Tarkington glares as if I've just spit up on his boots. "What blood, you fucking bonehead? The sample you stolewhen you broke into the lady's house? Jesus W. Christ."
"Rick, I needed to know for sure. That's why I did it."
"And I need a warrant, old buddy. You find me some PC and I'll find a judge and then we'll go cut us a piece of that rug, nice and legal." He stands up, stretches his arms. Throws in a yawn, in case I'm not taking the hint. "Jack, don't get bummed. You've got quite a story here ... "
"But what?"
"A helluva story, as you say. But you're not done yet. It's still missing the pretty ribbon and the bow." Tarkington nods toward his stack of files. "Now you'll excuse me, I've got a couple widows of my own to interview. They aren't nearly as chipper as yours."
"Okay, but first give me your impression—in a word, Rick—of everything you've heard so far."
"Intriguing," he says.
That's good, but it's not what I'm looking for. Abkazion will demand something stronger.
"How about 'suspicious'?" I venture.
"Yeah, all right. It's suspicious."
"Highlysuspicious, would you say?"
"I would say goodbye now, Mr. Tagger. And if my name appears in the paper this week under your byline, it'd better be because I've croaked in some newsworthy way."
That's what I mean about Rick. I couldn't even joke about something like that. As soon as the office door closes, I take out my notebook and jot the following:
Asst. State Atty. R. Tarkington says he's preparing to investigate circumstances of J. Stoma death and disappearance of Stoma's sister. "Highly suspicious," says the veteran prosecutor.
Forgive me, Woodward, for I have sinned.
The pier at Silver Beach is not a big draw at high noon on a hot August day. I arrive half an hour early and, from the safety of my car, I scope the place thoroughly with binoculars. Team Cleo has had two days to run the phone number I wrote on the compact disc, an easy job for any private investigator.
But I don't see any egregious lurkers, anyone who looks as if they don't belong. There are a couple of shirtless teenagers drinking beer and snagging pilchards; a row of retirees in folding chairs, dozing under hats the size of garbage-can lids; a smoochy young Hispanic couple sharing a single fishing rod, taking turns reeling in baby snappers; a trio of weekday regulars, leathery and windblown, laden with bait buckets and bristling with heavy tackle.
After yanking off my necktie and loosening my shirt at the collar, I set off at a breezy amble for the phone booth at the end of the pier.
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?"