in half, but why anyone would do such a thing to perfectly good money was beyond me. Fifty dollars was way too much to waste that way. I wondered if it might be counterfeit, or, a longer shot, was carrying a message of some kind. After dinner, I borrowed my mother’s magnifying glass from the table in the front parlor where she used it to read the newspaper.

  Under the bright beam of my desk lamp, the grainy image of General Ulysses S. Grant became a series of uninteresting swirls, revealing nothing. His stern face ended at the left ear, where the bill had been torn. On the bill’s back, the grand U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., was sheared off down the middle. Nothing unusual there, either. I’d heard that counterfeit bills lacked the tiny red and blue threads that run almost invisibly through the background of real money. This bill had red and blue threads galore. It was real.

  I gave up in disgust. Half a fifty-dollar bill was about as useless as an old bottle cap. Worse than useless, I decided, because it made you think of what you might have bought if you’d only had the rest.

  If Jeddy and I had been talking, I would’ve showed my discovery to him and we could’ve had a good time making up theories about it. Instead, I tucked it between the pages of my geometry book that night, and over the next couple of weeks mostly forget about it. From time to time, it would slip out when I did my assignments. I’d reexamine it—the half was now a flattened square—and slide it back between the pages.

  One day at school, I was stashing my books in my locker, getting ready to go to lunch, when I heard a voice in back of me say:

  “Here, Ruben, you dropped something.”

  I turned around to find Jeddy holding out the piece of bill. He’d been standing back, waiting for me to finish loading my things so he could get to his locker, which still was, as it always had been, right next to mine.

  “It slipped out of your book.”

  “Thanks.” I took the bill from his hand. He watched me put it back in the book with a comical look on his face, as if to say, “Saving up to buy something with that?” I knew he was wondering about it.

  “I found it in the dead man’s tobacco pouch, all rolled up,” I explained in a low voice. “I thought it was a cigarette.”

  “Too bad it wasn’t,” he said. “Might’ve been good for a smoke at least.”

  I laughed and so did he. We’d put in some time with a pack of Lucky Strikes behind the McKenzies’ garage not long before our breakup. For a minute we stood grinning at each other, remembering. I thought maybe that was an opening, but Jeddy turned and walked off and never said another word. My heart fell. I saw nothing had changed. He was sticking by his dad, true blue, to the end.

  Mr. Riley’s court date came up about midway through May. Chief McKenzie sent Charlie Pope to testify and Riley was convicted by a federal judge in Providence of “possessing and transporting liquor.” He was sentenced to eight months in jail. At the store, the staff shook their heads over it.

  “He got the book thrown at him,” Bink Mosher said.

  “You can bet there’s some shenanigans behind it,” Fanny DeSousa agreed. “I tell you what, I don’t trust anybody anymore.”

  A lot of people in town were angry. Other folks who’d been brought in by the Feds under similar circumstances had gotten off with a fine. The jail sentence was unfair, most believed. There was a general suspicion that money had changed hands to put him behind bars. I even heard my father tell my mother and Aunt Grace that he’d gotten a bum rap.

  “The whole thing stinks to high heaven,” he said. “Somebody was out to get him, and they did. There’s judges getting paid to—”

  “Didn’t I say so?” Aunt Grace interrupted. “Every which way you turn, somebody’s asking for a payoff.”

  “Surely not here in town,” my mother said. “Ralph McKenzie’s an honest man.”

  They were all in the kitchen. I was listening from the top of the back stairs leading down, and I waited to hear what my father would say to this. There came a clank of dishes—they were washing up from supper—then the sound of the sink emptying.

  “Carl, what’ve you got against him?” my mother said finally, with more impatience than she usually allowed in her voice. “We all used to be such good friends. I know Ralph’s changed some since Eileen died, but who can blame him? He loved her so. I can’t see why you look that way whenever I bring up his name.”

  There was no answer. I heard a squeak from the back door as it opened. A minute later, our old Ford was revving up and on its way out the driveway.

  The Interview

  I WENT BY RILEY’S STORE AFTER WE FINISHED here yesterday. You’re right, there are old storage cellars still under the barn out back, David tells Mr. Hart on a hot afternoon in what has now become the month of July.

  They’re not the only ones, by any means, Mr. Hart answers. You take a close look at some of the older farmhouses down near the water, you’ll find trapdoors, false ceilings, closets in unlikely places. Everybody was hiding the stuff, both for selling and drinking.

  They’re sitting outside in Mr. Hart’s front yard, on plastic lawn chairs under a tree. David helped carry the chairs from the decrepit garage teetering on its last legs in back of the house, the same place he found Mr. Hart’s moldy, calcified clippers.

  It must be a law of nature, David thinks, that when folks get old, everything around them ages too: their bathrooms and kitchens, their rugs and chairs, their cars, their clothes, their pets, their books, their eyeglasses.

  Just try and buy an old person anything new, though, a garden cart that actually works or a rake to replace the one with half the prongs broken off. They’ll protest. They don’t want it. David sees it all the time at Peterson’s Garden Shop. (Despite what his dad says, he’s already put in a good amount of time there over the years.) The old stuff is like family to them. You wouldn’t throw out your wife just because she’s lost a few teeth.

  Mr. Hart goes on:

  There’s a house up in Harveston where a pipe runs from the beach all the way up to a big holding tank under the garage. They’d pump Canadian whiskey by the gallon up there and repackage it for delivery—you know, siphon it into olive oil tins or gasoline drums, anything to fool the Feds if they were stopped on the road.

  Creative thinking, David jokes.

  You wouldn’t believe how creative you can get when it comes to making money outside the law.

  I thought you said you weren’t involved.

  Like I told you, I had friends in the business. Close friends.

  Well, I guess none of them has come into this story, yet, David says, slyly. Unless you’re about to get close to Charlie Pope or Mr. Riley.

  I’m not.

  So there was somebody else?

  A big important somebody, that’s right.

  Well?

  Keep your cap on, you’re about to meet ’em.

  TOM MORRISON’S VISITOR

  ONE SATURDAY AFTERNOON I WAS PEDALING toward the harbor with a package of stuff for Tom Morrison when I came up on Marina bent over her bicycle along the side of the road.

  “What’s the matter?” I called out. When she pointed, I saw that her front tire was flat. It had picked up some kind of steel tack and the air was already all but gone out of it.

  “Where’d this come from?” I said when I got over to her. I tried to pull the thing out, but it was stuck in too deep to get leverage on.

  “Look,” she said, “they’re all over the place here.”

  A great mass of tacks was lying along the roadside,
and also on the other side of the road.

  “I guess somebody knocked over a nail keg,” was the best I could come up with.

  “Oh, it’s the rumrunners,” Marina said, shaking her head. “They let loose with these out the back of their trucks if the cops get too close. My dad’s always coming home with flat tires. Now what am I going to do?”

  “Where were you going?” I asked.

  “I was thinking of buying some fresh clams down at the docks, for chowder tonight. And taking a ride on a nice June day. I guess I’m headed back home, like it or not.”

  There was a long silence after this while she leaned down and poked at the tire again, and I looked on, thinking about possible solutions to the problem that I would never dare to mention to Marina. She had on a blue sweater and a red bandana over her dark hair, which tumbled halfway down her back. I could’ve stood there all day looking at her, and very well might have if she hadn’t decided she’d waited long enough for me to come to my senses.

  “You wouldn’t give me a ride down there, would you, Ruben?” she said, standing up. “I mean, unless you’re in a hurry, making a delivery for the store. I wouldn’t dream of holding you up.”

  Something was wrong with me and I didn’t know what. A year or two before, the idea of riding Marina to the harbor wouldn’t have made me think twice. She would’ve climbed on board and we’d have been off in a minute. Now I felt as if I’d been hit over the head with a ton of bricks and received some serious brain damage.

  “It isn’t,” I said.

  “Isn’t what?” Marina asked.

  “A delivery. I mean it is, but . . .”

  “Oh, well, in that case . . .”

  “No, really . . .”

  “Definitely not. You’re on a job, I see that now.”

  “No!”

  “Well, you’ve got a package.”

  “I know, but . . .”

  “Ruben, no. You don’t have time.”

  “Yes, I . . .”

  “I’m just going to walk back and . . .”

  “No, Marina. I can do it!” I was in a frantic state by this time.

  “I’ve gotten you in a fizz by asking you to do something you can’t,” Marina said. She had that serious wrinkle between her eyes that always finished me.

  “No!”

  It was several minutes more before we worked things out, and she finally did sit herself down on my handlebars. This was such a nerve-racking pleasure that I couldn’t think of one thing to say. She tried out a comment now and then, otherwise we rode in silence.

  “Where were you going, actually?” she asked me at last.

  When I said it was just to Coulter’s Point to see Tom Morrison and bring him some coffee grinds, she insisted we stop by on the way back, after she’d bought the clams.

  “Tom Morrison,” she said. “Is he still down there in that chicken coop? I haven’t thought about him in years.”

  “He’s still there,” I said. “Jeddy and I went to visit him a while ago, and I’ve been going by since. He’s a grand old fellow. Do you really want to come? I might stay a few minutes.”

  Marina said she’d be more than pleased. It would give her a look at the beach, which she hadn’t seen lately. So down we went, and we were quite a load on the bicycle with the addition of a couple of bushels of clams in a burlap sack and Marina laughing and balancing them on her knees.

  “I’d offer you supper for all this trouble, but I guess you and Jeddy haven’t patched up yet,” she said. “What’s the matter, anyhow?”

  I didn’t want to say that the real stumbling block was her own dad, so I shaded things a little.

  “Jeddy wants to report everything to the police,” I told her. “What I think is, you’ve got to pick and choose.”

  “Well, I’m not getting in the middle of that one.” She laughed. She thought a minute and added, “You know, it’s hard when your father works in law enforcement. It’s like a spotlight is shining on you and you’ve got to do everything by the book, whether you think it’s fair or not. Otherwise you’ll be going against him, out in public, for everyone to see. Give Jeddy some time. He’ll find a way back.”

  “You think he will?” I felt a little hope spring up in me.

  She smiled and nodded. “You’ve always been friends. You can’t just stop.”

  By this time, we were near where the dirt road to Coulter’s ended and the dunes began. As we rounded a final bend, I saw that Tom Morrison had a visitor. A rowing dory was pulled up on the shore near the path that went in to his shack.

  We dumped my bike. Marina put her sack of clams in a tidal pool between the rocks to keep them fresh, and we walked in through the dunes. I was jumpy about who we’d run into and kept a sharp eye out as we came up on Tom’s junk-strewn yard.

  One thing I wasn’t expecting was a big white dog I’d never seen before that came charging toward us, barking like fury. While we were backing away, trying to talk some sense into the beast, the door of Tom’s house flew open and out came Billy Brady, an older kid I knew. He’d lived in town until his family had moved to Harveston a couple of years before. Marina knew him, too. He’d graduated from the regional high school the year before.

  “Sadie!” he shouted. “Hey, Sadie, stop that!”

  This was to the dog, who looked to me like a white Labrador, an unusual sight around our parts. Anything purebred was. This being farm country, dogs mostly roamed free and far afield, where they met up with other dogs out of reach of human interference. All kinds of combinations of mutt would result, to the general improvement of the species, some would argue.

  “Billy Brady, is this your pup?” Marina yelled over the racket.

  “She is. Gives off a good alarm, doesn’t she?” he bellowed back.

  He strode forward to capture Sadie and drag her away from us. He was a good-looking fellow with a rowdy head of black hair who’d filled out a lot since I’d last seen him. Behind him came Tom Morrison, grinning from ear to ear. I didn’t know if it was Billy or his dog that was responsible, but Tom looked the happiest I’d seen him since Viola.

  Turned out it was both, and maybe Marina, too, because Tom hadn’t set eye recently on a “female biped,” as he was shortly to tell her. When Sadie quieted down, we made introductions, which weren’t really necessary because we all knew each other, only from different walks of life. I asked Billy how he’d come to be there.

  “Just keeping up with this coot,” he said, jabbing a thumb in Tom’s direction. “I get by every once in a while.”

  “Every once in a long while, you mean,” Tom teased him. “Been more’n a year, hasn’t it?”

  Billy said it had, and he had plans to do better in the future. “My dad worked for Tom on his fishing schooner in the old days, till it got wrecked. They had some high times together from what I hear.”

  “We did,” Tom said. “Otis Brady were one of the best. Could spot a school of blues a half mile off.”

  “Did your dad pass on?” I asked Billy.

  “Last summer,” he said. “Didn’t you know?”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, I guess you could say he ran into some lead. The Coast Guard aimed too high.”

  Tom Morrison’s face darkened when he heard this. “I didn’t know he’d got shot,” he said. “I heard it was a boat explosion that brought him down.”

  “That’s the story the Coast Guard’s been telling,” Billy said, a bitter tone in his voice. “I believe different. There was an explosion, all right, but it came after, when the boat went up on the rocks. My father was shot dead at the wheel. With a machine gun.”

  “Was he smuggling?” Marina asked.

  “Who wants to know?” Billy fired back. He knew full well who Marina’s dad was.

  She fixed him with her straight-in-the-eye look and said, “Billy, you know I don’t work for the police.”

  “How do I know when you live in the same house as them?”

  “Because I just told you!”
she exclaimed. “You can judge me how you want.”

  He gazed back at her for a moment, then dropped his eyes. She’d outstared him the way she did anyone she came up against. Somehow, in the midst of his defeat, Billy Brady must’ve decided to trust her, because he went on to answer her question.

  “My father had a couple of hundred cases on board, most of which went to the bottom when she blew up,” he said. “The Coast Guard came back and fished out what was left the next day, and took it away for themselves. What I believe is, it was a setup.”

  “You mean the Coast Guard shot your dad for his load?” I couldn’t believe that.

  “Not for the liquor. The Guard was after him, all right. But some of those officers are out of control. They’ve started taking the law into their own hands. There’s a big Boston gang that’s trying to muscle in around here, and what I believe is, they ratted on my dad to one of these maniac officers, tipped him off to my dad’s run that night, hoping he’d go in and shoot up the boat. Which he did. Officer Roger Campbell, if you want to know his name. He says he didn’t intend to hit anybody. Swears he was just giving ‘fair warning’ to stop. But everybody knows you don’t fire warning shots with a machine gun into a ship’s pilot house.”

  “Is that what happened?” Marina asked.

  “It is,” Billy said. “That’s according to all three men who were my dad’s crew that night. Somehow, those warning shots went astray. I won’t say any more.”

  Tom looked grim. “Whether it’s from the Coast Guard or the gangsters, we’re losing some good men to the rum business,” he said. “And good dogs, too.”

  Billy nodded and turned to me. “I heard about what happened to Viola. That’s one reason I’m here, to see if I can get an idea of who it was that shot her.”