Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 5. Whole No. 777, May 2006

A Day at the Beach by Helen Tucker

Helen Tucker is not known for creating series characters. This time she makes an exception and brings back her anti-hero from the EQMM story “The Ice Storm.” “Sometimes it’s more fun to work with the dumb wicked than the smart righteous,” she says. “And I may use Brody again if I can think up another daft scam for him.”

The whole stinking mess started as he went out the gate of Rocky River Prison Camp and the guard at the gate looked on his clipboard and read, “Micah Brody, number 46503, paroled after serving three years and four months.” The guard looked Brody up and down, gave a little snort, and said, “How was your stay with us, Brody?”

Brody, who thought all guards were slimy scum, gave this one his biggest smile and said, “It was a day at the beach.”

That spontaneous sentence was the beginning of the whole damn thing.

The guard opened the gate, still scowling as though he hated to let anyone out, and snarled, “Don’t forget to check regularly with your parole officer or you’ll be back, heh, heh.”

Brody didn’t answer, didn’t even bother to nod, but walked through the steel gate into bright sunshine and out to the road where his friend Nathan waited in his car to take Brody away from the accommodations from hell.

As Brody got in the car, Nathan sang out, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty you’re free at last.” He was the custodian and sometime preacher at the Church of the Divine Word and usually he was high — often too high for Brody — on religion. Like he’d had a shot of it in his arm or maybe sniffed too much of it.

Brody gave his friend a good looking-over now. Nathan seemed to have aged in the three-plus years. His hair was cut short where it had been shoulder length before and his brown stubble was now a grayish beard. His face was craggy, but his eyes still had that piercing quality, as though he could see inside your head and know every sin you’d ever committed.

He, himself, hadn’t changed that much, Brody thought. Maybe gained a few pounds from eating regularly, but his hair was still dark, no gray, his dimples were as deep as ever, and he’d bet he could still wow the women from vertical to horizontal.

Nathan put his hand on Brody’s arm. “How you been, friend? Wasn’t too bad in there, was it?”

They hadn’t seen each other since the day of sentencing, but Nathan had written about once a month, mostly quoting scripture.

“Bad enough,” he said. “What I can’t figure is why I had to stay so long. All I did was take a few things from a house on an icy night. They got everything back, every single piece. I got a broken leg on the ice, was in the prison hospital three weeks, then got shipped to that friggin’ work camp.”

“But you got out early.” Nathan, as usual, had to look on the bright side and count everybody’s crappy little blessings.

“I served a third of the sentence and got some good time,” Brody said, almost belligerently. “I behaved so good, it was like I was you.”

Nathan laughed. “Keep it up and you’ll keep out of trouble.”

He and Nathan had been thick ever since that day some years ago when he had taken Nathan’s part against a cop. Nathan had been preaching on a street corner when the cop told him to move along. Brody reminded the cop about freedom of speech, then the cop made them both move along.

Nathan and the goddamn prison system were the only ones in the world who knew Brody’s first name was Micah. Even his ex-wife had called him Brody. She was ex because she threw him out when she found out what he did for a living. Threw him out and kept the house.

“I got to have some wheels.” He punched the dashboard for emphasis. “What’d you do with my Chevy, Nathan?”

“Used it some for the church. It’s there now, full of gas and waiting for you.”

“Good! I’m ready to get it right this minute. There’s somewhere I gotta go.”

“Where’s that?”

“The beach. I got this sudden hankering to see the ocean, smell salt air, and look at undressed women. It hit me just as I came out of that hellhole.”

Nathan shook his head, said something that sounded like “Tsk! Tsk!” but, mercifully, didn’t offer a sermon on the subject.

Man, it was the greatest! Speed limit 70 mph. I-40 to the shore. He’d checked with his parole officer, told her he was going to the beach (right here in the state) for a week or so, went to the bank and got his $319 out of savings, and took off. He was very careful to stay within the speed limit — which felt like flying anyway — because he didn’t want to get a ticket on his first free day. Jee-zuss, wouldn’t that be the pits? Get sent back because of a lousy traffic ticket!

The only cloud in his sky right now was lack of the old do-re-mi. As a professional shoplifter, held made a pretty good living, but now he had to think of some other way of fund-raising. During the three years he was “retired,” merchants undoubtedly had come up with dozens of new ways to catch store boosters.

Well, something would turn up. It always did.

He turned east at the outskirts of the port city and headed for the ocean, singing loudly, “By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea...”

The old Chevy didn’t have air conditioning, so he drove with the windows down, and he smelled the salt air long before the ocean came into view. He took a deep breath and made a vow: They’d never put him on the inside again.

First off, he had to find a place to stay. On Ocean Boulevard he stopped at a chain hotel and stood in a trance when the desk clerk told him the cost of a room was $135 a day. Without a word, he went back to his car. If a chain hotel cost that much, the really plush hotels must cost more than he’d made in a lifetime of hoisting merchandise. He kept driving down the street until he was almost at the south end of the beach and then he came to an old frame house, badly in need of paint, that looked as though several hurricanes had stopped there for a spree. In the yard was a sign, GARAGE APT. FOR RENT.

It couldn’t possibly cost as much as those hotels, he thought. So he knocked at the door several times before it was opened by a woman of indeterminate old age, seventy or more, who squinted at him over the top of rimless glasses. She had a mole on her chin, out of which grew a long black hair, and this instantly repelled Brody. He could endure moral flaws until the residents of hell were ice skating, but physical flaws turned him off completely.

“Yes?” the woman said when Brody was slow to speak. “You want something?”

Brody pointed to the sign. “I was wondering... How much you charge for the apartment?”

“Forty-five dollars a week, a week in advance, no refund if you leave early.”

“Could I see it?”

The garage, in the same condition as the house, sat a few yards away from the house with stairs outside going up to a door. The stairs seemed as rickety as everything else around here, including the woman. She took out a key and opened the door. “My name is Miz Dudley. What’s yours?”

“Brody,” he said, and held out his hand to shake before she could ask for another name to go with Brody.

What he saw inside was not an apartment, but one room. There was an old sofa, some chairs around a card table, a double bed, a doll sized fridge, a three-burner hot plate, a sink that was brown with age, and inside a curtained-off area, a lavatory in the same condition, and a commode. He’d had better accommodations in prison.

“Don’t you think forty-five dollars a week is a bit steep for this?” he asked. “There’s not even a shower.”

“You agree to stay a month and I’ll cut it to forty,” she said. “And there’s a bath house a block or two away that has showers.”

What the hell! He wasn’t going to find anything cheaper. “I’ll take it.” What he had to do was get his hands on some money pronto so he could find something better.

After bringing in his lone suitcase, he found a nearby discount store and bought sheets for the bed, a couple of towels, swim trunks, beer, bread, a sandwich spread, and a cantaloupe, a real delicacy that he hadn’t had since before he was canned.

Now he was ready for his day at the beach.

Back in his so-called apartment, he looked in drawers under the sink until he found a knife that would cut the cantaloupe. After eating the whole melon, he put on the swim trunks and headed for the ocean.

When he reached the beach, he simply stood there for a long time looking at the waves, the surf, and taking deep breaths. Damn, this was good! He had forgotten how really great the outside could be. Then his eyes surveyed the sand. It was late in the afternoon and, even with daylight savings time, the sun was beginning to head downward. So there weren’t a lot of people sunning now, but still a few. There was a family down near the surf: mother, father, and two little kids. There were two women lying on a blanket half under an umbrella. There were three guys, beer cans in hand, standing in the surf. Not a shapely girl in sight. Oh well, tomorrow was another day. He’d come early and stay late.

He went back to his apartment, made a sandwich, drank a couple of beers, and wished he had bought another cantaloupe. He sank down on the bed, which sank when he did, but he was so tired he didn’t notice. When he opened his eyes again the morning sun was shining through his one window. He got up, cursed himself for forgetting to buy coffee, had beer and toast for breakfast, and began to think what he could do to get his hands on money, a lot of money.

Just ripping off a few stores wouldn’t do it, and he had never had the guts to rob a bank. Breaking and entering some of the beach cottages... Hell no, that was what had sent him up in the first place. So what...?

Maybe a walk down the beach would clear his mind, give him some ideas. First, he had to go back to the store and haul in more food. He hadn’t been thinking too straight yesterday and had forgotten a lot of things.

When he returned with two bags of groceries, he counted his money. He figured he had enough to last another week, maybe ten days if he didn’t eat much. The big surprise was how much food cost now. Where he’d been, he hadn’t had to pay for it.

When he got to the beach, a big smile broke out. There were a lot of people, some under umbrellas, some spread out on beach towels, some in the water. His eyes went quickly to the girls in their bikinis. This was what he’d come for. Finally, he had died and gone to heaven!

But right now he had to think about raising money for this celestial holiday. Almost immediately an idea came to him. While people were in the water, their belongings were on the shore. He could lift a few wallets.

He began walking down the beach. There were several beach bags, unguarded, on towels or under umbrellas, but those on towels had people sunning nearby who would notice if he began opening the bags. He did look in a couple under umbrellas, but there was no money, only those little cards used for room keys, and of course, none of them had a room number, so there was no point in taking them.

He walked further down the beach, for the first time beginning to feel depressed. He had to have money. He looked more closely at the people, not just the buxom girls, and he was surprised at how many toddlers there were. Babies and little kids everywhere. They were building sand castles, throwing balls, floating on rubber rafts in the surf, and some of the tiniest ones were just crawling in the sand, near mothers who were burning their skins in the sun.

He stopped for a moment, gaping. Some of the mothers were watching their little kids, but some were not. For all they knew, their infants could have crawled out to the surf and been washed out to sea. Where there were fathers around, they seemed to be playing with the kids, but the mothers, some of them...

Jee-zuss! If somebody wanted a baby, this would be the place to pick one up. A kidnapping.

A kidnapping if you wanted money.

But such a thought had never entered his head before. He couldn’t imagine taking a child. What would you do with it until ransom was paid? Where would you keep it? How would you go about returning it without getting caught? Nosiree, not in a million years! That wasn’t his thing. Stealing was.

But wasn’t taking a child nothing but stealing?

He walked along the beach, his mind in an uproar. He needed money desperately. If he just borrowed a kid for a little while, say overnight, and returned it unharmed, was that really kidnapping? He could ask for some money for its safe return, and the parents would be grateful to him for keeping the child so well.

No, no, he couldn’t do it. It would be too risky. How would he know who the parents were or where they lived? How could he ask them for money if he knew nothing about them?

Easy! If he took a kid today, kept it overnight, the parents’ name would be in the morning paper with the story of the missing child. But could he pick up one off the beach without someone noticing and without the kid yelping its little head off?

He walked on and on, past the crowded part of the beach, now along a row of cottages. It was something to think about, but he still couldn’t imagine doing it.

And then he could.

There was one woman, youngish, probably early or middle thirties, dyed blond hair, purple bikini hugging a good figure, lying on a large Confederate-flag beach towel. There were no other people near her. Going toward the water at an unsteady gait was a little boy, not much over a year old. The woman appeared to be asleep.

He started to call out to her, to wake her, tell her to look after her son. But then he didn’t. Almost without realizing what he was doing, he went to the kid, picked him up, and said, “You shouldn’t go to the water like that.”

The kid just looked at him. Didn’t cry or utter a sound.

Then Brody did it. He started walking back the way he had come, riding the kid peacefully on his shoulders, the kid laughing all the time. He felt a little antsy when people looked at him, but apparently they thought he was a father playing with his kid. Finally, he got back to his garage room and put the kid down on the sofa, really looking at him for the first time. He wasn’t bad looking, kinda cute, in fact: brown curly hair, big blue eyes that were staring back at him, and then those eyes filled up, spilled over, and the kid was crying.

“Wah! Wah!” The little face now scrooched up in a frown that was like a thunderhead before a disastrous storm. “Wah! Wah!”

Godamighty, what did you do with a crying kid?

“Shh! Don’t cry! Please don’t cry. Here, ride on my shoulders again.” He picked the baby up and the crying stopped. The kid looked at him in a puzzled way. Then Brody smelled the smell.

Uh-oh! He’d never changed a diaper in his life, didn’t know how, didn’t even want to know how. But he’d have to learn pretty quick. He took off the stinky one, folded together some thick paper towels he’d bought, and used scotch tape he found in a drawer to hold them together. The kid still looked at him in an accusing way, but at least the yelling stopped.

Something else he hadn’t thought of was food. A kid that young couldn’t eat real food and he couldn’t risk going out to buy baby food. He looked at the groceries he bought that morning, picked up a banana and mashed half of it, eating the other half himself. The kid just looked at it. Then Brody realized the baby couldn’t feed himself so he got a spoon and shoveled the banana in. Now, the kid looked content, but when Brody put him back on the sofa the wah-wahing started again, and before Brody could shush him there was a knock at the door.

“Mr. Brody, open up. I know you’re in there.”

And there was Miz Dudley, hands on hips, scowling at him. She looked past him into the room and said, “In case I forgot to tell you, I don’t allow children here, no children of any age.”

“Uh — this ain’t my kid. I’m just keeping him for a day for my sister so she can enjoy the beach.”

“Well, you be sure he’s out of here by nightfall. Or you can go too and forfeit the rent.”

“You can count on it.”

She thumped back down the steps and went into the house.

Now what? He had to keep the kid overnight so he could read in the morning paper who his parents were and their address. Right now, the kid was on the sofa, looking fairly peaceful, his eyes slowly closing. But the problem remained: what to feed him the rest of the time, and how to keep him quiet. He ended up mashing mixed vegetables from a can he had bought for himself, and giving him a few spoonfuls of beer, which the kid seemed to like. During the night when he began to cry, Brody walked the floor with him for a while, then put him back on the sofa.

The next quandary was what to do with him while Brody went for the morning paper, but that was solved when he stepped outside at six A.M. and saw the newspaper lying in Miz Dudley’s yard. He almost stumbled down the stairs in his eagerness to get it. He’d either put it back before she was up or let her think the delivery boy had missed her today. He looked on the front page, and there was nothing but political and war news. Least of his worries right now. Page two, nothing. And so on through the rest of the paper. Not one screaming word about a missing kid! He couldn’t believe it. Didn’t anybody care that the kid might have walked into the surf and drowned? Or wandered away? Or been kidnapped? Apparently not.

It was for damn sure he couldn’t keep him another day. Miz Dudley would just as soon kick him out as look at him, and he didn’t have enough money left to find another place. He had to give some thought to what he was going to do now.

The woman on the beach surely had to be the kid’s mother. And she undoubtedly was staying in one of the cottages behind where she was sunbathing. Maybe if he found her and returned the kid, saying he’d found him on the beach and had seen him with her yesterday, she’d be so grateful she’d give him a reward. That not only seemed the best way to get rid of the kid but the only way.

He held the baby on his left hip as he went down the steps so Miz Dudley couldn’t see him. It was too early in the day for anyone to be sunning on the beach, so he stopped at a McDonald’s and got an Egg McMuffin, giving the kid part of the egg. All told, it was a pretty good kid. He only cried when he wanted something or was bothered by something.

Brody walked down the beach slowly, the kid on his shoulders again. By now, the beach was filling up, bright towels and umbrellas and skimpy bathing suits, the men’s as skimpy as the women’s. Might as well be naked, he thought as he looked at the bulges of both sexes.

When he reached the spot where the kid’s mother had been yesterday, he saw he was in luck. He wasn’t going to have to go from cottage to cottage looking for her, she was right where she had been, purple bikini and Confederate towel.

“Uh — miss...” He didn’t know what else to call her.

She looked up at him and then at the kid. Strangely, she did not jump up screaming, “My baby! You’ve found him!” as he had expected her to do.

“I saw this kid with you yesterday, and today I saw him crawling down the beach quite a ways from here. I brought him back to you.”

“That kid?” She looked at Brody indifferently. “Not mine. I never saw him before.”

“What?” Brody stared at her, all but speechless. After a minute he said, “I know he’s your kid. He was beside you yesterday while you were lying exactly where you are today. I remember noticing both you and the kid.”

“I tell you he’s NOT mine. Never saw him before in my life.”

She was lying. She had to be. The kid had been on the towel with her and then had toddled down toward the water.

“This IS your kid, or a kid you were keeping for somebody. Don’t tell me you never saw him before because I saw you with him.”

“If you don’t leave me alone, I’m going to call the police and charge you with harassment.”

Brody looked at her, giving her the severest frown he could muster. “You don’t have to do that.” He was about to say, “I’ll go to the cops myself and tell them you won’t take this kid,” but he thought better of it. The cops were not his first choice for help in any situation.

What could he do? He could put the kid down beside her and take off. That seemed the only way. So he took the kid off his shoulders and the kid puckered up and let out the now familiar “Wah! Wah!”

“You see,” the woman said. “He doesn’t know me from Adam... or Eve.” She stood up, put the Confederate flag over her shoulder, and headed for the cottage immediately behind them.

Now what? It was the most numbing experience Brody could remember. He didn’t know what to do, what to think. And he was stuck with this bawling baby.

“Okay, up you go.” He put the baby back on his shoulders, all the time watching the woman as she went inside the cottage.

He could leave the kid on the cottage porch, but would the woman take him in? Maybe she hadn’t planned on a baby and didn’t want one and would like to get rid of him. She’d let him crawl back to the water and drown. He couldn’t let that happen.

“Well, buster,” he said. “I can’t think of a thing to do with you but deposit you with the cops. Maybe leave you in front of the station or something. Let them worry about what to do with you.”

He went back down the beach and up to the boardwalk. This was a first: He inquired about how to find the police station.

It was a block from the boardwalk, a little brick building that looked squashed between a discount store and a restaurant. Brody hesitated in front of it. He couldn’t just put the baby down and take off. There were too many people passing by who would stop, look, and know exactly what he was doing. He’d either have to go somewhere else with the kid or go inside and...

Was he out of his freakin’ mind, going to the cops? They might think he took the damn kid. Which he had. But he was trying to give it back.

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Well, here goes nothing.

He opened the door. There were two rooms, the large one he entered and a smaller one right behind it with the door open. In the large room was a desk where a cop sat with his feet up, and another cop leaning against the side of the desk. Both were laughing, but both all but came to attention when Brody went in.

“Help you?” asked the one sitting, the older one, his feet now on the floor.

“I hope so,” Brody said. He noticed they were both looking at the kid on his shoulders. “Yesterday I was walking down the beach and saw this kid playing on a beach towel beside his mother. Today, I found the kid way down the beach, in the surf, about to go even deeper and nobody was around watching him. I picked him up and took him back to where I’d seen him yesterday with his mother and... and she claimed she’d never seen the kid before. She refused to take him, so now I don’t know what to do with him.”

There was a long, long silence as both cops looked at him, one with his mouth agape, the other scratching his bald head. It was obvious to him they didn’t believe a word he’d said. That was cops for you!

“It’s the God’s truth,” he declared, saying what Nathan always said when trying to convince someone of the seriousness of a matter. “I can take you to the cottage where the mother is.”

“What’s your name?” This time it was the younger one, the one with glasses and a face that had recently known acne intimately.

Omigod! Wouldn’t you know! All he had to do was give them his name, they’d run it through a machine, and he’d be right back at Rocky River Camp for Boys.

“I’m Walter Havington the third.” It came trippingly off his tongue as though he were accustomed to saying it.

“Well, Mr. Havington the third, why don’t you just take me to the mother of this little tot,” the older one said. “Les, take care of things while I’m gone.”

So there was Brody, sitting in the back of a cop car, screen between him and the front seat, no door handles on the inside. He should have felt right at home, but all he felt was miserable and uncomfortable. The kid needed changing again and he’d run out of thick paper towels. He could only hope that with a cop along, the woman would take her kid. If he got out of this mess okay, he wouldn’t even gripe about not making any money.

He gave instructions for finding the cottage, but he spoke hesitantly, because Walter Havington the third would use good words and not street language. Brody had quit all that school jazz at the end of the seventh grade, preferring money to schooling.

“This is the place,” he said near the end of Ocean Boulevard. “And look, there she is, packing her car. She’s fixing to leave without the kid!”

The bald cop stopped instantly and pulled in the slatted driveway, blocking the car parked beside the cottage. The blond woman in red sunback dress and sandals was indeed throwing things into an old Buick as fast as she could. Baldy opened the door for Brody and he jumped out, yelling, “Hold on there. You’re forgetting something.”

“I’ll handle this,” Baldy said. “Er, miss, is this your child?” He pointed to the baby Brody was holding carefully away from him.

The woman, half inside the backseat, came out slowly, straightened up, and without even looking Brody’s way, said, “I told that man earlier I’d never seen that child before. I don’t know why he keeps pestering me.”

Baldy now looked from the woman to Brody, questioningly. But Brody spotted what she had been putting in the backseat. It looked to him suspiciously like a box of those disposable diapers, something he needed right now for the wet kid. “Where’s the baby that goes with those things?” He pointed.

“I’m... I’m going to visit my sister who has a baby and I’m taking them to her.”

Huh, Brody thought, I already used the one about my sister’s kid. She oughta come up with something better.

Suddenly, the kid, who obviously wanted to be back on Brody’s shoulders, held up his arms and yelled, “Wah! Wah!”

Now the cop’s attention was on the baby. “Didn’t he just say Ma-Ma and hold out his arms to you?”

“He sure did!” Brody was quick to agree. “He wants his mama.”

“What’s your name?” Baldy asked the woman.

Another hesitation, then, “Eliza Marvin.”

“Well, just hold everything, Eliza Marvin. We’ll see about that.” He went back to the cop car, picked up the radio, and said something into it.

Uh-huh, Brody thought, he’s telling the other cop to run the name through that machine, but it’s probably not her real name anyhow. Boy howdy! Suppose he’d run my fake name through!

Baldy stuck his head out the window. “You from Beckley, West Virginia?”

There was an almost imperceptible nod from the woman.

Baldy said a few more words in the car, then got out. “Eliza Marvin, you are under arrest for kidnapping.”

Jeez! The woman didn’t even have sense enough to give a fake name. Dumb broad!

“No, no! I was babysitting.” Even under her sunburn, she looked pale. “The McClendons asked me to keep their kid while they were in Europe for a month.”

“They’ve been back from Europe a week and found you and their baby gone. They’ve been trying to hunt you down. The message went across the country on Amber Alert. Now you come with me. And how come you said that wasn’t your child?”

“He isn’t my child.”

“She told me she’d never seen him before.” Brody put in his two cents’ worth.

She started blubbering. “I had to take him. The man I planned to marry wanted children and I can’t have any. I thought if I told him I already had a child by a former marriage... Anyway, he said he didn’t want somebody else’s kid.”

“So why didn’t you leave him with his folks?” Brody couldn’t resist asking.

“They’d already reported him missing. I’d have been arrested.”

“Which you are,” Baldy said, opening the back door of the cop car. “Get in. We’ll hold you until they come from West Virginia to get you.” He looked at Brody. “I don’t want to put you back there and it’s against rules for you to ride beside me.”

“I don’t mind walking in the least,” Brody assured him. “Nosiree, nothing I like better than a walk down the beach. But hooweee! Can you imagine taking somebody else’s kid? Worst thing I ever heard of.” He handed the kid to the cop. “Maybe you better get that box she put in the backseat of her car. You’re gonna need it.”

It was late afternoon when he got back to the city. He had slipped out of Miz Dudley’s without her seeing him, forfeiting the rest of the week’s rent but happy in the thought that she hadn’t got the extra five reduction she’d given him when she thought he would stay a month.

He also left the beach without making a nickel, spending his last few dollars on gas to get away.

He found Nathan in the kitchen at the Church of the Divine Word.

“Well,” Nathan said. “I thought you’d stay longer.”

“Ran out of money. You think I could stay here in the basement where you put up the homeless for a day or two until I can get my hands on a few bucks?”

“I’ll even help you find a job.”

“That ain’t necessary. I’ll find one myself. I’m good at that sort of thing.”

Nathan shook his head, a sad expression on his face. “Brody, Brody, what am I going to do with you? What am I going to do about you?”

“Just let me be,” Brody said. “Don’t preach me no sermon. I’ll be okay.” His mind was already busy with plots, schemes, and ripoffs. “You know, Nathan, I learned one thing while I was at the beach.”

Nathan looked hopeful. “What was that?”

“A day at the beach ain’t always a day at the beach.”

Copyright © 2006 Helen Tucker