Ed McBain - Goldilocks

“Where do you work, Lisa?”

“At the Cross River Market. I’m a checker.”

“And Michael?”

“He’s a busboy at Leonardo’s.”

“Was he working yesterday?”

“No, Sunday’s his day off.”

“Was he here on the boat then?”

“Yes.”

“All day?”

“Well, he left late at night.”

“Where was he going?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask him?”

“Yes. He just said he’d be back in a little while.”

“What time was this?”

“Right after he got the phone call. It must’ve been—”

“ What phone call?”

“Somebody called him.”

“Here on the boat? There’s a phone on the boat?”

“No, up at the dockmaster’s office. He’ll come get us if it isn’t too late.”

“What time was it?”

“About eleven-thirty.”

“Who was calling?”

“I don’t know.”

“Did you ask Michael?”

“Yes.”

“What did he say?”

“He said it was nothing important. Then he went below, and got his wallet from the dresser and came topside again. That’s when I asked him where he was going, and he said he’d be back in a little while.”

“When the dockmaster came to get him... did he say who was on the phone?”

“He just said, ‘There’s a call for you, Mike.’ He likes Michael a lot, he won’t believe this. He just won’t believe it.”

“Were you worried when Michael didn’t come back?”

“No, I wasn’t worried. I mean, I didn’t think anything had happened to him. I thought maybe he’d met some girl, you know, and decided to stay with her for the night. I guess that’s what I thought. Because, you see, we have an understanding like if I meet some boy I want to know better, I can do that, you see, and it’s the same with him, with a girl, I mean. I can leave this boat any time I want to, I can just pack up and go. That’s our understanding.”

“Who ordinarily pays for the boat’s maintenance?”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“If something goes wrong with the boat, does Michael pay to have it repaired, or does his father?”

“Well, normally Michael, I guess. I really don’t know, I never asked him about who paid for what. But Michael puts in the gas, and he pays for keeping the boat here, it costs two-fifty a foot, plus sixty-five for the power cord. It comes to a hundred eighty-five a month, something like that. Michael does all the minor repairs himself, but this is a big job, this oil leak, so I guess he would’ve asked his father to pay for it, if that’s what you mean.”

“But Michael said he went there to borrow the money.”

“Well, maybe so. He’s got a lot of pride. His father thinks of him as nothing but a plastic hippie, that’s because Michael’s having trouble finding himself, you know. But he’s got a lot of pride and I can see him only asking for a loan and not for the money as a gift. I know it bothered Michael that he was living on the boat freebies, that his father was letting him use the boat, you know? He kept telling me he wanted to buy a boat of his own. But in the meantime, you know, his father never went out on it, Maureen would get seasick even if it was just the bay, never mind the Gulf. So he offered the boat to Michael to live on, and Michael said sure why not?” Lisa shrugged elaborately. “But I know it bothered him. Because they’ve had hassles, you know. Michael’s not a bum, you know, he’s just having trouble getting his head together; in fact, he’s been talking about going back to school, I think he’s really seriously considering it. That’s something you ought to know because... I mean, how could he have killed her? I mean, why would he have killed her?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t understand you.”

“Well, it was Maureen who was encouraging him to go back. I mean, I don’t care if he goes back or not, whatever makes him happy. But Maureen was the one talking about his future, and about did he want to be a busboy all his life? They really got along fine, he respected her a lot, he really did. There was a conflict there for him, you know, he felt guilty about relating to Maureen when he had a mother of his own. But Michael found it difficult to talk to either of his parents because of all the trouble—”

“What do you mean? What trouble?”

“Well, you know, all the hard feelings about the divorce. It isn’t easy, you know, take it from me. Michael was only ten when his father split, twelve when he finally married Maureen. Those are tough years for a kid anyway , never mind divorce. And his mother didn’t make it any easier, told both kids their father had been playing around with half the women in town, made Maureen out to be just another tramp, you know, like that. What I’m saying is Michael gave his father a pretty rough time, and I’m not sure his father’s forgotten it yet.”

“What kind of a rough time?”

“Well, like I just told you.”

“You only said there were hard feelings about the divorce.”

“Well, yeah, but... like the time in Virginia. You probably know about it.”

“No. Tell me.”

“Well, she sent Michael away to a military academy—”

“Yes, I know that.”

“And he got caught smoking pot there, the general caught him smoking pot. He was about sixteen at the time, the general refused to let him go home for the spring break — the spring furlough, he called it. So Michael’s father went all the way to Virginia to see him, and Michael just wouldn’t give him the right time, told him to go to hell.”

“He actually said that?”

“No, but he told his father he was doing fine without him.”

“What else?”

“Well, you know about the trip to India...”

“No.”

“Well, Michael started school at UCLA — this was after he got out of that place in Virginia — and then he dropped out of there and went first to Amsterdam and then India, and Afghanistan, I think it was, or Pakistan, one of those countries. He was following the drug route, you know, he got into drugs pretty heavy in Amsterdam—”

“He’s not involved in drugs now, is he?”

“No, no,” Lisa said. “He was never into the hard stuff, anyway. He’s never put a needle in his arm. He never would. He may have sniffed coke while he was in Europe, I don’t know about that, he was traveling with a junkie in Denmark. But what I meant was acid, he got into acid in Holland. And, of course, pot. But everybody smokes pot,” she said, and shrugged. “The point is, he never wrote to his father all that time. He had the man going crazy, he admits that now. Sending letters to the American Embassy, writing to Washington, while Michael’s climbing the Himalayas and sniffing flowers and having his hair and his beard dyed red by mountain priests. He used to write his father about the spiders in the hut he lived in. Big spiders. Told him about the spiders to make him worry even more, that was all. Never a return address on the letters. I’m in the mountains , period. With priests and spiders . Lots of mountains there, man.” Lisa shook her head. “What I’m saying is the relationship with his father was strained, you know what I mean? It was getting better, but it was still strained.”

“How about his mother?”

“How about her? Have you ever met her?”

“I’ve met her.”

“Then you know. A fat pain in the ass. Always using Michael as a messenger boy — tell your father this, tell him that. Phoning him three, four times a week, sending him letters. He was fed up to here with her.”

“So he talked to Maureen instead.”

“Well, he talked to me , too,” Lisa said, “but that’s different. I mean, we’re lovers.”