All done now. Leave him up for a day to feed the vultures, then cut what’s left loose. Weigh him down with four fifty-pound anchors attached to durable steel chain, and there he goes, off Bitches Ledge where the sea is, what... five hundred feet deep?
“Sorry, Tom,” the Sisters would have said. But what the hell. Their law is the law.
Tom had it coming. Drunk out of his mind again, he had called the Sisters sexist names. He had been picking fights with big guys who felt embarrassed but hit him anyway, causing drunk-and-disorderly charges. Priscilla was about to ban him for messes made in the Dolphin’s bathroom. Even I had avoided him lately, after he applied Zen to the art of shooting, showing me how to become one with his shotgun, and missing the target, a fifty-five-gallon drum at short distance.
Sheriff had pulled Tom’s driving license. Tom, by now a habitual offender, still slammed his old truck around Bunkport’s alleys. He would soon have to be arrested. The jails around here aren’t known for comfort.
I drove out with Elizabeth to check Tom’s trailer that the bank was aiming to foreclose on. The door was locked. Tom’s dog, Cindy, wandered about outside, looking sickly. I offered her beef jerkies that I kept in the truck but her teeth were too weak. She snarled at Tillie, who wanted to play.
“Terrible,” Elizabeth said. “He could have gotten himself treated.” She shrugged. “Quit booze, swallow pills, what part of that is not to understand? But the Sisters went too far. Right, James?”
I huh-huh-ed.
“So you won’t do nothing either?” (Elizabeth had picked up our double-negating ways).
I hah-hah-ed.
It wasn’t that I wasn’t horrified by what I was pretty sure had happened. Blame the Sisters? What do I know? I’m no part of a minority. Male heterosexual whites have it easy in Maine. We just bumble along, no need for defense. If white males would go out of fashion in Maine I might become vicious too. (This is where crime story #4 starts). We have a summer camp for city girls behind Bunkport, in the woods — pretty out there: a brook for skinny-dipping, a glade between the maple trees for campfires, some low hills for enjoying the views, a landscaped moss-and-shrub garden, Chinese style. And there are some comfortable lodges that belong to a trust set up by a long-dead wealthy lady. City girls can let go there, have themselves a nice vacation. But some of our trailer-trash rednecks liked to bother the girls for being different. The machos set fire to a lodge, punctured some tires, tore up tents, then raped a few of the young and pretty. There were no charges pressed, but Sheriff stepped in anyway, making arrests for DUI, driving to endanger, assaulting a police officer, and managed to hand out jail time. Enraged, the boys tried again, but this time the summer ladies contacted the Sisters by cell phone and before you could say Jane Robinson big motorbikes cut the boys’ vehicles off the road. There was some gunfire but no one got hit by bullets. The leader-rapist drowned in a shallow pond — I heard a whisper that some heavy person had a foot on his head. State detectives found no witnesses. The Sisters smiled sweetly. Beat-up rednecks claimed they had been drinking and couldn’t remember having bothered no summer girls. Black eyes? They always had black eyes. Broken ribs? Same thing. People get careless with baseball bats. Who were swinging the bats? “Sorry, Detective, it was dark, I had two beers, you know how it goes.”
Sheriff wasn’t helpful either. Deputies Dog and Sycophant knew nothing neither. Tribal fights, liquor, minor bruises, boys will be boys, but no one died, except the drowned guy, but then, being no more, he couldn’t press charges. Autopsy showed lots of liquor in the boss fellow’s veins.
“Rape? Murder? Them are big words around here, Detective.”
I didn’t tell Elizabeth about all that, not then, but she kissed it out of me later. I didn’t want her to get mad at me. We were having a good time. Intimacy can certainly be all it is cracked up to be. Shared laughs. Sex, ah, sure, sex too, but there is a limit to that. It’s part of the thing, what with living in the same cabin and all. Good cooking. Tillie the dog took us for long walks. We hired a piloted airplane and I showed her the bays, islands, and coastal mountains. There were more warm and windless days, another brief Indian summer, and we lay about naked on my porch, sunning our scars.
Elizabeth had taken my truck to the Bangor mall to buy female stuff. I had gone boating. It so happened that Sheriff and I met on the water. Sheriff keeps rum on his boat, in case a hauled-out man-overboard needs warming up. There being a chill in the air again, we made some hot toddy.
Sheriff and I go back a ways. Back to when his wife got to knowing me a little bit better. Now that Elizabeth is in the way he no longer holds it against me.
In any case, the point was moot now that Dolly, having done with the departed dock builders, had gotten to know a Mexican landscape gardener who looked like, and was therefore named, King Carlos (of Spain). Sheriff told me he had found someone too, way out in Bangor. Which was good. A bit of distance makes the contact more exciting.
Sheriff, as I figured, knew about the bleeding chair on the channel marker. Eugene, our chief illegal clam digger, just wanted Sheriff to know. There was no dead body when he spotted the decorated marker, but another digger had heard shots earlier on that week. The other digger, having lost his license for working a closed area, hadn’t bothered to go nearer.
Sheriff went out to check the crime scene but the chair was gone. The night’s heavy rain and gale-force winds washed the marker clean.
“You didn’t see no body?” Sheriff asked me.
“Me?”
He stared at me.
“No,” I said. “Elizabeth saw no body either. Just blood, cut ropes.”
“She is going to talk to someone?”
“I hope not,” I said.
“And if she does?”
“I never saw nothing,” I said. “No chair either. Chair? What chair?”
We drank hot toddy.
“The victim is Tom, you know that,” Sheriff said. “Good riddance of good garbage. Pity. Right? Now how about perpetrators?”
“The Sisters?” I asked/told Sheriff.
“The Sisters?” he asked/told me.
Sheriff had checked on the whereabouts of Tom Tipper.
Like me, he hadn’t been able to locate our friend. Like me, Sheriff had seen Cindy, Tom’s dog, wandering about in bad shape. Unlike me, he had shot the old helpless and dying dog. Tom’s old boat wasn’t at its mooring. We all knew that Tom hardly had any lobster traps left and made his living, or his drinking, rather, by working traps owned by the Sisters.
“The chair?” I asked, for I hadn’t been inside Tom’s trailer for a while. Sheriff had. Tom’s door was unlocked. Tom’s huge old recliner was still there, beer-fart perfumed, in front of the DVD player (Tom didn’t watch TV) with a Pat Metheny DVD in the slot.
“So the Sisters got a chair from the dump?”
“For sure,” Sheriff said. He had seen the dump guy, who said he was missing a discarded recliner that he sometimes used for napping.
Sheriff, as I expected, wasn’t going to be active on the Bleeding Chair mystery. Tom had already been reported as missing. The Sisters would know enough to sink his boat, quietly, at night. It’s a big ocean out there.
Coming home, I vaguely reported non-ascertainable assumptions to my live-in reporter. Elizabeth was working her computer. I glanced at the screen and she was scrutinizing Doc Shanigan’s Web site. Her pencil pointed at a paragraph that mentioned abortions.
“Pregnant?” I asked casually.
“Not today,” she said casually. She kissed me. “I thought you had yourself fixed.”
I had, long ago, after returning from Vietnam, not wanting to cause more babies to become maimed soldiers in the next war.