Chapter 10: Of OCD and OMGs

    “Yeah that’s the little piss-ant,” exclaimed Glenn Hubbard when Miss Iceland and I described the hipster geek we saw talking to Curly Carson’s ex at the press conference. I wasn’t sure if ‘piss-ant’ was colloquial New England, but now that I turned 40 it sounded like the perfect way to describe anyone under 30. I made a mental note.

            “I’ll make some calls to the Bee see if anyone knows why they called the kid back for this story,” said the veteran reporter, closing his laptop. He’d nested at one of the desks- he could write his opinion pieces anywhere- which gave my confidence an always needed boost. Meanwhile, Miss Iceland was retrieving her keys indicating she had to go.

            She had the dedication of a new gymnasium wing to attend just across the border in Winchester, New Hampshire then 4 hours to kill before reporting on the scintillating doings of the Rutland Board of Education meeting. I extended my most heartfelt condolences.

            She made for the door. I followed at a respectable distance, but noticing her sweatshirt came down over her hips decided to pick up the pace. She turned to me at the exit and looking into her pale blue eyes I wondered if I was in this thing to save the paper and find the killers or just to get in her jeans. I figured a little from Columns A and B, a lot from Column C. But as a person who will only give blood after confirming they’re giving out a big cookie at the end my standards in such internal moral debates is not high, so I’d get by.

            “If anything comes up call me,” she tossed over her shoulder, her blonde hair bouncing seductively. At the door she turned three-quarters and looked at me. It seemed something on my part was called for, but damned if I knew what. We hadn’t even been out on a formal date yet, but my mind ranged from a peck on the cheek to a pat on that hidden, apple-shaped ass. Considering she hadn’t just converted a third-and-long from deep in our own territory I eschewed the latter and went for the former. It felt awkward, but I perceived a “lean-in” and felt satisfied.

            “Enjoy the Board meeting,” I said smarmily, because I just can’t leave well enough alone. She stuck out her tongue and departed, leaving me a visual that would tide me over till lunch.

            The late Warren Zevon sang, “It’s only in dreams that we are truly free…” and looking back into the still functioning office I could see what he meant. Of course, he also crooned, “He came down to dinner in his Sunday best/And rubbed the pot roast all over his chest…” so he could be hit or miss wisdom-wise.

            Glen Hubbard was on his cell, feet up on the desk, talking to folks at the Bee I assumed. Meanwhile Gladys was center stage, off the sauce, and running the show, as it should be. With a phone cradled on her shoulder she tapped at the keyboard and I knew she was in the process of squaring up accounts with our advertisers. Unfortunately, due to the benevolence and possibly pity of the good business people of Artfield, most folks were paid in advance so this process most likely involved considerably more refunds than collections. We were in the death throes at the paper, but having come to grips with my unambitious cum slothful ways some time prior I’d begun socking away a decent, but hardly substantial sum of money preparatory of the inevitable. I now began to calculate mentally how much of hit this bankroll was about to take.

            With the phone on her left shoulder Gladys motioned with her right hand at piece of paper I was to take. It listed the institutions that would have to be notified we were no longer publishing their event schedules as usual: Library, Little League, Senior Center, Schools, Religious Institutions and so on. Never one brimming with self-importance I simply assumed they’d all just turn to posting on the internet without a second thought. It was faster, free and the future. Still there was something sad about losing the print touch. After all if technology was always better the only place one saw a Segway wouldn’t be when TBS runs Paul Blart: Mall Cop.

            I was saved from this drudgery by the entrance of Derf, in his usual manner, hunched forward over his phone looking for the next wager. “Did you know there are only two Major League games scheduled tonight?” he lamented.

            “Yeah, it’s an early season travel day,” I informed him. “Besides haven’t you, as you so eloquently put it, been ‘getting my ass handed to me’ in baseball so far.”

            “But I’m due…,” he started.

            “Yeah, for 14 years now,” I interjected.

            “Still, if I get hot I can’t dig outta the hole I’m in with just two games.”

            “NHL playoffs start tonight…8 games.”

            Derf twisted up his face as he heaved his bulk into a precarious desk chair. “Hockey? What the Hell do I know about hockey?”

            We seemed to have reached a merciful impasse. I turned for the office, list in hand when Derf’s voice, brightening now, called me back. “I did get my $100 back,” he smiled, brandishing the single bill between middle and index finger.

            “You tracked down Bowden,” I said, incredulously. Not so much for his getting the money as for his putting in any effort at all to get the money. Derf was a rare one, even lazier than I.

            “No, we just kinda ran into each other. I went to get a bagel and tea at that McCarthy’s Bakery…” For the first time I registered the bag and cup Derf had carried in and deposited on the empty desk. “By the way what kinda town has a bagel place named McCarthy’s?”

            “Listen you grew up in Northern New Jersey where there were seven bagels shops in every town and they were turning ‘em back at the door.  We’re behind the times here,” I said, getting agitated. “Now what happened with Chief Bowden?”

            “OK, ok,” Derf began, putting aside the Irish-American-Jewish breakfast treat for the time being. “I was coming out of the bakery when I saw him pull up in front of the sporting goods store.”

            “Larry’s Outdoor. He musta went there straight from the press conference.”

            “Anyway I knew it was him so I waited and when he came out with an armload of fishing crap I confronted him.” Fred took a tentative bite from the bagel, pulled back the top half and peered inside.

            “And he just reached in his wallet and gave you a hundred?”

            “No. First I had to remind him about Boston and the dog track,” Derf continued. “He was acting nervous, like he was in a hurry to get away, get rid of me.”

            That was actually understandable since it’s not every day a semi-rural New England Police Chief gets shaken down for cash by a 6-foot-6, compulsive gambling, Jewish sausage salesman. I needed more though. “So he gave you the money so you’d go away? Did he say anything?” I prodded, thinking I was uncovering something important but knowing not what.

            “Well first he dumped the fishing stuff in his car. Then he took me around the corner to this fruity coffee place.” That was Johnny Java’s, the new coffee place, where I met Miss Iceland the other morning. It was located strategically on the main drag to draw business away from McCarthy’s, particularly among commuters and the ski/resort crowd.

            “What did he do there?”

            Derf took a healthy draw from his tea and smiled. “He just went behind the counter, opened up the register, took out the Benjamin and handed it to me with a look that said, ‘Now get lost’. You know like every girl I've ever dated.”

            Like a tampon on a stick this was one ugly red flag. The police “coverup”, the officers drinking Crap-pucinos, the slowly beginning gentrification of downtown, the terse press conference and now this all suggested Bowden as the point man of some kind of larger scheme. Maybe one that spiraled unfortunately out of control and ended in three people dying. I suddenly wished I had bagged a sample of the stool on my car for DNA testing. Something made me feel the Police Chief was behind (pun always intended) that too.

            With this information I retreated to my office. It had been swept clean of books and back issues and the walls purged of hundreds of coffee stained sticky notes. As I walked, without worrying about tripping, around the desk I felt a draft though there was no window within. My chair felt incredibly high, or maybe the junk removal had simply lowered the room. There was a pad and pens on the frighteningly clean desktop and for a moment I contemplated a Natty Ice while jotting down some notes. Suddenly, however, I was overwhelmed by a “wave of apathy” that rendered me unable to do anything but spend the next minute and a half contemplating what a good garage band name that phrase would make…if I, say, had a garage or was in high school or ever played in a band for that matter.

            That pointless pondering complete I realized I needed to get out of the office. I folded the paper with the numbers I was supposed to call and placed it neatly in the pen/pencil holder slot of the empty desk drawer. By this means I convinced myself I’d actually take care of it later whereas had I stuck it beyond in the full drawer I was preemptively admitting I was never going to do it. It was by such rationalizations that I got through my days. I felt satisfied till I closed the drawer and a corner of the note stuck out thereby launching a full-blown episode of OCD. I proceeded to position the note more carefully then close the drawer gently only to see the paper catch on something causing the corner to slide out again. I repositioned it a second time and slammed quickly, but the air resistance shot the paper straight up in front of me. Catching it with my left hand I folded it twice more, down to postage stamp size, and used my full palm to close the drawer and simultaneously cover the area between the desk and the drawer so it couldn’t escape.

            Now I definitely needed a drink.

            To that end I summoned the strength to formulate an excuse and bolted from my office toward the back door. I needn’t have bothered. One boon of technology is that people were often too pre-occupied with their devices to care about you. Teenagers didn’t yell at you from car windows anymore or kids mimic you singing “You Shook Me All Night Long” out of the back of a school bus and there was virtually no clothing style so unhip that it could tear kids away from their phones or not seem “ironic”.  Of course, I could’ve used this more as an insecure teenager than as a “who-gives-a-fuck” forty year old, but it got me past the currently distracted Gladys/Derf/Hubbard triumvirate, so you take what you can get.

            Once free the Falcon sputtered through town like cars haven’t sputtered since the advent of fuel injection. Bucking and knocking till it felt like it was one loud backfire away from being something Slip and Satch drove on The Bowery Boys. I turned left onto the main commercial drag. Johnny Java’s loomed up on the right and I noticed its plastic and neon juxtaposition to the rest of our so-called Strip. This consisted of the ubiquitous pizzeria and Chinese restaurant in between Morgan’s Hardware, Henry’s Shoe Repair, the Artfield Market and a Feed Store that also offered tattooing Wednesday 4-8 and all day Saturday. Heck, I thought, we were a just a cooper and buggy whip dealer from being a mid-sized 19^th century city so to say the up-to-date coffee shop stood out like a sore thumb would be an understatement.

            The one thing that struck me as I looked upon this anachronistic commercial district and then glanced in my rearview back at Johnny Java’s was the signs. The older stores had their names painted on the doors or in plastic lettering bolted to wood above the display window. A few, like Morgan’s, had taken up the offer of an itinerant, hippie sign painter (Is there any other kind?) who lingered in town a few summers back and sported tasteful black-on-white clapboard signs that hung perpendicular to the stores on simple, black wrought-iron brackets. Conversely, Johnny Java’s featured a giant, blinking coffee cup topped by red and orange flashing light tubes, meant to indicate heat or steam or something, that frankly I found somewhat disconcerting. It also hung over the entire sidewalk and nearly into the road; at least triple the size of any of the hippie’s signs. This seemed like the kind of thing that would twist the stick up the butt of an old zoning stickler like Wes Willard unless there was some incentive, fiscal or otherwise, to let it slide. I made note to consult Miriam at Town Hall about that.

            I also noticed while passing Johnny Java’s that the lights were on in the office of the Episcopal Church. That meant the rancorous Right Reverend Logan Brooks, who’d accosted Miss Iceland and myself the day after the murders, was still in town. His knowledge of Curly Carson’s state of mind and what axe he had to grind with his neighbor Johnny Java’s would have to be probed. Yet with each additional piece of the puzzle I felt more like the one being probed.

            That’s because, once again, this sounded like a lot of work on my part and I hadn’t even taken into account meeting with Barton and the teachers later to see if they got into Sheehan’s place or finding out what info my sister had culled from my brother-in-law. I began wondering how those literary detectives like Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe did it. Maybe a tougher name, like Mike Hammer, might help, but there was still the whiskey-drinking, bullet-dodging, doll-chasing and wearing of shoes that could crack a walnut. No wonder they were always on the surly side.

            My mind was working overtime as I pulled off the main drag and I next began to stress over the inevitable interviews: Reverend Brooks, the State Police, the County Coroner… I hated interviews. As a reporter that seems counter-intuitive, and it is, but I just couldn’t get past it. People exhausted me. That’s why I quit Boston and took this gig. I craved comfort, people I know, and I wasn’t embarrassed about it anymore. Lord knows, I’d never win a Pulitzer, hell, I may not ever get married, have kids or even own a house, but I figured if those instincts hadn’t kicked in by 40 they weren’t happening. I was tired of chasing things other people wanted. What I wanted was to drink beer, read books, laugh with friends and otherwise be left alone. Not lofty goals, but as the Washington Post horse racing writer and author Andrew Beyer once put it, “Why is it that a man studies the religious symbolism in the poetry of John Milton and he’s a scholar while another studies the symbolism in the numbers of The Daily Racing Form and he’s a bum?” I was beginning to understand more and more, it wasn’t what you enjoyed that mattered, it was your capacity to enjoy it.

            I turned right off the main drag still waxing philosophic about the state of things, but knowing deep down I was really looking for an easy way out that just wasn’t there. If nothing changed in about a month’s time I’d be a man with one somewhat marketable skill, scant drive and a mountain of debt that left very little wiggle room and no desire to wiggle anyway…something that most folks were fine never seeing. This in mind, I searched for some offbeat inspiration-cause the normal kind bounced off me like bullets off Superman- and recalled the words of tennis great Martina Navratilova who ghost-wrote in her autobiography (a library discard), “I wasn’t so much driven by the joy of winning as by the fear of losing.” Of course, I reasoned, that if one had such a great a fear of losing one should just not play in the first place. Problem solved. Then again, that may not have been an option for an athletic pre-teen in Soviet-dominated Czechoslovakia…a place where, I’m pretty sure, my attitude would not have played well.

            All this musing brought me to my apartment where I took a spot directly in front of my door. There was nothing like doing nothing on a weekday morning. Empty parking lots, line-less supermarkets, kid-free parks these are the little things that made life bearable. Through the door, up the stairs and into a comfort zone where a ratty, brown futon never looked so enticing. No sooner had I retired to said sofa/bed with a Natty Ice and George Orwell’s Burmese Days then a text message came through on the flip phone. It was Miss Iceland…

Gym opening total shit show smh   managing overly extravagant & cheesy @ same time lol  like they added rumpus room on the Taj Mahal    good news** Rutland BOE meeting cancelled    meet u in ur office @ 4

I liked all the asterisks and ampersands better when their primary function was to indicate curse words in comics, but time moves on. I was happy Miss Iceland would be there to help sort out what Hubbard, Gladys and Barton had gathered and I immediately made such thoughts known by mashing down on the various number keys of my flip phone 3 to 4 times each in a text that seemed to have an inordinate amount of the letters c/f/i/l/o/r-s/v/y-z. It was really time to upgrade.

I knew I should be back at the office preparing leads for Miss Iceland’s return, but I was nothing if not a pro at procrastination (actually I'm retaining my amateur status in case it ever gets into the Olympics) and after going through the “re-charging my batteries”, “I’d only be in the way”, and “I do my best thinking alone” school of excuses I got back down to what I do best: reading and drinking. But no sooner had I taken a pull and tucked into another sweaty colonial scene (Is there any other kind in Burma?) than the flip phone went off again. This time it was Gladys on the other end in a rare state bordering on animation.

 “Got word the president of the construction company is going to be on site this afternoon,” she began pleadingly. “Get up there and interview him today.”

While I was fixating on Chief Bowden’s involvement in the crime Gladys had always maintained a belief the builders of the new development had at least a hand in the evil doings. That the president of R. James Home Builders, Inc. was a furtive, never seen character only fed her intuition. To date this mystery man had unleashed a phalanx of lawyers on town planning meetings, as well as, teams of architects, foremen, carpenters, plumbers, laborers and such on the job site. But all the while he had stayed back in New York pitching plots to the idly wealthy, early retirees and tele-commuters with stacks of cash and a penchant for Fall foliage and good skiing.

“Goddammit,” I let slip out, closing old Eric Blair. “Uh, I mean, what’s his name? Will he be at that trailer?  Go out there? What should I ask?”

“Did they just find you under a cabbage leaf?” Gladys sneered. “You went to school for journalism. You worked for one of the biggest papers in the country. You don’t know how to conduct an interview?”

“OK, ok…I was coming out of a nap,” I lied. “I’ll go up around 3 and feel the jackass out. I don’t feel as strongly as you about this one, but I’ll do my best to see what he knows.”

“And for God’s sake put on a button-down shirt and a tie…or at least a sports coat. Let him know you’re a professional.”

“You’re asking a lot of a sports coat,” I cracked, but she was already gone.

I shot off another labor intensive text to Miss Iceland asking if she could meet me at the development by 3. She said she could and eschewed my offer of directions reminding me that cars and phones in the present come equipped with GPS and hoping someday I might join her in that world.

Gladys’s advice on presentation seemed sound so I retired to the bedroom and slid open the lone closet door. As a child I could recall my father putting on a suit and tie to take us to Arby’s, but times had changed. While his closet was chockfull of perfectly pressed vests, blazers, button-downs, ties and assorted-necked sweaters (V, crew, turtle), I stared into what appeared to be an Appalachian dental x-ray. Four or five hangers of mismatched attire liberally spaced while shoved into a corner below was a good-sized pile of yellow-collared dress shirts and wrinkled khakis in need of cleaning. Unfortunately I didn’t own-or know how to properly work-an iron and dry cleaning always seemed like an expensive chore what with the dropping off, picking up and I’m no Joan Crawford but enough with the wire hangers already.

Fortunately, one of the garments therein was indeed a sports jacket. Unfortunately it had belonged to my much broader, stouter father so when I tried it on I appeared to be a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and a series of right-handed karate chops down my left forearm short of breaking into a pitchy rendition of “Once in a Lifetime”. Obviously, I’d been “letting the days go by” too often without examining my vestments. When you’re down to acid-wash jeans, an 8-ball jacket and folks are asking “Who the hell is Frankie and why does he want me to relax?” you’ve let things slide. In the end I managed to scrounge up an outfit that even included a never-worn, pastel Jerry Garcia brand tie that Kayla gave me back in the days when she thought she could change me…bless her heart, the sweet kid.

I laid the clothes on my bed which being a mattress on the floor seemed something of a lateral move and retired back to the futon. I drained the remnants of the Natty Ice and lay down hands folded to contemplate my plan of attack on the building president. I mulled, meditated, dozed off, woke, contemplated, rolled over, ruminated and still had nothing. Finally I resolved on saying we were from the Burlington Bee, since technically my paper was no more, and just get a general feel for this guy, good or bad, while hinting that we thought the whole thing was just a tragic misunderstanding, not a crime. Maybe a useful lead would slip out or, more likely, life would once again prove to not be a TV detective series and it would all be a big waste of time. Well, at least Miss Iceland would be there.

A few hours and phone calls later I stubbed out a nervous cigarette as Miss Iceland’s wheels crunched over the gravel of the construction trailer’s parking lot. She exited the Volks in her work clothes: a well-tailored black pantsuit, white blouse, low-heeled black shoes and “K” pendant on a gold chain around her eminently bitable, pale neck. I favored the relaxed jeans and sweatshirt look of the morning, but that was probably only because it was less stunningly intimidating. Watching her tuck a strand of golden hair behind her ear I was reminded of a campus visit to the University of South Carolina; a school I passed on applying to for fear I’d get a rejection letter stamped: “Too Ugly”.

“What’s up?” I said, casually popping a slightly lint-covered Altoids into my mouth.

“Thank God a water pipe burst at the Rutland Town Hall,” she blurted out. “If I had to sit through a BOE meeting after that soul sucking gym opening I woulda friggin’ shot myself.”

Maybe not the kind of girl you necessarily were going to run right home to Mom, but as she shook out her ponytail and arched her back it was not the direction I was leaning anyway…or ever for that matter.

“Well, aren’t you the belle of the ball?” she continued, fingering my tie. Then added, “So how we gonna play this?” and it came back to me that I still hadn’t come up with a game plan.

The idea, as Gladys sketched it out, was for me to find out what I could about the builder and the development without alluding to the murder/suicide in any overt way. Meanwhile, she was gathering info on the finances of the company, their other projects and any litigation they may be involved in. Her theory being the traditional, “follow the money” and you’re liable to find anything. The question was how to best go about it.

My default position was to step back and let Miss Iceland take the lead. Unfortunately, it felt too much like “Good Cop/Testosterone Patch Wearing Cop”, and even I had my pride. Just then what I assumed to be R. James of R. James Builders stepped out the trailer door gesturing for us to give him a second to finish a call.

Sizing him up he was a fairly tall man- 6’2” or so- in his mid-30s, nattily attired in brown shoes and tan dress pants topped by a lavender shirt and matching tie. His jet black hair was molded into one of those faux-hawks by means of enough gel to contaminate the groundwater and his complexion was something Crayola might label “Tanning Bed Orange”. On one arm he wore a watch that was worth more than everything I owned and on the other a veritable rainbow of those stretchy wristbands that seek to inspire by combining multiple words into one: LiveStrong, BelieveAchieve, SuckADick and so on (though that last one I may have misread). Overall, he gave off the impression of the kind of guy who drank every kind of milk but such that came from a cow (almond, soy, cashew…) and could tell you what “Steampunk” was and why it represented the future somehow. In short, he seemed the consummate young, upwardly mobile entrepreneur except for one thing. When seen in profile one noticed a large, disproportionate paunch that gave him the appearance of a lower case “b”; or “d” depending on which way he was facing.

Making his way down the temporary steps from the trailer he continued a rather animated discussion. “Listen, do me a flavor on this one, will ya…Email me approval, attach those docs and everything’ll be copastetic, kapeesh…OK, stay in touch with yourself…”

Miss Iceland and I exchanged glances as if we hadn’t heard right, but before we could synchronize our eye rolls he was coming at us across the lot, hand extended.

“Hi, Richard James, president and head of sales,” he said, pumping our hands and cocking an eyebrow. “But you can call me Rick…” Here he cupped one hand over his ear in a gesture that was last cool if you were MC-ing the Amos and Andy Radio Hour and sang falsetto, “She’s a freak…a Super Freak…that girl is Super Freaky!” Then looking up into our dumbfounded-ness added, “Rick James? Super Freak? Get it?”

We did, yet it didn’t make it any less creepy. I still had no clue how to conduct this interview and tentatively opened my mouth to introduce myself when he came to my rescue with a rapid-fire sales pitch unlike any I’d heard before.

“Listen,” he began while checking his watch. “In a minute I gotta make like a baby and head out…but you look like a happy couple (Miss Iceland, I’m happy to say, didn’t flinch at this) just the kinda folks who’d love it here…young, active, looking for a community to raise a family (obviously he hadn’t been reading my blog)…this is the place for you close to skiing, hiking, good schools…and we’re re-doing the whole downtown…recruiting upscale eateries: steak, Thai, Italian and a seafood joint just for the halibut…plus shopping, an outlet mall with the top names: Polo, J. Screw, Nerdstrom’s, Tommy Middlefinger, all the best…here’s a couple brochures that detail the whole thing…prices start at 450,000 doll hairs…now it’s tooth-hurty I’m late for my dental appointment…only kidding, but I gotta run…smell you later…”

And with that mercifully he was gone.

“That guy’s a piece of work,” said Miss Iceland as we watched him drive off in a tricked-out Cadillac Escalade.

“Oh, he’s a piece of something alright,” I responded, thinking we’d just found a new suspect.