It’s hard to button one's shirt sans buttons and as I glanced down my shirtfront I noticed mine were MIA. Debra Townes had attacked me with such vehemence that some were on the desktop, some on the floor and until she flossed we may not know exactly where the rest wound up.
“What the hell was that?” I half shouted as I tried to cover my rapidly graying chest hair like a 1950s actress caught in her slip.
“I’m sorry,” she muttered, overwrought.
Still shaken I was not at my most erudite and fell back on another, “What the hell was that?”
“I’m sorry,” she repeated and it looked as if we were about to fall into one of those “Delete file in printer queue and try again” loops when she added, “They’re going to write an article about Curly, about my daughter unless you stop poking around into this thing.”
Now I was never very quick on the uptake, the down take or any other kind of taking. Giving…I had that down, taking not so much, but even I could see where she was going with this. Still I wanted to hear who “they” were from this horse-face’s mouth.
“It was Jeremy,” she continued, referring to the hipster reporter. “He called me over at the press conference. I thought he just wanted to say hello. Then he started in with it. Said he had dirt on Curly, which didn’t really bother me much. He drank; he hit me a few times…it’s a small town everyone around here knew. But when he started talking about Monica I couldn’t take it.”
I am many things: a decent writer, a functioning alcoholic, the last card-carrying member of Members Only, but a discerning detective apparently I am not. I had never looked at her expression when I caught her talking to Jeremy at the presser. As one who lives his life by the mantra “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you” I simply assumed she was in on the conspiracy to cover up the murders and tangentially shut down the paper.
As I stood in what was fast becoming my go-to position- dumbfounded, mouth agape, brain slowly processing- she pulled up a superfluous bra strap over a bony shoulder and continued. “He said Monica was having an affair with Ted Sheehan that went all the way back to high school. The police chief is trying to keep it under wraps, but you’ve been asking too many questions and they might have to release it if you make a big deal of this. I had a few drinks at Pete’s Pub trying to figure out what to do. On the way back to my motel room I noticed the lights on here. I stopped hoping I could persuade you to drop the whole thing, let them just rest in peace. I didn’t know what to say, I’m drunk, so I just acted like they do in the movies and threw myself at you. It failed, obviously.”
My first thought was that this was not the most ego-boosting of come-ons, but I’ve had worse. My second thought was, “Did I just pass on sex?” As an average guy with little to no “game” I always viewed sex like mothers of young children view vegetables. Just as there was always someone “starving in insert 3rd world nation” who’d kill for that broccoli, I always assumed there was a nerd in a dorm room somewhere who’d kill for a piece of what I was being offered so I shouldn’t look a gift twat in the mouth…to turn a phrase. Besides I’d done a lot more with a lot worse than Debra Townes over the years (I likes my beer, you may recall) and usually I was on the begging end of getting that. Was this growth? Old age? The influence of Miss Iceland?
Fortunately, I didn’t have sufficient time and/or alcohol for such self-analysis. So I reset the old bean and suddenly realized, there it was, evidence that Police Chief Bowden was involved in a cover up. Barton, the teacher at Artfield High, had confirmed that Sheehan was not only a committed educator, but a Friend of Dorothy, as they say. No way he would switch teams for Monica Carson, if not from general morals, then at least from the standpoint of possibly scuttling an already rising career. Bowden also had a motive…his rising gambling debts. And who around here had the money to buy him off? Rick James, of course, but why?
“You don’t believe that do you?” I queried, knowing Debra Townes already knew of Ted Sheehan’s sexual leanings. She was almost fully dressed and ready to depart but nervousness tends to loosen lips and right now she was shaking like a Shih Tzu in Saskatchewan.
“No, but they have evidence; text messages and things. Jeremy said the police showed him everything, off the record. Besides once it’s out there people will believe it. It happens all the time these days.”
The last part was sadly true. I even researched one of these stories during my time at the Boston Globe. I recall doing a google-image search of teachers who slept with students. You could have gathered the women together and made a pretty good swimsuit calendar. Meanwhile, the men looked like headshots at 1970s porn casting call replete with cheesy moustaches. No one would have trouble imagining a good-looking guy like Ted Sheehan would have any difficulty manipulating a vulnerable 17 year-old into bed if he played his cards right.
Something else caught my attention as well. I noticed this was the second time she called the hipster reporter by his first name. “Do you know this kid from somewhere?” I asked, feeling as if I was finally getting the hang of this sleuthing thing. Though realizing that akin to my seven seconds of rollerblading glory or the week of anxiety after that Dollar Store Pregnancy Test, it could be a false-positive.
“He was at Bennington College with Monica…They dated.”
Well, I’d be dipped in shit and called ‘Stinky’. “For how long?”
“About eight months,” she replied, searching for a shoe. “But they stayed friends after…”
OK, so nobody stays just friends with a girl as attractive as Monica Carson unless they’re trying to get back in, so to speak. Hell, Bob Dylan couldn’t even get through the first chorus of “All I Really Want to Do (is Baby be Friends with You)” without laughing (check the original).
“Is this Jeremy from around here?,” I questioned, thinking he might be known to Chief Bowden beyond his newspaper work.
“No, he grew up in New York City,” she answered while cinching up her overcoat to a tightness that suggested regret. “They met at Bennington. In an Environmental Science class, I think.”
My first thought was lamenting that I might have to drive all the way across the state to Bennington to check out the history of the unhappy couple. I mean it’s not like we live in Montana, but still I kept coming back to how this investigation was already putting a big dent in my comfortable reading/drinking/watching sports on TV lifestyle and I was more the type to get OUT, as opposed to GOING, when the proverbial “…going got tough”. Yet if the paper went under I’d be in even more dire straits reading/drinking/sports on TV-wise…that is I’d have to get a real job and if past experience was any indicator there’d be no winners there.
During these desperate deliberations I failed to notice that Debra Townes had completed dressing and was making her way toward the backdoor. I stepped out of my room, with more questions germinating in my mind, only to hear her utter a final “I’m sorry…” that seemed more directed at herself than me. Then the door slammed behind her mercifully cutting off my, force of habit, “Call me…” and she was gone. God, I miss her already.
It took a few minutes and a cold Natty Ice to wrap my head around what just happened, but once I did I realized that unlike a David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or how points are tallied in Roller Derby this was starting to make sense.
Now, if watching reruns of the many Law & Orders (I mean I own a TV how could I avoid them) has taught me anything it’s that to qualify as a suspect one needs means and motive. I now had two folks with the latter: Bowden-Money, Jeremy-Love. But as for means, as was usual with another definition of that word, I was lacking.
I needed to track down their movements in the days before the murders and their access to the triggerman, Curly Carson. The whole thing was starting to get me depressed, but considering I’ve turned around, blew off work and crawled back into bed because I screwed up trying to tear open and secure back the little sip tab on the plastic lid of a coffee cup the bar for such things wasn’t very high. With that in mind I had a tot or five of Natty Ice and read a few pages of Solzhenitsyn’s walnut-crushing Gulag Archipelago that I’d been working through on-and-off for the last three years. Pretty soon between the alcohol and the fact that I wasn’t building a stretch of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in cojones-contracting weather while wearing burlap sacks for shoes I felt my spirits were buoyed enough to crawl onto the office sofa and fall asleep.
Dr. Joyce Brothers, who I believe in real life specializes in diseases of the pancreas, said, “A positive self-image is the best preparation for success.” Waking up the next morning and looking in the mirror it was immediately clear that ship had pulled up anchor. My clothes were rumpled and stained. My aching back left me with the posture of a jumbo shrimp. And my hair was simultaneously doing a William Henry Harrison in the front and an Art Garfunkel in back. Success? I’d be happy to just break even.
With this in mind I brushed my clothes to semi-unwrinkled, wet down the back of my head, poof-ed out the front and found the To-Do list I’d made yesterday among papers swept to the floor by Debra Townes' amorous advances. My mouth felt like I’d just licked clean the floor of Eli Whitney’s workshop so I figured a little ‘coat of the canine’ was not out of order and popped another Natty Ice before getting down to work.
Derf had once commented during our co-habitation that there was no better feeling than “giving notice”. With my name on the lease this had an ominous ring, but now scratching my head and looking at the list I could see some merit in his mantra.
Reflecting back my father was of the belief, that if the kid was afraid of the water throw him in the deep end of the pool and he’d have to learn how to swim. Of course this often resulted in only learning to dog paddle the four yards or so to the ladder, climbing out of the pool and never setting foot near any body of fluid greater than one’s own toilet ever again; and depending on the child’s emotional stability perhaps winding up one day in a bell tower with a towel and a twelve-gauge trying to wipe off “Dad’s dirty water” between taking potshots at passing pedestrians…don’t worry my Mom taught me to swim.
So de-sensitization was the watchword for me. If I wasn’t going to get overwhelmed and ditch this thing faster than a gym membership or one of those “twelve albums for a penny” record deals. The to-do list I noticed featured three interviews for today and as someone who gladly submits to the irony of paying a postage fee to order stamps online I was not a fan of this much human contact all at once. Fortunately, in the office cleanup Gladys had replaced my well-thumbed 1978 Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar with a current one, Cheryl Tiegs in fishnet be damned, and I noticed it was Saturday. Artfield High would be closed so with all the relish of Derf and Johnny (Take This Job and Shove It) Paycheck combined I crossed my meeting with Ted Sheehan’s teacher friend Barton off the list.
This left Reverend Brooks and the builder Rick James as my interviewees. With his church closed and plans to leave town imminent sitting down immediately with the maniacal minister was unavoidable. As for James, my only contact with him had been with Miss Iceland by my side where he had seemed more open to her comely concerns than anything I had to say. I was hoping she was available to come with when my flip phone began vibrating in a not unfriendly way in a front pocket.
It was Miss Iceland texting, of her own volition no less, to say she’d meet me at Pete’s Pub at one o’clock followed by an emoji that was either a palm tree or an outline of the country Laos, I’m still not sure. That meant we could reconnoiter over a cocktail before heading out to the sales office to pump Rick James for info. Suddenly I felt better having cut my interviews from 3 to one and a half. I’d also have along the woman I gave up a bounce on the blotter with Debra Townes for, or so I was telling myself in building a story of supposed growth that Gladys had shamed me into.
I noticed I had a little 'teepee' working as I now recounted the events of last night only with Miss Iceland in the Debra Townes role. For a second I considered retiring to the bathroom and strapping a stranglehold on the bald-headed champ to relieve said wigwam, but decided I might best be served channeling that frustrated energy into my interview with the crazy cleric Brooks.
When I accepted that I wasn’t going to look or feel any better I stumbled out the backdoor to the Falcon. It must have rained overnight for I noticed the red expired inspection tag was showing on the lower, driver’s side front window. I scooped up some mud on a leaf and slapped the whole thing over it, taking a second to make it look like it had just fallen there naturally. I slid in, it started- never a guarantee- and I was off to downtown.
I pulled onto the main drag, such as it is, to find it, relatively speaking, hopping. It may have been city/suburb folk dropping in on Rick James’s sales office or some sort of spring-fling-family-fun-I’m-glad-I-don’t-have-kids-days at the ski resort, but the street in front of the square, two-story, white clapboard-fronted Episcopal Church was a mob of Saabs. I parked my shame a few side streets down and made my way toward the huge Johnny Java's sign that now dominated the block.
There was bin overflowing with trash outside the church, but I knew the Reverend was inside. I saw him raging about within as I passed. No doubt packing up final belongings so this might be the last chance for an interview. Thus, I quickly weaved through the North Face-attired sidewalk strollers and entered the church vestibule.
I immediately heard Brooks down the hallway to the left ranting to himself against his perceived enemies. I made it down to an open door where, as I guessed, he was going through the last remnants of his office. The furniture was gone and in its place were boxes piled high with writings unfinished and books never to be opened again and suddenly I got that vuja de feeling- the opposite of déjà vu- where I realized I’d be in this same situation in the future.
“I’ll be right with you,” growled the reverend, sensing I was there without looking. He was bent over a box of God knows what, shuffling through it with a purposeless intensity. He wore a heavy, white cardigan though it was in the mid-50s outside and the thicket of brambly curls that grew on his neck made it hard to determine where the sweater ended and his hair began.
I lingered in the hallway preparing myself mentally to enter that small room and the steel cage match of an interview that would ensue. Fortunately, I was too broke and cheap, for that matter, to have stopped at Johnny Java’s and brought an offending beverage with me. I looked around the hall and could see it was truly the end. Geometrically plotted indentations in the carpet indicated where furniture had once stood and rectangles of dust served as chalk outlines for the pictures that used to live on these walls. I picked up a wooden cross, Jesus included, off a pile of the Book of Common Prayers. The Son of God I noticed had a great set of abs, but considering what he had to go through to get them I suddenly was more comfortable with my paunch. Reveries, such as these, were broken by a coarse bark from the office, “You still there? Whaddya want?”
I timidly dipped a toe in the room still clutching the cross. “You can’t have that,” he snapped, pointing at the crucifix. “This isn’t a stinkin’ estate sale though they wish I were dead those sons-of…oh, it’s only you, from the local paper. Where’s the blond girl?”
Apparently, he at first thought I was a parishioner and I noted if that was the way he talked to one of the flock it didn’t bode well for my hung over ass. “She’s off today,” I lied for the same reason I majored in history in college…none. I noticed the veins on his neck protruding and pulsing as if he was about to say something, but nothing came forth. The silence only seemed to make him madder so I filled it, what I thought was, innocuously, “So, its packing day, I see.”
A-a-a-a-and that set him off. “Packing day? It’s a goddamned tragic day that’s what it is. This place is a goddamn institution in this town,” he began, at which point I stepped back unsure if lightning was about to strike him down, but apparently there’s some sort of special dispensation on damning God for men of the cloth. “An institution in this town dammit. But does anybody care? No…they’d rather have their good for nothing coffee bars and who the hell knows what else.”
Johnny Java’s was obviously still a hot-button issue so I tried to turn the conversation, if that’s what you would call it, to Curly Carson. “Actually I came here to talk about Curly Carson. Had he been attending the AA meetings here regularly before his death?”
“Yes…uh I don’t know. I’ve been fighting with the diocese in Burlington. Had to go up there a few times, so I let the boys run it themselves. Same eight to twelve every week. Didn’t need me. Now Curly’s gone, the meetings are gone and nobody cares. This place is an institution, but that don’t matter to them.”
Apparently, it was grammar that be damned in this congregation. However, it raised the question, “Who is ‘them’?”
“Them…them,” he spit, pointing wildly. “The coffee shits…the bullcrap builders…the city asses and their little sons and daughters of bitches, that’s them!”
“I’ve had the coffee shits before. They have a pill for that now.” This was obviously going nowhere.
“An institution, that’s what this place is…an INSTITUTION!” he screamed, turning a pair of crazed Marty Feldman eyes on me and waving his arms expansively.
This guy belongs in an institution was my only thought. As a youngster Reverend Brooks was scarier than lawn darts, now I realized he was just a pathetic old man having the last thing he cared about in the world torn away from him. I wasn’t going to get an answer from him on Curly’s sobriety or who bought the Church building. Then, fortunately, a phone rang somewhere in the myriad of boxes allowing me to quietly slip away while thinking Derf would’ve given 3 to 2 against the poor guy ever finding it.
I stepped out on the street and the “crowds” had thinned a tad. It was still warm, but there was a cool breeze indicating, as was the case in Vermont in early spring, that winter was still lurking. There must have been lead, asbestos and God knows what other dense and carcinogenic material in the ancient church building because the old flip phone (Are there new ones?) sprang back to life out on the sidewalk with a series of beeps.
Now, to paraphrase Buddy Hackett, there are two things that burn my ass: a flame about three feet high and multiple text messages. As the owner of outdated technology I assumed I was discouraging communication. Thus, I opted for the cheap, I prefer thrifty, non-unlimited messaging plan. Others, however, refused to get on board with this so that every worthless “LOL” or “K” in response or, worse yet, as part of a group text was costing me a quarter a pop. So it was with anger mixed with trepidation that opened my phone to see “what fresh hell”, as Dorothy Parker would lament, cellular/satellite advancement had brought me now.
It was three text messages, all from Miss Iceland. Suddenly, I liked her just a tiny bit less. I stepped over to a spot between Johnny Java’s and the church and stuck my hand with the phone into the narrow, impassable alley between the two buildings so as to hide my phone from 12 year-olds scooting by with their iPhone 9s or BlueTubes or whatever the latest tech was. It seemed my shame (car, phone, clothes...) knew no bounds.
I quickly decided that these messages could yield no good. It could be that Miss Iceland was texting to cancel our “date” which could only lead to doubts and recriminations no matter how valid the excuse (Explosive diarrhea?...I’ve had worse dates…). Almost certainly she was wanting info about my morning interviews, one of which (Barton) I blew off. Was Curly Carson drinking again? What was his mood leading up to the murders? Who bought the church building? Were they connected in anyway to Johnny Javas? To Rick James? The answers, like whatever happened to Richie’s brother Chuck on “Happy Days”, were I hadn’t a clue.
Standing between buildings debating whether to open or ignore the messages I recalled a story about there being an old-timey advertisement painted on the side of the church wall. As kids we’d stick our heads between the buildings trying figure out what it was. As an adult, apparently, I wasn’t any smarter so to kill time while deciding whether to read the messages I poked my now much larger cranium into the void. Immediately, I realized this was an idea right up there with my bets on the Cleveland Barons (look them up) and Walter Mondale (“Minnesota is a bellwether state,” I claimed). However, like most of my sexual encounters, I was in so I’d try to make the best of it.
I tried turning my head but instantly felt a pressure at the back and front that foretold a potential Three Stooges moment. So instead I tilted back and tried to look up and in, simultaneously. Never one to be known as limber my “up and in” was limited...and, no, I’m not talking about my sexual encounters again. What I could see was some indiscriminate, chipped red and yellow paint that extended farther up the wall and nearer to me the words “Whitey was here” scratched into the brick. Now in the 1930s and 40s you couldn’t field a sandlot baseball team or shout across a Sweet Shop without coming across someone named Whitey. Post Civil Rights movement not so much. If my thinking was correct that made the church building at least 70 to 90 years old, but in an area where every other farmhouse sported a plaque saying Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys slept there this hardly qualified it as an “institution”.
I had no idea what all this was accomplishing. I wasn’t a detective, I wasn’t even a very good reporter and the feeling that I should give up the ghost-on the paper, the murders, Chief Bowden-was overwhelming. Derf’s oft fantasized idea of us moving to Reno and becoming blackjack dealers was suddenly becoming palatable that’s how bad things had gotten. So I turned my head slowly, eased it out from between the buildings, and looked up into the smiling, well-groomed face of Rick James...yeah, Reno, blackjack, it was looking better by the second.
“I think you’re going to have to go around...or lose a lot of weight,” he chuckled while tilting his head toward the narrow alley.
I really wasn’t in the mood for his corn-pone humor and made note to be on the lookout for hand buzzers, squirting flowers and if told there was a spot on my shirt to not look down- though chances were better than even money he would be telling the truth on that one. Nonetheless, I patted my beer gut and tried to be sociable. “Well, losing a few pounds, in general, wouldn’t be a bad idea I’m sure.”
“Actually you’re in luck. I’ve been negotiating to put an LA Fitness in here once enough units are sold,” he said, grinning too widely.
“If the LA stands for ‘lard ass’ I’m in otherwise…,” I let the thought, and inevitable snarky finish, trail off when I realized as annoying as this chance meeting was it was an opportunity to redeem myself for the all too familiar sloth and failures of this morning. I could practically hear my mental gears grinding as, against my better judgement, I tried to change tack, “You’re looking sharp. Got a haircut?”
“You know I was there, I had the money, I said what the hell let’s get ‘em all cut. How’s it going with you?”
I respected the way he’d put a spin on the old ‘I got ‘em all cut’ so I decided to return serve. “Oh, you know. it’s going. I wish it were gone, but it just keeps on going.”
He laughed into the big crazy straw that was coming out of some kind of iced coffee frappe-thing in a clear, plastic Johnny Java’s cup complete with whipped cream under a dome lid.
“Nice coffee...What does your husband drink?” I cracked.
“Very funny. I told the girl no whipped cream, but I think the dozen earrings affected her hearing.”
“Yeah, that would’ve made it all better,” I deadpanned.
“Man, it’s packed in there,” he said, pulling hard on the giant straw.
“They do a nice business with the touristy crowd. They got the skiers passing through in the winter, now the foliage-fetishists in the spring. You must be happy ‘bout that.”
His demeanor changed and it wasn’t a brain freeze from sucking on his girly-drink. “Happy? I’m pissed. I wish I had a piece of that deal. That’s the best location in town.”
I recalled how he had mentioned to Miss Iceland and myself how brokering these deals with big name franchises was one of the perks of re-development. Probably money that went right to him without having to pass through the business and related taxes. I was no William Levitt, but I noticed he was right about the spot; anyone on their way north to the Sugarbush Resort had to travel right past here. It was the only thing that kept the town going over the years. So how had this big-time, well-connected New York City developer missed out on the ‘best location in town’?
“Then who owns it?”
“I don’t have a clue. It took so long to get approved by those old bastards at the Planning Board that by the time I got around to other matters it was already vulture-d. It happens.”
The crowd on the sidewalk was picking up again and the ubiquity of phones in hands had me concerned my ‘head between buildings, ass in the air’ moment was already going viral somewhere. I’d swung and missed on who bought the church building. I’d swung missed again on who owned Johnny Java’s. Behind in the count seemed to be the self-inflicted story of my life. So, this is usually where I took a backdoor slider, in both the baseball and prison metaphorical senses, and retired to my dugout/apartment with cheap beer and frozen pizza. But with Miss Iceland’s and Gladys’s inquiries waiting on my phone and at the office respectively and the distasteful prospect of job interviews in my future (“where do you see yourself in five years?”; “In a shallow grave by the highway...why do you ask?”) I figured it was time to swing for the fences. Maybe I’d hit something.
“So why are there so many lawsuits pending against your company?” I confronted Rick James, throwing caution to a stiff breeze.
Now when one detects privately as events had thrust me into doing one needs certain skills. Such a skill is the ability to read faces, after all every episode of Dateline features the reporter asking, “Did you kill your wife/husband/girlfriend/boyfriend/parent?” and no one yet has answered, “Whoa jeez...yeah, you got me.” However, unlike most things I say and do one does bear repeating, and that is that I am not a partisan of people. Due to this I really don’t even like to look at most folks faces, unless, of course, they look like Miss Iceland’s and even then I’m thinking they’re reading the dirty thoughts that must be written all over my visage, so I generally end up averting my eyes there as well.
Thus, it took a concerted effort to look into Rick James’s peepers where I discerned a look that may have been concern or constipation which only confirmed further that I was in over my head. Surprisingly, though, no infantile insult, corny quip or ribald riposte sallied forth. His brow furrowed and his eyes raised upward and I thought perhaps I’d caught him off guard, and searching for a plausible response. However, I also realized my brow was furrowed and my eyes skyward as I tried to figure out how to follow this up to maximum benefit. Just then he reached inside his sports coat and in spite of the broad daylight and surfeit of pedestrians I still flinched a little. Fortunately only a cell phone emerged, he grunted twice, muttered an “OK” and now fixed me in the eye.
“Gotta run...sales office is jamming,” he remarked, as he put a hand on my arm and eased past. Over my shoulder I heard his standard, “Stay in touch with yourself” and, I thought, that is all I’ll be doing after I report back to Miss Iceland.
As I staggered back to the Falcon I took out the flip phone and debated whether to look at the three text messages. It had long been an axiom of mine that when waiting on a call/text good news took forever or never arrived while bad news was as punctual as one of Mussolini’s train conductors. These messages had been two things I seldom was...bright and early.
I reached the Falcon, found a non-rusted patch, leaned against it and opened the mailbox. The three messages stared at me no doubt wanting to know where I was and what I’d accomplished- and to think just when I’d almost forgotten the little joys of the male/female relationship. The first two were as suspected...What happened with Barton? What happened with Brooks? The third in this Trio of Gloom was a cryptic, “Big news...tell you later” from Karina (we were meeting in a few hours I needed to practice her real name). I trashed all three unanswered and got in the car.
I drove away wondering what I would report to Miss Iceland during our rendezvous at Pete’s Pub or if I should cancel the meeting altogether. The office was not an option for mulling it over as Gladys was there awaiting info on her favorite suspect, Rick James, no doubt. Instead, I drove around aimlessly looking for an out-of-town gas station that had coffee and was reminded of the words of Lawrence Durrell who wrote in book one of his Alexandria Quartet, “...as well as displeasing myself I had displeased another; ...alone I have only myself to displease. Joy!”
At first this resolved me to cancel with Miss Iceland. But sipping a 24-ouncer and eating a Little Debbie’s at a Phillip’s 66 just outside Brattleboro I remembered Lawrence Durrell was a bit of a prig who took four books to wring his metaphorical hands over his unrequited love for the flighty (and frankly fairly slutty) Justine. Conversely, all I wanted was a piece of ass. So caffeine-ed up I headed back to Artfield and Pete’s Pub to see if I could finagle a way to get Miss Iceland to give up same.
