Jake's 8 (12 page)

“Maybe it was you leaving her,” Mr. Sumner said. “Ever thought of that?”

“I didn’t leave her. I went to college.”

“Yeah, you left her and then she did that thing.”

The son brushed a piece of lint off his Dockers and turned to me.

In a low voice he said, “My freshman year at U.K.....my mother took her life in the upstairs bathroom.”

“My father did the same my junior year,” I admitted.

Through a glance we shared a mutual sympathy.

“How’d you survive?” he asked me.

“Survive?”

“Yeah, the depression. The loss.”

I shrugged. “It was rough,” I told him, “but my family wasn’t close. It was more an inconvenience.”

“My mother and I were close,” he said. His eyes were watering. “I was—am—too much like her.”

“Yeah, he was a mama’s boy,” his father snarled. A flash of anger crossed Rick’s eyes. I saw the pupils rage black. “That’s why he did that thing.” He laughed then said, “I’m going to go take a leak.”

I didn’t ask what thing. I watched Mr. Sumner leave the parlor, round the corner and heard his footfalls on carpeted stairs.

“If you’ll excuse me I have to make a call,” I said to the three gentlemen. The son looked on the verge of tears while the business partner seemed to smolder with anger. Sumner’s father looked asleep. I hoped asleep.

I went outside onto the front stoop. I should have grabbed my coat. The air had passed from chilly to frigid. I glanced at my watch. Ten thirty in the p.m. I dialed up Mr. Carmichael. It went right to voicemail. Getting a signal through the granite of the Museum was near impossible, I knew.

I left a message.

“Mr. Carmichael, it’s ten thirty and no ghosts have been spotted. Mr. Sumner is here with his family, such as it is. His father, son and an old business partner. Things have gotten personal and I think I’ve overstayed my welcome. I’m going to make sure Mr. Sumner feels okay and call it a night. No need to stay until the chimes of midnight. I hope that’s okay.”

I clicked my phone shut and grabbed a few gulps of the fresh air. It must be a neighborhood of old people, I thought. Up and down the street the houses were dark. Not a light or a flicker of a TV through the windows. The chill got to me, so—tense as it was—I stepped back into the warmth of the house.

I closed the door and turned and Mr. Sumner was rounding the stairs on his way back to the parlor. He was taking short, marching steps.

“Let’s get these assholes out of my house,” he said.

A vicious little man, I thought.

I followed him into the parlor.

“Okay, you three. Out! Get out or Mr. Gibb here will throw you out.”

“I’m not throwing anyone out, Mr. Sumner. You want them out then call the police.”

“No. We’re throwing them out,” he said. He looked at his son. “Boy, your mother was weak and bad in bed. Ross, you were a horrible business man, but your wife was good in bed. I bet you didn’t know I knew that.” He gave a laugh. “Dad, you were just plain weak.”

The three men stood as Mr. Sumner shouted at them. Even the octogenarian’s face went fierce. For some reason I’ll never know, I put myself between Mr. Sumner and the three men.

From behind I heard the old man whisper, “It’s time to settle up.”

“Mr. Sumner,” I started to say, but then my mind went foggy. I felt myself lifted. I sensed I was floating on my feet just above the carpet. I left the parlor and rounded the corner to the front door. I saw the closet door open and I was pushed in. The door closed behind me. I feel back and the slamming door struck me on the crown of my head. I crumpled to the ground. There was a quarter inch of space between the door and the floor. A quarter inch of dim light shown through. I felt the blood swirl in my head and I tried to right myself. My body wouldn’t follow orders and I was tangled in fallen coats. As a great aching blackness cobwebbed itself across my mind, I saw a green light creep in under the door along the hardwood floor. It was the color of spilled absinthe on a cherry bar. I was out.

The cobweb was falling from my mind. I heard the front door open. I felt cool air rush in under the closet door. It slapped me awake. Then footsteps. The footsteps paced slowly past the closet door and down the hall. I heard them return and fall against the rug in the parlor

I swore loudly. Mr. Carmichael’s ‘client service’ be damned I was going to hurt somebody.

“Let me out of here,” I screamed. “Now you motherfuckers!”

The steps approached the closet and the door opened. I looked up into the face of Prescott Carmichael.

“My god,” he said. “Let me help you up.”

“No. Let me sit for a moment. Let me get some air.”

He stood back. After a few gulps I looked up at him.

“What time is it?” I asked. “Why are you here? Who got me? I’m going to kill him.”

“Sit back,” he said. Mr. Carmichael spoke his words softly, but they come across as orders. I sat back. I was worried by the look on his face. It was worry or fear. I‘m not sure which. I’d never seen the man worried or be fearful.

“I got your message,” he said flatly. “The one from ten thirty. About you calling it a night and heading home. The message about Mr. Sumner being with his family.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s why I came over here.”

“Yeah. Thanks,” I said. I put my hand to the top of my head. A spot of blood was on my fingers.

“I came as fast as I could.”

This was getting old, I thought. “Yeah. Like I said, thanks.”

“You don’t understand.”

“You came over here. Client service. What’s to understand? Who shoved me into this closet?”

“Stay down,” he said. “You said Mr. Sumner’s father was here.”

“Yeah.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. He called him dad. His father told a pretty good story about Mr. Sumner ruining his life.”

“And his business partner, Reinhart? And his son, Rick?”

I used the wall to climb to my feet. Mr. Carmichael can be frustrating. When the frustration is balanced against the rather large salary I score off him, he wins. But tonight the six figures on my W-2 held little weight.

“Yeah. The three of them. They were here,” I said. “In that room over there.”

Mr. Carmichael gulped.

“I helped administer Mr. Sumner’s father’s estate,” he said. “Herbert Sumner died twenty-five years ago. His business partner? Ross Reinhart. I knew him. He belonged to my club. Pancreatic cancer got him ten years ago. His son? Rick Sumner drove into an overpass embankment on I-75 on his way back to U.K. after burying his mother. Died instantly.”

“You’re mixed up,” I told him. “I spent a couple of hours with them. One of them tossed me in here.”

“I need you to see something,” he said.

He took me by the waist until I could steady myself. We rounded the corner into the parlor.

“This is how I found him,” Mr. Carmichael said.

Henry Sumner was hanging by a rope tied to the chandelier. A noose was cinched tight around his throat. The tips of his toes lightly brushing against the carpet. His blood bloated face was contorted into an expression that looked like a screamed ‘No.’

“He’s dead,” Mr. Carmichael said. “I checked.”

“Shit,” I said.

“Agreed.”

Instinctively we stepped away and backed into the hallway.

“I’m going to call the police now,” Mr. Carmichael said. “I think it’s best you not mention the three… others. The three others that you say were here. Was Mr. Sumner’s distraught?”

“Distraught? I guess so. Sure.”

“Then he must have pushed you into the closet, locked it and did that. Sometime while you were in there you called me for help. Does that sound more plausible?”

“More plausible?”

“As if it could have happened?”

“I know what plausible means. I also know what filing a false report means.”

“Think it through,” he said. He wasn’t threatening. There was earnestness in his voice.

“You sure the three others are dead?”

“Yes,” he said.

I punched my way through the fog in my head.

“Yeah, that’s the way it happened,” I said.

“Tell me, then.”

“He was distraught. He pushed me in and locked the door.”

“Okay, I’ll call the police now.” He dialed and told the dispatcher he’d found a suicide and gave his number and agreed to wait for a squad car. He slipped his phone into his pocket then said, “I drank a Manhattan tonight.”

The statement surprised and confused me.

“What?”

“A Manhattan. I drank a Manhattan at the S.P.C.A. reception.”

I gave him a who-the-hell-cares look then righted myself. “You don’t drink liquor,” I said. “You only do wine.”

“But tonight I had a Manhattan. I was standing in line waiting for a glass of whatever over-chilled red they were serving when, off to the side, a barman flagged me over. I asked him for a glass of red and he suggested a Manhattan. He was dressed different from the rest of the staff. Not in slacks and golf shirts. He dressed like bartenders use to. He was in a starched white apron over a burgundy vest and he wore sleeve garters. Impeccably dressed.”

“He said, ‘No, you need a Manhattan, Mr. Carmichael’ and for whatever reason I agreed.”

“He pulled out a shaker, scooped in some ice, poured in two measures of Bulleit rye, one of vermouth, and carefully added four dashes of bitters. He shook it as if he was waiting for the precise moment to stop. When he did, he poured it into a Nick and Nora and handed it to me. I drank it in four sips standing in front of him then I put the glass down.

“As my glass clinked on the bar, he said, ‘Mr. Carmichael, sir, you need to go out-of-doors and check your voice messages. Mr. Gibb is in need of your assistance. I’m afraid he’s going to partially pay for someone else’s sins.’”

I looked to Mr. Carmichael’s ashen face and then back to Mr. Sumner’s body hanging in the parlor. Red and blue lights flashed against the dead man’s face and a couple of minutes later three Newport cops walked in.

It was three before I got back to my place. A medic checked out my head and told me not to sleep in case I was concussed, but I brushed that off. I slipped into bed and for some reason I’ve still not figured out—I wept.

She asked, “Why are you stopping?”

“Look,” I said.

She got off the motorcycle and stood beside me.

The military had tried to blow the airport bridge to slow the rebels’ advance. They failed. Two of its four lanes had fallen the seventy feet to the river below. The third teetered, broken at a forty-five degree angle. A wind would send it falling soon enough, but the fourth lane looked to have held through the blast.

“We’ll walk across,” I told her. “First me with the motorcycle then you.”

“No.”

“It will be safer.”

“I love you,” she said to me for the first time.

“I love you,” I said to anyone for the first time.

She took my hand from the grip of the bike, turned it up and kissed my palm.

“Then it’s settled,” she said. “We’ll cross together.”

The remaining lane was eight feet wide. The bridge spanned twenty-five yards. I looked across the bridge again and steeled myself. To our left would be the girders of the bridge. To our right would be the long drop into the river below.

“Get on,” I told her. She did so and again wrapped her arms and legs tight around my body.

I put as much speed into the bike as I could. We were either going to get across quickly or we were going to die quickly.

We did not die.

The bike hit a hard transition where the far end of the bridge met the road. I kept it upright and pulled the bike to a stop and looked back.

“Are we still alive?” she asked.

“Are we still in love?”

“Yes, we’re still in love.”

“Then we are alive.”

The Margarita is a fun drink. While drinking one (okay, maybe four) one day, I sat down to write a fun story.
Dirty Pictures
is the result. Reading it again, I can almost feel the tequila hangover.

Be warned: there are plenty of crap margaritas out in the world. Don’t fall victim to one. If you’re margarita is coming from a machine that looks like the contraption at a gas station that a kid’s neon-colored frozen slurry treat comes from, skip it, ridicule the bartender and have your drink at a better establishment. Margaritas are easy to make well and not easy to foul up. Some idiots really work at it.

Here’s how I do mine.

Again with the chilled glass and the half-full of ice Boston cocktail shaker. If you want a salted rim, use the same procedure as sugaring the rim in for the Sidecar, except swap in lime juice for the orange juice and salt for the sugar.

Next, toss in 1½ ounces of some quality tequila. When I say quality, I don’t mean some nice
reposado
or
anejo
. I mean something you’ve heard of that won’t make you wince at the cash register, but something that won’t make you gag. I mean something decently priced and maybe even with the word “gold” on the label. Get it? I think you got it.

On top of the tequila, pour in 1 ounce of triple sec, then squeeze in ¾ ounce of fresh—and I do mean fresh, as in you cut the lime yourself and you have to lick the juice off your fingers afterward—lime juice. Skip the fresh lime and you’ll just ruin the whole thing.

Shake. Shake some more. Strain it into your well-chilled cocktail glass and sit back and have a fun time with
Dirty Pictures
.

– Howard McEwen