I napped the kind of nap that makes ambition seem ridiculous. I dreamed of Hail Mary TD passes, game-winning home runs and buzzer beating baskets. It didn’t take the combined minds of Carl Jung and Dr. Phil to discern I knew we needed a miracle. So when I awoke to find Miss Iceland sitting on the edge of the couch sorting through the clues I’d assembled she looked like Tom Brady, David Ortiz and Larry Bird rolled into one with a pale, blonde downy neck I wanted to kiss passionately (I mean, of course, Miss Iceland, though I’m sure Mr. Bird’s neck does resemble that description).
Suddenly she turned to me confused and said, “What the Hell is all this?”
Not exactly the ‘Eureka!’ moment I was hoping for and if this were a football I might have suggested we just punt. Unfortunately, that was not an option at this point.
“It’s the stuff we gathered about the murders,” I said tentatively like the first, or to be truthful, all the times I’ve had to order at Starbucks (“uh, is Venti a size or a type of coffee?”). “I thought if we laid it all out, between the two of us, we could make something of it.”
“Freakin’ hell…” was her only comment...I think...for at that moment she ran her hands through that long, straight, golden hair and suddenly the situation’s desperation was fighting my ever-present sexual desperation for center stage.
I fought back my amorous attraction long enough to ask, “What did you come up with in your travels?” At this point I tried to innocuously rub the sleep from my eyes, but she caught me and looked disappointed.
“Not much,” she started. “My contact at the State Police said as far as he recalls investigators reviewed the locals theory and from crime scene photos, ballistic tests and some messages the Artfield PD collected it all checked out. Monica Carson was having an affair with Sheehan, her father caught wind of it, confronted them at Sheehan’s house and shot the place up.”
“But we know that’s not true. Sheehan was gay!”
“Listen, homo-, hetero-, bi- or pan-sexual I don’t care...I’m tellin’ you what they said.”
“Pan-sexual? Is that like doing it on the stove…?”
She looked at me like I was in my early hundreds and said, “Jesus, you gotta get outta this apartment and this town more.”
That wasn’t my plan at all. Though often I’d made jokes about Artfield this whole ordeal had finally made me appreciate this town and the folks in it despite the flaws. I’d gone away to college, I’d worked and lived in Boston, I’d traveled a little, partied often, dated many and had my fun. But as a philosophic Derf once put it, “Fun?...It’s not all it’s cracked up to be”. Not compared to finding a home and this was mine. It was too late and I was too tired (read: lazy and/or broke) to start over again, so whether this community was being destroyed from within or without- and I felt in my bones something was being done to change it for the worse- I was going to find out or become a jaded, disenchanted, manic depressive with a growing alcohol problem trying...heck, but for Miss Iceland I was practically there.
The State Police were obviously a dead end so I turned my questioning to her other fact-finding mission. “Were you able to find out who bought the church building?”
“Yes,” she began while taking a cursory look through the mess I’d made on the table. “Some investment group...stupid name, something with a bird in it…”
“Who are the principals?” I queried gently. My questions or my napping on the couch with a beer can beside me seemed to be pissing her off. Based on experience, probably both.
“I had to call Montpelier to get the info. They said it was a private LLC and they aren’t authorized to give out the names of the principals. The address is a P.O. box in Burlington.”
“A private LLC...it figures,” I said, as if I knew what those letters stood for. Watching her profile Mr. Peabody stood at Parade Rest, as they say in the military, but any chance of his receiving the “Ten-Hut” command quickly went by the boards.
“Oh, and I got an estimate on the damage to my car,” she said in a tone that precluded anything good following. “Eighteen-hundred dollars. That’s all I have in savings. Did you ever find out who owns that white pickup that rammed us?”
My plan to be a gigolo, a prohibitive longshot at best, dead, I began to stammer until a plausible lie came to me, “Uh, no, but I got some guys down at Pete’s working on it.”
Realizing such a feeble defense couldn’t hold long and not being the most quick-minded around beautiful, or any, women I began to sort through the items on the table. In particular I pushed the phone and the packet of papers from Ted Sheehan’s house that Barton found her way as those were the two things I did accomplish on the case today. I hoped she was buying my Potemkin efforts when my flip phone rang. It was my sister and I walked to the kitchen debating whether to answer. Seeing as Miss Iceland hadn’t softened but Mr. Peabody had, I did and regretted it immediately. She wanted a favor.
“Can you come over and watch the kids,” she blurted out over crying, wailing and general mayhem.
“I’m kinda tryin’ to save my livelihood right now,” I said without much conviction. I could never muster up drama at will. “Can’t someone else, do it?”
“Oh, you’re probably out with your Peroxide Princess, I bet.”
“Why is everyone so fixated on her hair?” I questioned. “She got tits and an ass; you know!”
“Yeah, and so does my husband, but you don’t wanna hear about those. I gotta run Old Lady Murchison to the vet. Her cat’s been dying for three months now and with any luck this’ll be it. She’s out in the driveway sobbing so I’m leaving now. Get here before the kids burn this shithole down…”
She hung up and as the last part was no idle threat, I grabbed my keys. Miss Iceland had pulled the brochures and paperwork from the envelope Barton had taken from Sheehan’s house. I was anxious to see if she could make something of it, and my presence only serving to distract and annoy her, I was at the stairs before I told her I was leaving.
“I’ve gotta go watch my sister’s kids. I’ll be back in about an hour,” I said, one foot on the stairs.
She didn’t seem too thrilled about this, but asked, “Do you want me to go with you?”
“No, stay here and go through the info. Besides you might wanna have kids one day and one hour with my sister’s brats and your ovaries’ll seal up like a mayonnaise jar on Funk & Wagnalls porch.” I knew she wouldn’t get the reference (Johnny Carson’s Carnak), but the subsequent confused look gave me just enough time to sneak out and leave the heavy lifting to her. As I descended the stairs I tried to think if it was safe to leave her in my place alone where she could snoop around. Then I considered: no porn videos, no nudie mags, no sex toys...Maybe she was right, I should get out more often.
I entered my sister’s house about eight minutes later and heard my nephews barreling towards me from two rooms away. Immediately I covered my testicles. Maybe I should rephrase that: my testicles were covered clothes-wise, but I struck a pose like soccer players taking on a penalty kick. That’s because said nephews were in a pro wrestling phase; or more dangerously a pro wrestling video game phase. Now I don’t like to brag, but I’m kind of a squared-circle savant and could believably ‘sell’ a blow as they say in biz. Unfortunately, at their height and limited reach these callow clouts all seemed to cluster around my tender parts...and with the accession of Miss Iceland I currently needed those parts in relatively functioning order.
Huey, Dewey and Louie, for an inability to remember and/or care about their real names, came charging into the kitchen screaming. “Uncle Luke! Uncle Luke! Uncle Luke!” they exclaimed in ear-piercing stereo.
“Yeah, what?” I said, sternly. This brought them up short, sock-sliding to a halt on the linoleum floor. I’d heard an elementary school teacher say the best way to control a class is to not smile until November. The tone having been set I removed my hands from my aforementioned testicular region and grinned at them. I mean I’m not a monster.
A couple more stifled “Uncle Luke’s” were released before Ryan (I think) spoke, “When are we going to get to stay at your home?”
He was playing fast and loose with the word ‘home’, but as they all chimed in, I cut them off again. “My house is filled with fire and broken glass. Kids aren’t allowed there.” As they pondered this, I considered whether they were too young to know any better or thought I was the kind of person that might live in such a place.
“How ‘bout Halloween? Can we come over then? Do you give out candy?” asked the middle one (Ryan II, I’ll call him).
“Yeah,” I said pretending to wet a pen on my tongue and then write on my hand. “Note to self: Get razor blades...OK, see you then.”
At least I was having fun.
“Who wants to play the wrestling video game?” I said since this was the only bonding experience I could think of; they not the type to enjoy a reading from Dostoyevsky, say.
“Me...Me...Me”
“OK, go set it up and I’ll be there in a minute.”
“I’m gonna be John Cena,” said Ryan I.
“I wanna be Goldberg,” cried out Ryan II and they ran off pulling Ryan III in their wake.
As I moved into the dining room and took off my coat I had to laugh. While living with Derf in Boston Bill Goldberg was in his wrestling heyday. Walking in one day Derf pointed at the TV and asked, “Goldberg, do you think that’s his real name?”
Never one to look gift sarcasm in the mouth I replied, “No, I think he changed to that for wrestling. Probably thought ‘Let’s see they have The Rock, Stone Cold, The Undertaker...I’m thinking something Jewish might work…’”
Then as I went to hang my jacket over a dining room chair something caught my attention. It was a note written by my brother-in-law Andrew to my sister. It wasn’t the content that was of interest- ‘hon, pick up steak and burgers i will grill tonight.’ It was the style: child-like scrawl, no caps.
Immediately I pulled out my phone, flicked my wrist and flipped it open (I don’t care, I still think it looks cool) to call Miss Iceland. .
After exchanging pleasantries, I began tenuously. “Hey, what’s going on?”
“Just trying to sort out this pile of crap you left me,” she replied, testily. Then on a positive note added, “I think I figured out what’s in this packet the teacher, Barton, gave you.”
“Great...Do you have the note that was with the flip phone there?” I asked, hurriedly.
“Yeah, and you’re welcome,” she replied with a trace of exasperation in me that I shrugged off as inevitable. Papers shuffled, then, “Wait, what note?”
“The one that was in the manila envelope with the phone. I found that on my car this morning after you drove off. Didn’t you look inside?”
“I did. I just assumed you forgot your phone in the rush to leave me here with everything.”
This was not going well. I pined for a Natty Ice. Fearing the bloom was bidding farewell to the proverbial rose between us I took a deep, not nearly as satisfying, breath and spoke calmly. “Why would I leave my phone in a manila envelope?”
“Based on the state of your car and apartment I figured you were marching to the beat of a whole different drum corps so I chalked it up to your...uh...eccentricities, shall we say.”
“OK, you got me where the hair is short there, but now dump that envelope and look at the note,” I said.
“That’s disgusting,” she sneered as regarded the first half of my statement, but carried out the second half as I heard the envelope crackle and the phone hit the plywood with a thud. “OK, I have the note. You want me to read it to you?”
“No, I read it already. Just tell me is it all in lowercase?”
“Yes.”
“Does it look to you like a 3rd grader wrote it?”
“To be generous...yeah.”
I examined the note to my sister again. “Are the T’s crossed low so they look like plus signs.”
“There’s one T and it could be a plus sign or a crucifix for a midget.”
“Freakin’ Andrew,” I blurted out.
“Are you done playing CSI and mind telling me what this is about?”
“My brother-in-law Andrew, I told you, he's a cop in town .Based on the writing he’s the one who left that on my car,” I informed her.
“Wait, didn’t Monica Carson have a flip phone on her or near her at the crime scene? That fat cop at the door told us about it.”
“Fat cop? This is Artfield you’re going to have to be more specific,” I wisecracked. My inveterate jokiness out of the way I saw she had a point. “Yeah, that’s right Woody Maynard was there keeping people away. He mentioned that when I pulled out my phone.”
“I always thought that it was strange why anyone under 60...um, present company excluded...let alone a 24 year-old girl would have a flip phone,” she queried. “I meant to check that out, but then the newspaper pulled me from the story.”
I heard more “Uncle Luke’s” from the living room and figured I hadn’t long till the three snot-noses dragged me away from this call. I couldn’t figure out why Andrew would give me such a potentially explosive piece of evidence, but Miss Iceland, without such complacent thoughts rattling around her head, had already moved on.
“How do you turn this on?”
“I tried...no charge. Go in the kitchen. Try my current charger. It’s on the kitchen table,” I said.
“You didn’t try your charger?” she growled slowly in a voice I heard Gladys, girlfriends, my mother and assorted others of the distaff set use all too often. “How friggin’ lazy are you?”
“In grade school whenever we did a report on a President I chose William Henry Harrison...so don’t be afraid to set the bar real low. Are you at the kitchen table?”
“When it has a hole in the center for an umbrella it’s a patio table...all I see are newspapers…”
“If you’re going to criticize my decor we’ll never get this case solved,” I lamented. “Now look under the newspapers...Got it?”
“Yeah, it’s no good. The phone has a female end and so does the charger. We need a male end to stick in the female end of the phone,” she claimed, rather graphically I thought.
“That’s the second worst phone sex I’ve ever had,” I declared.
“What was the worst?”
“Let’s just say it was non-traditional and involved a free Sports Illustrated helmet phone and copious amounts of Neosporin...Quick, go to the linen closet. There should be a box filled with junk on the floor in there.” For once, I thought, my laziness and hoarding instinct may have combined for something positive.
“You have linen?” she answered, starting to enjoy herself now. Suddenly I realized what it was like dating me...but without the good looks.
“It’s a figure of speech. The closet by the bathroom.”
I could hear her footfalls and the squeaking of the 60s era hardwood floors. “Yeah, yeah I’m there. I pulled the box out. What am I looking for?”
“I may have the charger to my old phone in there,” I answered. “It might work on this one.”
I heard rummaging and then she released an exuberant “Oh my God!” making me think we really were having phone sex. “What is it?” I asked with trepidation. “Is there a big bug living behind the box? Kill it now before it hides somewhere else. I’ll never sleep if that happens…”
She pulled me back from what was not my finest moment by incredulously asking, “You played minor league baseball?” She had uncovered my memories.
“Yes. One year with the Lake Havasu Gila Monsters in the Arizona Rookie League. The scouting report on me was ‘...he’s small, but he’s slow…’ Undrafted free agents with that label are destined for the slo-pitch softball circuit,” I informed her. “Now, look underneath and…”
But it was too late and since she was having fun after our testy exchanges previously I let her go on. “Wow, you graduated with honors from University of Vermont?”
“Wow? You don’t have to act so surprised.”
“I wasn’t acting,” she said with added snark.
I responded with pomposity, “I’ll have you know I also won the prestigious Biederman Scholarship in Journalism which I didn’t use...but, alas, that was one score and 7000 beers ago.”
“And what’s this in the plastic sheet?”
“Don’t touch that,” I pronounced a little too forcefully. “That’s my ticket stub from the Eighties-Palooza I attended in 1999 at Boston Garden signed by two of three members of Bananarama and a Thompson Twin. That could be worth something someday.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Hey, you don’t know one of them could freak out and kill a bunch of people and I’ll be laughing all the way to Ebay.” At this point I had enough of playing This Is Your (Pathetic) Life and decided to give her the abridged version so we could get on with what I really wanted her to find in the box. “Listen, the program’s from Game 1 of the 2004 World Series, the matchbook is a memory from a couple hours spent at the Fountain Motor Lodge, ‘nuff said, and the legal release papers stem from a night in the Drunk Tank at Lake Placid Spring Break 2001 where some local named Tweety and I banged on the bars singing Dylan’s Hurricane till they dropped charges and kicked us to the curb at five in the morning...he still sends me a Christmas card every year.”
“Well, seems like you’ve lived a full life,” she cracked.
“OK, now take that crap out and see if you can find my old charger among the wires and cords at the bottom.”
“What the…,” she stopped short of the expletive out of shock and not decorum I believe. “This is worse than when I had to help my Dad with the Christmas lights every year.” She was talking about the plethora of wires I’d accumulated over the years and left in a tangle that made Cobble’s Knot in Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac Magee look like the twist-tie on Wonder Bread.
“It is a Gordian Knot, but I have confidence in you,” I said, trying to summon something that sounded remotely like confidence.
“Do you even know what the Gordian Knot was,” she spat. My silence indicating ignorance she went on, “The Gordian Knot was tied by the Phrygian god equivalent to Zeus and could not be undone for over a thousand years until Alexander The Great chopped in half with his sword in 333 BC.”
“Uh...well, let’s call that Plan B,” I stammered. “You know, maybe see if you can work a finger in there first...or something…”
She sighed so deeply I could feel her breath bouncing off a satellite and coming through my phone. “I’ll work on it,” she said in fading tones until the last thing I heard before she shut her phone off was a faint, “...freakin’ Gordian Knot…what an ass...”
Well, I’ve had worse girlfriends, I thought. That’s when the sound of sock-ed footsteps came padding down the hall and stopped closer than anyone would want their kids to me. Another chorus of increasingly annoying and shrill “Uncle Luke's'' later I put my phone away, returned the note to the center of the table and agreed to follow them to the den to take them on in Greco-Cyber wrestling. That is until my sister returned and I could get back to my apartment where I planned to take on Miss Iceland in some catch-as-catch-carnal excitement of our own.
Distracted by Miss Iceland’s pale pulchritude I dropped my guard long enough for Ryan 2.5 (not sure if it was II or III) to catch me with, what my High School baseball coach referred to as, a shot to the ‘cubes’. It was my own fault for suggesting we play a game that had a button labeled “Crotch Shot”. As I hobbled knock-kneed off to the layeth the proverbial smacketh downeth on some Ryan's ass in the game suddenly sex was the last thing on my mind. However, unbeknownst to me, I’d be overwhelmed by it in a way I never thought when I finally did get home.
