Each step puts me that much farther from a clean escape, but it's not as if I haven't got a backup plan—should one-eyed Jerry burst out of a trash bin and start shooting, I'll simply dive over the rail and swim away like a dolphin.
Pretty darn clever. Always be halfway prepared, that's my motto.
And naturally some old guy is tying up the damn phone. I check my watch—twelve minutes until noon. I hope Cleo doesn't give up because the line rings busy once or twice.
Assuming she tries to call.
I sit down on a worn wooden bench and notice too late that it doubles as a bait table, leaving the seat of my pants covered with lady-fish scales and gummy snippets of rotting shrimp. I am one smooth operator.
The man at the phone booth hangs up and waves to me. "It's all yours, son."
A cheery little fellow topping out at maybe five-two, he's got small wet eyes and fluffy gray hair and a pink pointy face with sparse white whiskers. He looks like a 120-pound opossum.
"Thanks, I'm waiting for a call," I tell him. "Shouldn't be long."
He says his name is Ike and he was talking to his bookie in North Miami. "Don't ever bet on a horse named after a blonde," he advises ruefully.
Ike is fishing three spinning rods. He reels in one and rebaits with a dead pilchard plucked from a five-gallon bucket. "I caught a twenty-three-pound red drum standing at this very spot," he says, "on August 14, 1979. That's my personal best. What's your name, son?"
"Jack."
"Strange place to take a phone call, this pier."
"It's going to be a strange phone call."
"You look familiar. Then again, everybody looks familiar when you reach ninety-two." He laughs, flashing a mouthful of shiny dentures. "Either that, or nobodylooks familiar."
I whistle. "Ninety-two. That's fabulous."
"When I get to ninety-three," he says, "I'll have lived longer than Deng Xiaoping."
"That's right."
"And Miss Claudette Colbert, too." Ike's button-sized eyes are twinkling.
"And Greer Garson!" I exclaim.
"And Alger Hiss!"
"Hey, you're good."
"Well, I been at it a long damn time," the opossum man says.
This is too much. I can't help but laugh.
"Just look at you!" I say.
"It's this healthy salt air. And the fishing, too." Ike rears back and casts the silvery minnow over the rail. "But that's not all," he says. "What I did, son, early on I made up my mind not to die of anything but old age. Stopped smoking because I was afraid of the cancer. Swore off booze because I was scared of driving my car into a tree. Gave up hunting because I was scared of blowing my own head off. Quit chasing trim because I was afraid of being murdered by a jealous husband. Shaved the odds, is what I set out to do. Missed out on a ton of fun, but that's all right. All my friends are planted in the ground and here I am!"
"Where'd you start out?" I ask him.
"At The Oregonian.After that, three years at the Post-Intelligencerin Seattle." He pauses to put on a faded long-billed boat cap with a cotton flap in the back. After nearly a century under the ozone, Ike's still worrying about sun damage. "Then the Beacon-Journalin Akron, briefly at the Tribin Chicago, and a bunch of rags that aren't around anymore."
Phenomenal. He's probably the world's oldest living ex-obituary writer. I ask him what else he covered.
"You name it. Cops, courts, politics." Ike shrugs. "But obits is what stayed with me. Funny, isn't it, how it gets a grip? That was the first beat I had out of college and the last beat I had before retiring. Twenty-seven years ago that was ... "
The opossum man has noticed a subtle twitch at the tip of one of his rods. He reels up the slack and sets the hook so zestfully that he nearly loses his balance. With bony kneecaps braced against the rail, he hauls in a husky mutton snapper, quickly thrown on ice.
"Don't get me wrong, Jack," he says. "I was a fairly decent writer but not in your league."
His delivery is downright rabbinical, otherwise I'd swear he's blowing smoke. "How'd you know who I was?"
"I read the Union-Registerfaithfully every morning," he declares. "Also I had my eyes peeled, because some young lady phoned here about twenty minutes ago asking for you by name."
"That's impossible."
"She'll be calling back any second, I expect," Ike says.
Suddenly the sun is blinding and the heat is suffocating and I'm breathing nothing but dead-fish stink. Frantically I scan the pier to make sure no one's coming, while Ike is saying he'd be honored to loan me his Norwegian fillet knife, which he assures me is sharp enough to penetrate dinosaur hide. The sensible microfraction of my brain issues the signal to run like hell, but the reckless remainder says I should stay and ascertain how Cleo Rio already figured out that I'm responsible for the disc in the deli bag.
And they could be anywhere, the widow's boys, watching and waiting—on the beach, in a boat, even in a small plane.
Yes, this was quite the crafty plan of mine.
"Ike, you might want to try your luck someplace else."
"Hell, I'm not budging." He chuckles as he cranks in another fish. "I've had three heart attacks, son. I lost half my stomach, fourteen feet of intestines and even my trusty old prostate to one nasty thing or another. Plus I've been through two divorces, both in community-property states, so there's not much on God's green earth that scares me anymore. These are rough customers?"
"You could say that."
"Just tell me it's not over dope."
"This isn't about drugs, Ike. It's about a newspaper story."
The old opossum man beams. "Good for you, Jack Tagger."
Then the phone rings.
Here's how I messed up. I assumed Cleo would panic the moment she discovered the compact disc in the deli bag—or at least after she listened to it. I figured she'd be too rattled to bother snooping after the phony delivery boy, our intrepid Evan.
But I underestimated the little barracuda. She must have called up the restaurant manager to find out if there'd been a pickup order for meatball subs with a side of slaw. From there it would have been easy to match the bogus delivery to my phone order. Lots of takeout joints use caller-ID logs, which work just dandy on most non-published numbers. That's likely how the deli man got my name, which he provided to Jimmy Stoma's wife as blithely as he would to any booty-flashing celebrity customer.
Big mistake on my part. Major fuckage. Tomorrow I'm calling the phone company and springing for the trace-blocking option.
For now, there's nothing to do but strap on an attitude and act like I'm having a ball. I wait until the fourth ring before lifting the receiver.
"Is this Cindy?" I say sweetly. "Of oyster fame?"
The desired effect is achieved—a long pause, broken by edgy breathing, on the other end of the line.
Finally: "Fuck you, Tagger."
"How's widowhood treating you, Mrs. Stomarti? Is it all you hoped it would be?"
"What a flaming asshole you are. I don't even know why we're talking."
"I'll tell you why. Because, A, you're dying to find out how I got a copy of that track. And, B, you want to know if I've figured out what really happened to your husband."
Not much return fire from Cleo's end. The static leads me to think she's on a cellular.
"Listen closely," I tell her. "I know you don't give a shit about 'Cindy's Oyster' but there's another song you've been searching all over creation for. I've got that one, too. Your title cut."
"Oh, I'm so sure."
Snideness is such an unattractive quality in the bereaved. Now I'm thinking I ought to sing the song, just to give the needle to Cleo. So I do the verse that has the nice line about night whispering to the shore—Ike, gutting a fish, sways appreciatively—and for good measure I finish big with: