Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 54, No. 3, March 2009

Past Imperfect by Jim Ingraham

That warm morning on the coast of Maine I parked my Jeep and walked on hard clay through a salt marsh to the stone steps of Elric Hoagy’s cottage. I hadn’t been here in a while and stood on the porch enjoying the briny wind coming in off Casco Bay, the cries of seagulls, the glints of sunlight on the swaying acres of grass, the fragrance of the marsh.

Elric was asleep in his old Morris chair by a fireplace, a white-haired man in his seventies wearing corduroy pants, bare feet resting on a pillow. Frenchie, his hound, was on a rug at his feet, jaw on his paws, watching me with mild interest. The wind stirred gauze curtains at an open window across the room.

I rapped on a post at the staircase. Elric didn’t budge. Frenchie thudded his tail, got up and came over to smell my hand, get his head scruffed, then went back to the rug.

“Leave your door unlocked like that,” I said, “someone’s gonna come in and steal you.”

Elric smiled before he opened his eyes. “Ain’t seen you in a while.”

I moved newspaper off a chair and sat down facing him. “Looking for Eloise,” I said.

He yawned, found an itch under a layer of shirt, and scratched it. “She’s out on the rocks, painting. Want something to drink?”

“Just ate,” I said.

“Don’t mean you can’t drink, Duff.”

He hitched himself up in the chair, glanced past me. “Sure that door was unlocked? Thought I locked it.”

“Wasn’t locked.”

“Thought I locked it,” he said, getting up.

He kicked his leg a few times, curing a cramp I supposed, then paused in the kitchen doorway. “You gonna sit a while? Or you just come to see her?”

“Can’t stay,” I said.

“Well, she’s out there,” and he left the room, not in the least offended.

I walked down a clay path to the end of the marsh, stepped through yellow patches of grass onto gray ledge, and watched a boy just offshore standing on the stern sheets of Elric’s renovated Jonesport dumping bait from a firkin, noisy seagulls fluttering over him. Like me twenty years ago, a high school kid earning summer pay hauling traps. I noticed Elric’s dory propped under hanging buoys against his fishing shack. The tide was out and a heavy odor was coming in off the mudflats.

Elric’s daughter Eloise was hunched forward on her stool, her back to me, easel in front. She was studying lobster buoys in the choppy water beyond rocks draped with seaweed. Across the inlet were the bleached barnacle-coated pilings of an abandoned wharf on an empty stretch of sand.

“You’ve done this scene before,” I said. “Saw it at your last showing.”

She turned, started. “Hey!” she said, reaching out a warm hand. About my age, she was a broad-shouldered Scandinavian woman, with a wind-coarsened face, blue eyes, and blond eyebrows. A sailor’s knit cap held her hair down.

She dropped a brush into a coffee can, swished it back and forth, wiped it on a stained kitchen towel. “Still trying to capture it,” she said, sitting back, taking a breather. “So what brings you down here?”

I found a boulder to sit on, glanced for a moment at the open sea, and caught a whiff of turpentine before the wind blew it off. Raising my voice over the sound of waves crashing the rocks, I said, “Was your friend Nora Murphy ever a friend of a guy named Dixie Hardaway?”

“Wow! That’s a name out of the past.”

“You and Nora still friends?”

“Sure, but I never knew Dixie Hardaway, only what Nora told me — some rich man’s son she fell in love with. What’s going on?”

“What can you tell me about Nora?”

“A high school teacher. Lives with her mother. Why are you asking?”

A sudden gust tilted her easel. She made a grab for it, almost falling off her stool. I helped her wedge its legs into a cleft in the rocks.

“The summer my father was killed, would you remember if the police questioned her?”

“Ahh...” Her eyes brightened. “You’re still doing that. No, never heard that they did. Why would they?”

“You remember, don’t you, that Nora was shacked up with Dixie Hardaway that summer?”

She laughed. “Where’d you get that expression? People don’t say ‘shacked up’ anymore. ‘Shacked up’ makes it sound dirty. It wasn’t dirty. They were in love. At least, she was.”

We stared at each other a few seconds. A little smile was in her eyes, waiting for the next question.

“Ran into a lawyer yesterday in Steep Falls,” I said, “an old friend of my father’s. He said he’d rented a cottage down Cape Porpoise next to one rented by Dixie Hardaway and a woman named Nora Murphy. Thought it might be your friend.”

“It was. Yeah, that was a big summer for Nora. In love for the first time. I never saw her happier. But it all came crashing down, poor woman.”

“How?”

“Well, for openers, her mother lost a leg to diabetes, then was paralyzed by a stroke. Nora had to take a year off from teaching. With all due respect to you, Duff, I doubt she paid much attention to news about a murder.”

“What was never in the news,” I said, “is that Dixie was one of several people questioned by the police. He was a suspected drug user. What bothered this lawyer and now bothers me is that Dixie claimed he’d gone to Florida the weekend my father was killed. The lawyer thinks he lied.”

“That summer — what was it, eight years ago? — if Nora had missed a weekend with that man, she’d’ve come sobbing to me. And she never did.”

“You sure?”

“She lived for those weekends. She was in love.”

“This guy said she was on a blanket with Dixie every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday right in front of his place. Drove his wife nuts with his children out there giggling at them.”

“So why’s this important now?”

“Because he lied. He didn’t deny being with a woman. It wasn’t to protect her. He just told them he went to Florida that very weekend. Why would he say that if he wasn’t hiding something?”

“You might find out from Nora. But she might not want to talk about it. That summer’s a bitter memory for her.”

“You have her address?”

I found Nora’s mother in the small backyard of a two-story house that had to be, like most houses on Munjoy Hill, at least a hundred years old. Paint blisters on the clapboards, red begonias in faded green boxes under street-level windows. She was in a wheelchair with only one foot protruding from a quilted robe that covered her legs. I guessed she was in her seventies. She looked like a spent old lady with sallow cheeks and thinning gray hair and sagging jowls. She looked up from a magazine as I walked toward her. I watched her lift a Perrier bottle off the grass and drink from it while squinting at me over metal-rimmed reading glasses.

“Mrs. Murphy?”

“Why, yes, young man,” she said, her face brightening. I guessed she didn’t get many visitors.

“I’m Duff Kerrigan.” I handed her my National Assurance card. (I don’t carry one identifying me as a private investigator — too intimidating.)

She put the bottle down and pushed her glasses higher on her nose and read every word on the card. She seemed disappointed to find nothing printed on the back.

“My husband sold insurance,” she said, handing the card back. “Everything on the hill this side of Congress Street was what he called his debit, all the way down past Longfellow’s house. Everybody on the hill knew him and loved him.”

I found out later that her husband had been dead for more than ten years.

“Nora should be home anytime now. She probably stopped to get some groceries. I told her we were low on coffee.” Looking across the table at a chair laden with potting soil, plant pots, and a bag of fertilizer, she said, “You can bring a chair out from the kitchen if you’d like. Nora sometimes does that although she’s not one for sitting around much. She likes to putter in the garden or stay in her room. She has a computer up there. I think she’s writing a book, although I don’t know what she has to write about. She doesn’t have any social life. She’s always been fearful of boys...”

I heard a car stop at the curb behind my Jeep and went out to see a slender woman, maybe five four, set a stack of papers on the hood of her car. She opened the trunk and lifted out a bag of groceries.

“Can I help you with that?” I said, crossing the street.

A puzzled “What?” came to her face.

“You’re Nora Murphy?” giving her a big smile. “I’m Duff Kerrigan.”

That got a so-what look as she lowered the lid of the trunk and gathered the papers off the hood.

A few papers slid from her hand to the pavement. I helped pick them up. They were pages with ragged edges torn out of spiral notebooks, student essays.

As she took them from me, she said, “You want to see me?”

“I’m a friend of Eloise Hoagy,” I said.

That brought another so-what look, but one that was tinged with curiosity.

I followed her up steps to the lawn, watching her pink heels slide in and out of black flat shoes under the low hem of a dark blue dress. She said something to her mother and went to the back door. “I’ll be right out,” as though telling me to stay put.

While waiting, I learned a lot about Mrs. Murphy’s husband the insurance salesman and about the four-masted schooners that were still coming into the harbor when Mrs. Murphy was a child, “long past their most useful time, of course. They took the masts down and used the hulls to carry pulpwood down from the rivers. This was once a very important seaport.” She glanced at the back door when Nora came out. “Sometimes at night I watched my husband standing at the window. I always thought he was dreaming about going to sea.” She started to laugh. “Maybe to get away from me. He always said I talked too much.”

“How can I help you?” Nora said, coming onto the grass, brushing a lock of hair off her forehead. She was every high school English teacher you ever knew, strong willed and forthright. Maybe she had little social life, but she was not mousy. Her face glowed with the radiance of a disciplined mind.

“Are you a lawyer?”

“A private investigator.”

Her expression grew thoughtful. “And this is about Eloise?”

“I guess the two of you are friends.”

She glanced at her mother, probably to determine whether she was listening, then led me down the walk toward the street. She was suspicious and annoyed but curious.

“Actually it’s about Dixie Hardaway.”

That jolted her. “So just what is it you want?” she said in a manner that told me I wouldn’t get it, whatever it was.

To protect Nora’s privacy I turned my back on the old woman in the wheelchair and said, “Eight years ago my father was murdered on a beach down Brackett Shores. He was a policeman watching a cottage where people purchased drugs.”

That brought a concerned, puzzled look.

“You spent your weekends that summer in Cape Porpoise with Dixie Hardaway.”

She didn’t deny it, but the observation made her impatient. “What is it you want?”

“I want to know whether he was with you every weekend?”

Again the puzzled expression. “I don’t understand. What is it you’re...?”

“You were taking courses at Southern Maine. Every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday you were in Cape Porpoise with Dixie.”

“Eloise told you that?”

“She said if he hadn’t been at the cottage any one of those weekends, you’d’ve been upset.”

“And what is it you want me to say?”

“I just want to know whether the police questioned you.”

“Why would they?” shaking her head as though the question didn’t make sense.

“They questioned Dixie. He didn’t tell you that?” She didn’t answer, didn’t intend to answer, still trying to figure out what I wanted. “This is very important to me,” I said. “I’m trying to find out who killed my father.”

“You think Dixie did?”

“I didn’t say that. But he apparently lied to the police about where he was that weekend, and I want to know why.”

After a moment’s reflection, she said, “I’m sorry. I don’t know what he said to the police. I didn’t know he talked to the police or had reason to.” She started to walk away.

“Please!”

She waved me off with deprecation. That offended me.

“Talk to me or talk to a grand jury,” I said.

She took about four steps, turned, and came back. In a tone intended to bring all of this to a close, she said, “I knew nothing about a murder. The police had no reason to question me. Dixie never told me the police had questioned him.”

“Was he with you every weekend?”

About ten seconds floated past her eyes. She resented me and resented my question. But she said, “Yes,” and turned and walked away.

That brief answer gave me incentive to book a flight to Fort Myers, Florida, where I spent a day and a half in a rented Ford before I located Dixie at a bar in an outdoor bistro on Sanibel Island.

The sweet smell of decaying algae floated in off the Gulf of Mexico and mingled with odors of cigarettes and whiskey in the humid Florida atmosphere. Seven stools down from me, facing a mirrored wall of bottles, a man who resembled the man in the photo the police had given me removed pictures from his wallet and showed them to the woman on the next stool who regarded them with indifference. For ten minutes he had been hitting on her, unmindful of the amused skepticism that should have told him he was wasting his time.

While I glanced at four pelicans flying languidly down the channel toward the yacht basin, the man I suspected was Dixie Hardaway had pocketed his wallet and was moving down the bar in search, probably, of more receptive prey. I watched him tap a woman on the shoulder, watched her look up at him, smile, and turn toward him. I watched him raise a hand and snap a finger at the barkeep, ordering a drink.

I slid a leg over the stool he had just vacated and looked past the woman’s face at the sun dropping slowly into the sea on the western horizon.

“Name’s Kerrigan,” I said. “Duff Kerrigan. Can I refill your drink?”

“You’re wasting your time, honey. I’m waiting for someone.”

I smiled and watched painted fingers stroke the stem of her glass.

“I’m not hitting on you. I just want to know about the guy who was just sitting here. Do you know who he is?”

“I believe his name is Benedict Hardaway. Are you gay?”

I laughed. “Is he?”

She shrugged, caressing her glass. “I think he may have a Don Juan complex, trying to prove he’s straight with every woman in sight.” She pushed her glass toward the barkeep, tapping the rim with a long finger. I saw more years in her eyes than on the smooth flesh of her face.

“He was showing you pictures.”

“Of his son. At least that’s who he said it was.”

“He’s married?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. A lot of these barstool johnnies...”

“Forgive me,” I said, watching Dixie heading down the planks toward a men’s room. “Nice talking to you.” I hurried after him.

I found him bent over a porcelain sink, a slight, good-looking guy in his early thirties, with dark hair and dark eyes. I waited until he poked his hands under a blower. I saw no wedding ring.

“Dixie Hardaway?”

He gave me a questioning look, a half smile. “We know each other?”

“Name’s Kerrigan,” I said.

He laughed. “And I suppose you want a deal on a Cadillac. New or preowned?”

“You sell cars?”

People say there’s something intimidating about me — maybe my size, maybe something lingering from when I was a cop. I have no idea. But the smile left his face. Later I learned that he owned a Cadillac dealership. Maybe he thought I should have known.

He started to walk past me.

“Nora Murphy,” I said.

His face froze. He stopped, turned, started to say something.

“Let’s go somewhere and talk,” I said.

He didn’t want to go anywhere. For several long seconds he stared at me with stubborn resolve.

“It’s important,” I said. “It’s about a man on a beach with five bullet holes in his back.”

On what might have been weakening legs, he walked with me down the planks of the pier and leaned on the rail. Pole lamps shed little light on us, but I could see a small tic twitching at the edge of his eye. With a trembling hand he offered me a cigarette. I watched him light one and drag smoke into his face.

“A name I haven’t heard in a while,” he said, fumbling with his lighter. “Something happened to her?”

“No, and she doesn’t know I’m here.” I would have handed him my card, but in the dim light he wouldn’t’ve been able to read it.

“Is this about my son?”

That hit hard: I had mentioned Nora Murphy and he asked about his son. My thoughts flew to the rocks at the salt marsh and Eloise telling me that Nora had taken a year off from work. Maybe not only to care for an invalid mother.

“It’s about the summer you spent at Cape Porpoise.”

“What about it?”

“You were on a list of people who patronized a candy store on Brackett Shores.”

He angrily stepped back. “Is this some kind of shakedown?”

“No, and I’m not a cop. I just want to know why you told the police you were in Florida the weekend my father was murdered. You weren’t in Florida. You were in Cape Porpoise with Nora. Why did you lie?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I caught his arm as he started to move away. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.” He yanked his arm free. “Talk to me or talk to a grand jury,” I called as he walked away.

He stopped. In a nervous voice he said, “I was here with my father that weekend,” breathing rapidly. He put his hand to his chest, maybe to quell a rapid heartbeat. “The police have my statement. If you try to damage my reputation—”

“You weren’t here. You were with Nora.”

“My father—”

“If he said you were here, he lied for you. This is the murder of a policeman. It’s not going away. You’ll get dragged back to Maine. Your father will be questioned.”

“What is it you want? Money? You want money?”

“Is Nora the mother of your son?”

“What the hell do you care!”

“Why did you tell the police you were here? Where were you that Saturday night?”

“I don’t have to talk to you,” he said.

A man, maybe a security cop, was sauntering toward us from the bar, alerted maybe by our shouting. Dixie saw him, strode down the planks, and talked to him. Both men regarded me for a moment, then walked off together.

I decided not to hang around. I caught a night’s sleep at a Hampton Inn and spent the following morning riding around in an Escalade SUV with a salesman, learning, among other things, that Dixie had a seven-year-old son enrolled in a local private school and that his father, who had bought him the dealership, was a wealthy supporter of an Evangelical Christian organization dedicated to the abolition of substance abuse.

Back in Maine, after a bumpy overnight flight above the rainstorms, I visited my friend Lieutenant Myron Kadish at the local police station and told him what I had learned. I didn’t mention Nora or Dixie’s son. For now, at least, Nora’s name didn’t have to go into the record.

“It’s not enough,” Mike said, leaning back in his swivel chair, fingers entwined at the back of his head, sweat patches in his armpits, children’s watercolors on the bulletin board behind him. “But let’s get Porky up here.”

Porky Johnson was the investigator assigned to my father’s case. We didn’t like each other. At least a dozen times over the last eight years he had threatened me with arrest for interfering in his investigation. Each time Mike had rescued me with a mild rebuke.

“It’s my father, Mike.”

“It’s his case. It’s police business. For the tenth time, stay out of it.”

“But he’s not doing anything!”

Annoyance flashed in Porky’s eyes when he saw me as he swaggered into the office. He didn’t greet me; I didn’t greet him. He dropped onto a hard chair against the wall and leaned back, legs stretched out, looking like a kid with a bad attitude who’d been called into the principal’s office.

“We got something,” Mike said, fingering the file his secretary had just dropped onto his desk.

Porky waited.

“This guy—” He flipped through some pages, ran his finger down a sheet. “—Benedict Hardaway you interviewed. You remember him?”

“Supposed to be a customer of the hag who ran that place. We had nothing on him. He alibied out.”

“But you remember him.”

Porky shrugged.

“His father, it says—”

“I remember him because his father’s lawyer called, accused me of threatening the kid.”

“And he said the kid was in Florida?”

With typical arrogance, Porky didn’t bother to answer. It was on the record.

“Did you even follow up on that? Why would the guy call in his lawyer?”

“We had no evidence his son was anywhere near that cottage the night of the homicide,” Porky said wearily, as though talking to an idiot. “We didn’t have anything—”

“We’ve found a witness who says Dixie Hardaway was with a woman that weekend in Cape Porpoise.”

“What witness?”

“A lawyer Duff ran into, said he rented a cottage next to Hardaway’s and saw him there with a woman every weekend, including the weekend Duff’s father was killed.”

“Give me the name,” Porky said, sitting up, pulling a notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. “I’ll check it out.” He looked at me. “Got a name for the woman?”

They were both watching me. I didn’t want to surrender Nora’s name. A child and a woman’s reputation were at risk. But it would catch up with me if I lied.

“Nora Murphy,” I said.

“I’ll check it out.” He stood. “Anything else?”

“Yeah,” Mike said, showing him the picture of Dixie Hardaway I had been given a copy of. “If this guy wasn’t important to your investigation, why’s his picture in here?”

That brought concern. “I don’t know. I didn’t put it there.”

He didn’t ask to see it. His eyes challenged Mike to call him a liar. Porky was too smart to show contempt, but it was there behind the eyes. We watched him leave the office.

“I don’t like that son of a bitch,” I said.

Mike laughed. “Nobody does.”

“But you know how that picture got into the file?”

The question amused him. “Just wanted to get his reaction,” he said, which might have been the truth, but left a bunch of untold truths dangling behind it.

“I’m not unmindful that my father was in Internal Affairs, Mike, and that it would have been out of place for him to be checking on a whorehouse. Is there a separate investigation going on?”

“You know how your father was, especially after your mother died.”

“A workaholic, you said.”

“Yes, and he was going out on little excursions that had nothing to do with the behavior of policemen, acting like a cop from the old days, comforting himself, killing time. I know you think he wouldn’t’ve been on that beach trying to close that cottage down. Okay, I can understand that. But we have no evidence — not in his notes, not in the record — that he was out there checking on a police officer.”

“But he might’ve been.”

“Sure, he might’ve been. He might’ve been suspicious as hell of someone, but there’s nothing about it in his reports.”

He knew I wanted more. I knew there was more and knew I wouldn’t get it.

“You admitted once that Porky didn’t follow up on a lot of leads—”

“Stay out of it, Duff.”

I could have sat there an hour arguing that I had a right to know, but it would only have antagonized Mike. He was already sharing a lot more information with me than I was entitled to. I let it go.

The following afternoon I was in my office putting together information about a house fire I had investigated for an insurance company when Nora Murphy called. She sounded scared. She wanted to talk.

Because I knew she’d be more comfortable at her own place than in a made-into-an-office bedroom in my loft, I said I’d be right over.

I saw Nora’s finger holding a lace curtain aside at a front window when I pulled up at the curb behind her Ford. She pointed toward the walk that led to the back door.

“My mother’s taking a nap,” she said as I entered a kitchen that smelled of old house and fresh coffee. Nora pointed to a chair at a cloth-covered kitchen table.

“Just milk,” I said, as she set a teacup and saucer in front of me. “No sugar.”

Everything in the room was old and old-fashioned, as though time had floated through the lives of these two women unnoticed. There were stains on the wallpaper, raw wood where varnish had peeled off the frame of a doorway that led past a staircase to a darkened front room.

“I’ve talked to someone about you,” she said, measuring my reaction.

“Okay.”

She rested the rim of the cup against her bottom lip, her thin upper lip retreating from the coffee as she sipped.

“Winona Dyer,” she said, across the surface of the coffee.

“A good friend.” She was a probation officer I sometimes worked for.

“I don’t know her very well,” Nora said. “She runs a kind of school for parolees. I teach there once in a while... Anyway, she said you were, as she put it, ‘good people.’”

Nice to hear.

She took several deep breaths as though fighting off the jitters.

To ease things, I asked, “Why do they call your friend ‘Dixie’? He’s not a Southerner, is he?”

“It’s just a sobriquet for Benedict.” She took another sip of coffee, stared at something across the room, tightened her lips. “He called,” she said, pain settling into her eyes. “He’s very upset.”

I threw it right in without warning. “You’re the mother of his son.”

“Yes,” she said, without hesitation, apparently not surprised that I knew. “His father—”

“Eloise told me how that summer ended. She didn’t mention a child.”

“She was just being delicate.”

“Has a police investigator contacted you?”

“No, but a woman from around here called Dixie, and he called me. He thought you might have told her to call.”

“No.”

She studied my expression. A vulnerability that I hadn’t seen before lingered in her eyes. “I just don’t know who to trust.” Her heart was right out there, unprotected, watching me with the innocent expectation of a frightened mother.

“What did this woman tell him?”

“She told him he’d be in serious trouble if he didn’t keep his mouth shut.”

“About what?”

“He didn’t explain. He assumed I would know. That’s why I called you. He knew what the woman meant. How would he know that unless he was involved in something?”

“So he’s hiding something. And he warned you about me?”

“He told me not to tell you anything — not about him, not about our son, not anything. I don’t know what’s going on!” Tears broke into her eyes. “I don’t want anything to happen to my son.”

After blowing her nose and apologizing for having lost her composure, Nora told me the story of her child. His name, she said, is Avery. He was born five months after her mother suffered her stroke. She was unable to care for him because she had to return to work and look after her mother who had become almost helpless. Dixie’s father wanted to adopt the boy. Nora refused to give up her parental rights, but she permitted Dixie to take the boy to Florida.

“It broke my heart, but I had no choice.” For an instant, a search for approval appeared in her eyes, then abruptly vanished. She was riding on a lot of guilt.

We heard her mother cough in the other room. “If she calls I’ll have to help her into her chair and make tea. We can go outside.”

I went into the yard and found a flat rock to sit on at the steps near the street, wondering whether any moment of Nora’s life was free of guilt.

When she came out I asked for the name of the woman who had phoned Dixie. She had written it on a piece of paper.

“She’s not in the book,” Nora said.

“I’ll find her.”

A fragrance of cheese hit me when I opened the door of Altieri’s Market on Fore Street. A woman behind the counter looked up — late thirties, a bit hefty, not bad looking, streaks of gray in dark hair pulled back to a bun.

“I’m looking for Gina Spalitro.”

“And what do you want with her?” she said, looking me over, half testily, half amused.

“Are you Gina?”

A door opened behind her. A bald man in his sixties looked out, eyes on me.

“It’s okay, Papa,” the woman said.

The man retreated.

I said, “It’s about Dixie Hardaway.”

The woman’s face turned to stone. “Who?” stumbled out of her mouth.

“If you’re Gina Spalitro, you made a phone call to him in Florida. You made it from here.”

That flustered her. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “I called a friend down there, but I don’t know any... What’d you say his name was?”

“I’m not a cop, Gina.”

“I don’t care what you are.” No hint of friendliness in her now.

“You could be mixed up in a murder investigation.”

Fear stirred in her eyes. “What murder? What’re you talking about?”

“You told Dixie Hardaway to keep his mouth shut.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Get out of here,” flailing both hands, waving me toward the door.

“This isn’t going away.”

“You are! Get the hell out of here!” She reached under the counter, maybe for a gun. I didn’t wait to find out. If she had a gun, she was tough enough to use it.

I took all of this straight to Mike. He was off duty, just up from the weight room in a sweatshirt and old police pants. I persuaded him to stop at Amato’s and split an Italian sandwich with me. We enjoyed it with cold beers in my Jeep in the parking lot. I told him about Nora’s latest call.

“That’s what makes it interesting,” I said. “When Porky got to the high school, he waited in the corridor outside her classroom. Hadn’t called, hadn’t made an appointment, but he knew she had the next hour off.”

“And he didn’t ask her anything about Cape Porpoise or that weekend?”

“Or whether Dixie had gone to Florida. He didn’t seem to care about that. All he wanted to know was whether Dixie had any ‘bad habits,’ is how he said it.”

“Didn’t mention drugs?”

“No. And didn’t ask about Dixie’s alibi. He just wanted to know what kind of person Dixie was. And I guess the main reason she called me — he wanted to know whether she’d ever been to Brackett Shores.”

“And how do you read that?”

“For one thing, I never mentioned Brackett Shores to her, but nothing she said made me think she knew the significance of Porky’s question. I think it troubled her because it was off the mark. She’s a pretty bright woman. If nothing more, his questions told her that Dixie was mixed up in something. It’s the welfare of her son she’s worried about. She wants this cleared up. She offered to hire me—”

Mike lowered his bottle. “No. Stay out of it. You’re involved too much as it is.” He took a bite of sandwich, sipped from the bottle, staring thoughtfully at me. “You remember the woman who ran that house?”

“Calysta Frye.”

“At her trial she never gave up the names of any of her customers. I can’t question her. After what she went through, she’d call it harassment. A civilian, on the other hand... Oh, and by the way, Gina Spalitro was one of Calysta’s girls. She was a witness against Calysta at her trial.”

“Calysta’s out of prison?”

“Bought a bed and breakfast on Sebago Lake in Raymond.”

“It have a name?”

“Lakeside B & B. It’s right on 302.”

As I was getting up to leave, he said, “Remember, nothing about your father’s case was allowed at her trial. She was tried strictly as a madam. We didn’t have enough to try her for selling drugs. Nobody admitted anything.”

“And nobody heard the shots... yeah, I know.”

“That could be legit. It was a windy night. Waves crashing, all that. Maybe you can get something out of her. Don’t bother with the drug stuff, it’s statuted out.”

I had a lot to think about as I drove up country roads to a lake that’s the pride of southwestern Maine, the source of drinking water for the entire region, and home to trout and landlocked salmon. My father often took me fishing there when I was little. I had no trouble finding the Lakeside B & B, a large, white Victorian mansion behind a lawn and a flagpole.

I nodded at an old man sitting in a wicker chair on the wide veranda, went inside, and tapped the desk bell. A young woman in jeans emerged from down a long hall and walked toward me, all smiles. She was pretty and had brown hair drawn back to a ponytail.

“I’m looking for Calysta Frye,” I said.

She picked a headset off a wall bracket and spoke into it. Listened a while. “She wants to know who you are,” she said, laughing. “Are you selling something?”

“No.” I gave her my name.

She talked a while with her back to me, finally turned. “What’s it about?”

“A property she once owned on Brackett Shores.”

The name evidently meant nothing to the girl, but it got me what I wanted. Within a few minutes a short, plump woman in jeans and a white blouse marched up the corridor bristling with hostility. She dismissed the girl and turned on me.

“Okay, tough guy. You get your ass out of here and tell Porky to leave me alone or I’ll call the cops.”

“Ho! Wait a minute. Porky? You mean Porky Johnson?”

“Don’t get cute, I know a goon when I see one. Now turn around and get the hell out of here.”

I couldn’t help laughing and apparently had enough surprise on my face to convince her I wasn’t a threat.

“You just told me more than I expected to hear,” I said.

The girl in jeans was watching from down the corridor. Seeing a five-foot woman confronting a six-foot-three man must have looked comical. I might have laughed, but I didn’t.

“I just came here to ask a few questions,” I said. “I know Porky, but I don’t work for him.”

“What questions?”

“He’s mixed up in something he’s trying to hide. Did he threaten you?”

That got a stubborn nothing.

“Did Gina Spalitro call you?”

“That bitch.” She drew back. “Who are you?”

“Eight years ago a policeman was murdered on the rocks below your cottage on Brackett Shores. That man was my father.”

She gave that some thought, studying my face. “Yeah,” she said. “Your picture was in the paper. I remember.”

“I used to think he was there checking on your operation. But I’m beginning to think he was there looking for Porky Johnson.”

A wariness came into her expression. “Let’s go inside.”

When she turned, the girl down the corridor scampered away.

Calysta brought me through a large room, past an old man and two women clustered at a table playing cards. One of the women, in a wheelchair, winked at me.

Calysta took my arm and led me through a doorway into an office, pointed me at a chair and walked around a desk and dropped into a high-backed swivel chair that dwarfed her.

“So what do you want?” she said, leaning forward, resting folded hands on the edge of a black plastic surface saver. “This about Gina Spalitro?”

“She important to Porky?”

“Used to be one of his favorites.”

“He was a regular john?”

Calysta laughed. “We never called them that. We called them ‘clients.’”

“But he came regularly to the cottage? Just for women or for drugs?”

“If you’re trying to hang something on him, don’t expect me to be a witness. I’ve put all that behind me. I don’t give a shit about Porky Johnson or Gina Spalitro. They did me dirty, but that’s all in the past.”

I showed her the picture of Dixie Hardaway. She admitted he bought cocaine from her. Whether he was at the cottage the night of the murder, she couldn’t say.

“But Porky was,” she said.

“Want to talk about it?”

She cocked her head to one side. “Sure you’re not a cop? You act like a cop.”

“Used to be,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. Not representing a client. I’m here on my own.”

“And no friend of Porky Johnson.”

“Right.”

She leaned back in the chair, folding jeweled hands across her belly. “I just got a call from Gina. But I’m sure she was talking for him. Must be they’re back together.”

“Warning you to keep your mouth shut.”

“Yeah. Other people got that call?”

“A few.”

“It was a threat. I don’t like being threatened,” staring at me to be sure I got that straight. “Okay. You want to know about that Saturday night.”

“Anything you can tell me.”

As though relieved to finally get it out, she told me about Porky’s affair with Gina. “It doesn’t happen often, but they got something going. She was the only one he wanted. It was like every week he came over. You could see her face light up when he walked in. Then it stopped. One night she ran up to him like she always did, arms outstretched, expecting a loving hug, and he shoved her aside and went for a different girl. Gina couldn’t believe it. She thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t. She went after the other girl and Porky knocked her across the room and told her she bored him. That was Friday night. Saturday night I found her in a corner crying. She wouldn’t talk to me. I never found out what happened. A couple of days later, I was in the tank. I never saw her again until the trial.”

“Who was the other girl?”

“She called herself Aurora Borealis.” Laughing, she added, “I don’t think it was her real name.”

“And you don’t know where I can find her.”

“Maybe Porky does. But those kids disappear.”

Mike’s wife Laura and their daughter were coming out of Mike’s office when I entered the squad room at the police station. Laura gave me a wet kiss while her daughter giggled.

“Where you been keeping yourself?”

“Here and there,” I said. She had put on a little weight but was still easy to look at with her abundant dark hair and playful eyes.

“When you gonna get married?”

“Come on, Laura. I’m too young.”

She punched my arm and walked away laughing, the daughter skipping along at her side.

“Means, motive, and opportunity,” Mike said, leaning back in his chair, tapping something on the keyboard of his computer. “All I’ve had until now is motive and means. She’s sure he was out there that night?”

“Friday and Saturday night.”

“But just for the women. Not drugs?”

“You told me not to talk about drugs, remember?” I smiled. “Is that what you’re trying to pin on him?”

He ignored the question. “So it doesn’t give us much.”

“Why don’t you tell me what you’re looking for? I won’t take it anywhere.”

Mike sighed, glanced into the squad room through opened blinds on the glass walls. “There’s something in his file from years ago. What we know that’s relevant is that he frequented that cottage. Now we know he was there that Saturday night.”

“Relevant to what? Your investigation?”

He didn’t answer, and I didn’t repeat the question. But I was getting closer.

Next day at a little luncheonette on Congress Street I sat for an hour with Nora Murphy. She’d called asking to meet me. We were eating quiche. She looked worried, said she hadn’t slept, said she was frightened for her son.

“The reason I called,” she said, “I didn’t tell you everything,” moving a spoon around her coffee mug, not looking at me, giving me a chance to examine lines of worry in her face.

“What’d you leave out?”

“That I caught him in the bathroom leaning over a few lines of white powder.” She poured salt on the Formica and drew circles in it with her finger. “Something else,” she said.

“About that Saturday night?”

“He was gone for about two hours. Not unusual. He often did that, and I never asked where he went.” She glanced past me at something across the room. Making this “confession” was obviously difficult. “I spent this morning at the newspaper library going over accounts of that weekend. I don’t know how I missed reading about your father.”

“You had other things to worry about.”

She tossed her head and looked squarely at me. “If you say he went to Brackett Shores that night to buy cocaine, I couldn’t deny it. I didn’t question things he did. I was afraid of losing him,” and that brought a smile of irony.

“Look, it’s a fair assumption that Porky Johnson told his girlfriend to call Florida and threaten Dixie. He wouldn’t want his fingerprints on that phone call. He must believe that Dixie knows something that can hurt him. And it’s fair to think Dixie might have told you what it is.”

“But he didn’t. Am I in danger?”

“Porky’s a dangerous man, but he’s not stupid. He’ll do what he can to intimidate you, but...”

“But what?”

“I guess it depends on what he’s trying to hide.”

“You think he killed your father?”

“I don’t know. But who else had access to squad room gossip that could have told him my father was there? It was dark down at those rocks. How’d the killer know it was my father?”

Nora sucked salt off her fingertip. “My testimony isn’t worth much, is it?”

“To get a conviction? No. But Dixie’s could be. The trouble is he’s out of state and his father probably has an army of lawyers to keep him in Florida. We might not be able to get him up here.”

“I’ll get him up here,” she said. And looking at her I knew she would.

I assured her that Dixie wouldn’t risk arrest for having used drugs. All he’d have to do was tell the police why he had lied about where he was that Saturday night and why Porky Johnson had warned him to keep his mouth shut.

Nora kept her word. Within two days Dixie was in a chair in Mike’s office. I was told he’d be there. I was told not to show up. Mike filled me in shortly after their meeting broke up.

“Porky knew Dixie was in Maine?”

“Dixie sat in on it,” Mike said. “And they stood together down on the street after the meeting, Porky tapping him on the chest with a hard finger.”

“What did Dixie give you?”

“He admitted lying. Didn’t want his father to know about his habit.”

“Did he see anything?”

“He saw Porky early in the evening with a woman. They were outside.”

“Anything about my father?”

“Said he didn’t know it had happened until he read it in the newspaper. It’s why he got scared. It’s why he lied. Said he made a buy and left. It corroborates what Nora Murphy told you, right?”

“So you had no reason to hold him. What’d he say about the phone call from Gina Spalitro?”

“That made him nervous. He kept glancing at Porky. Admitted she had ‘warned’ him, is the word he used, to keep his mouth shut about what he knew. He said he had no idea what she was talking about — saying it as much to Porky as to me, like denying it for Porky’s benefit, Porky taking it all in but saying nothing.”

“So what was gained?”

“Not a hell of a lot,” Mike said. “I didn’t throw hard questions at him, didn’t want to tip my hand.”

“About what?”

He studied me for half a minute. “Let me ask you a question.”

“Shoot.”

“Five bullets were shot into your father’s back and we found two slugs in the sand near the body. Does that sound like the action of a trained policeman, especially where potential witnesses were only a few hundred feet away?”

“I’ve thought of that,” I said. “It could come from long, pent-up resentment of being stalked.”

“Yes, but it raises doubts. I don’t like Porky, but he’s a damned good investigator. I have to respect him for that. I can’t even hint that he’s a suspect until I have it down on all fours.”

So that’s why Mike wouldn’t tell me everything. It was finally out in the open. For years, apparently, Porky had been under investigation for frequenting a whorehouse and possibly dealing in drugs.

It had cost me almost a month’s pay to have an oversized shower installed in my bathroom, but I was telling myself, while hot water poured down my back, that I’d do it again. Man, it felt good. I was rinsing soap from my hair, tilting my head back to keep soap from my eyes when the phone rang. I let it ring. I finished showering and walked naked into my office. The call had come from Eloise Hoagy. I called her. She picked up after the first ring.

“Oh, thank God,” she said. “I was just about to call the police.”

“About what?”

“It’s Nora. We were on the phone—”

“Slow down,” I said.

“She was talking about her son, about the legal arrangements, and wondering whether to go to Florida. She hadn’t seen him in a while. Then I heard loud pounding like a fist hitting a door. She put down the phone. I could hear voices, but I couldn’t make out anything. Then the phone went dead.

“Nora would never cut me off like that. Something’s wrong, Duff. Please, can you drive up there?”

I said I would. “Maybe it’s something to do with her mother, a relapse. Something like that. I’ll get back to you.”

I threw on some clothes and hurried up the hill to Nora’s house.

A Ford Taurus I recognized as Porky Johnson’s and a beat-up panel truck were parked behind Nora’s Escort at the curb. I made a U-turn and pulled up behind the truck, fetched my Beretta from beneath my seat, wedged it into my pocket, and went up the steps to Nora’s back door.

I heard Porky yelling something, then the sound of furniture being knocked over. I pushed the door open, stepped past a mop and bucket, opened the kitchen door quietly. Porky was in the doorway to the front room, crouched, holding his pistol in both hands, aimed at Gina Spalitro, who had an arm around Nora’s neck, dragging her backward.

“Let her go!” Porky yelled, ignoring me.

“You’re trying to frame me, you son of a bitch!” Gina yelled. She saw me, gave me a brief snarl, looked back at Porky.

“Just let her go,” Porky said.

Then I saw the knife Gina was holding against Nora’s neck. “Get out of here, both of you!” she yelled.

I got out my Beretta and aimed it, when I saw a flash of madness in Gina’s eyes. Before I could pull the trigger, Porky fired his pistol. A stunned look froze Gina’s features. The knife dropped to the floor, and Nora slumped to her knees. Gina fell backward onto the kitchen counter, knocking a coffee pot into the sink.

“Put that away,” Porky told me, meaning my Beretta. I stuffed it into my pocket and hurried over to Nora. She was crying, badly frightened but okay. Her mother was calling from the other room.

“Stay here,” Porky said. He hurried outside, came back, and raised Gina into his arms and carried her outside. Porky didn’t come back inside.

A few hours later we were upstairs in Captain Wetherell’s office. Porky was in a padded chair with me next to him. Mike was in another chair, angled out so that he could watch me and Porky.

“And just before she died,” the captain said, skepticism all over his face as he read from a typed report, “Gina Spalitro confessed to shooting Captain Frank Kerrigan. And you’re the only witness to that.”

“It’s the truth, Captain,” Porky said. “She thought it was me down there on the sand with a woman. It was dark.”

“And why would she think that?”

Porky looked resentfully at me and Mike, wishing we weren’t there. He said, “Because it could’ve been. It’s where she and I used to go. I never wanted to use those bedrooms.”

The captain held up a gas station receipt Porky had given him. “And you were twenty miles away at the time of the shooting, assuming we know exactly when the murder took place.”

“I don’t think Detective Johnson shot Captain Kerrigan,” Mike said.

The captain considered that. “But it doesn’t look good that she died before she could talk to anyone else. And it sure as hell doesn’t look good that it was you who shot her,” glaring at Porky.

“He saved Nora Murphy’s life,” I said. “It was a good shoot.”

The captain grudgingly acknowledged that. He wasn’t satisfied, but he didn’t argue. “There’ll be a formal hearing,” he said, “and all of you will be under oath.” He put papers back into a folder, looked at each of us, and said, “Dismissed.”

Outside, watching Porky go down the corridor, I asked Mike, “Are you convinced he didn’t tell Gina to make those phone calls?”

“Let it go,” Mike said. “Porky’s career won’t survive this.”

“But do you believe it was Gina Spalitro who killed my father?”

He gave it the same helpless shrug that was wandering around inside of me.

“She could have.”

“There’s the gun,” I said.

“You didn’t see a gun.”

“But what else could she have been reaching for? Don’t we have evidence enough for a warrant to take a look?”

“Let’s find out,” he said.

We obtained a warrant and the police found the gun under the counter at Altieri’s Market. It was registered to Gina’s father. She had apparently used it, then put it back under the counter eight years ago. Because at the time there was no reason to think she had motive to kill a cop, she thought she would never be a suspect or that her father’s gun would ever be connected to the shooting. Instead of throwing the gun into the ocean, she cleaned and oiled it then returned it back behind the counter.

The forensic examination concluded that the slugs found in the sand and in Frank Kerrigan’s body had come from that gun. At the hearing it was determined that Gina had mistaken my father for Porky Johnson and had shot him in a psychotic jealous rage.

Porky Johnson was fired.

Copyright © 2008 Jim Ingraham