Toby Olson - Tampico

“You look okay to me. Maybe a little drawn, green at the gills. What did the doctor say?”

“He said I was okay now, but he didn’t know what it was. Why I was under for so long.”

“Do you?” Peter asked. “Can you remember it?”

“Well, you know, I was watching the shoring at that time, and that was it.”

His fingers moved on the khaki at his thighs. He was looking through the windshield into fog, and Peter could see that ancient profile in shadow in the dash lights. It was only four o’clock, but the rain and fog had turned the car interior into dusk.

“Yeah?” Peter said.

“Well they’ve got the thing jacked up pretty high now you know, and there are lights down under it. They’re wanting to dig away at the sides of the hole to test the firmness, and there was a hassle with the Coast Guard officials. They’re hanging around there, giving the contractor what trouble they can. And the national government guys are there too. They keep stopping and arguing. They’ve got a little layered city under there, levels and chalk lines, that kind of thing. But I guess that was a week ago at this time and it might have changed.”

“It has,” Peter said. “They’ve put a stop to everything now, even the shoring.”

“Is that right?” Carlos asked.

“Could you see clear enough?”

“Oh, indeed, quite good enough. The fence ain’t far at all.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t know. A creak I think. They say it was a good size piece of wood, from the scaffolding. I think I saw it turning, after the creaking. When I looked up, you know? And that’s when I was falling.”

“And a damn good thing there were people there.”

“Right. I was at the fence, and there was a crowd behind me. They must have caught me.”

“That’s what the guy with the truck said.”

“You spoke to him.”

“Yeah, he called me. I was over there in a half hour or so. To the Manor, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Carlos said.

“Do you feel okay?”

“Good enough for me, I guess. Some little pain in the head is all. It may have knocked some sense in. I hope so.”

They passed beyond the lake, and the highway divided and narrowed a little and headed into the dunes. Sand had blown across the road in places and they saw the red taillights on the cars ahead, and Peter touched the brakes and they slowed down to a crawl. The rain had let up and turned to a cold drizzle, but the wind had stiffened and it rocked the car and blew the thinning fog in waves across the windshield. Neither of them said anything for a while, then Peter did.

“Charlie called. Just yesterday. About Strickland.”

“You’re kidding.”

Carlos turned from the window as he spoke.

“That’s right,” Peter said.

“After all this time? I thought it was over.” His fingers stroked his thighs. “What did he say?”

“Something about a list. Strickland’s papers. Seems there are missing ones.”

“He’ll be coming down then?”

“No, not that. There’s no reason. The house in Orleans has been gone through. It’ll be on the market soon. It’s us. We’re going to Philadelphia.”

“Why me?” Carlos asked.

“If you’re up to it. Why not? A little trip. Something to do.”

I learned I was HIV positive on the fourteenth of November, and it was later that same day I received my first call as a private citizen detective. There was a breath of silence on the phone, and I watched the drops fall from my arm, stain the white pad and bead on the red porcelain, then repeated the odd-sounding words again: “Peter Blue Investigations.”

I was sitting naked in the kitchen, which was not my office. That was down the hall in what used to be Sara’s sewing room before she left me but the phone wasn’t hooked up yet. We’d worked out a settlement for the places in Provincetown. Proceeds from the sale of the Spice Shop on Commercial Street had gone to her and I’d kept the house. The phone rang as I stepped out of the shower. Winter was coming and the metal chair back was cold and I leaned away from it, a green towel over my shoulder. It was three o’clock, and the sun was already sinking.

“Excuse me. I wonder if you can help me.”

His voice had gravel in it, a cold or a smoker’s rasp, and I couldn’t get his age or a sense of his attitude, not yet.

“We could start out with a name,” I said, then waited while he coughed.

About the HIV. I’m not gay, or at least I don’t think I am, but I was drunk and lost in drugs and can only place the situation vaguely. I know the woman is extremely thin, her robe parting to reveal her skeletal body as she comes out of the bathroom. Her hair is long, not too recently blond and blood dark at the roots, and I’m touching her small breasts, her nipples, and she’s watching the naked man beside me on the bed, and when I look over there and down I see the needle in my arm and the hose, and then I’m falling back.

I know it’s Boston and the Combat Zone, and I know it’s after Beth Charters’s death. I was with the police then and was investigating her rape and falling in love with her. Then Sara left me and Beth was dead, and it was only the help of her father Charlie, a milkman and a singer, that brought me back. We got Beth’s killer in a while, and then I could visit her grave at the cemetery in Truro.

The fresh mound was anonymous, but it had rained, and the white petunias in clay pots circling her head had drooped inward on their stems to form a kind of flowered parasol, or a hat, against the late October sun, and someone, Charlie I guess, had placed oyster shells and pearled beach stones at her feet. This had been a year before, and though I’d been to the cemetery on occasion since, it had been a good long while since I was there.

His name was Gordon Strickland, and he’d gotten my name through Warren at the station, and the job seemed an easy enough one. He had some rare documents, he said, a collection of things, and he’d made arrangements to sell them to a dealer in Boston. It was the insurance, a legal matter. I’d be along officially for security. I told him I was licensed, though he didn’t ask. We’d drive to the city together, deliver the stuff, then return the same evening. We’d be going in eight days, on the last Wednesday of the month.

“It’s four hundred a day,” I said. “Plus expenses.”

“There aren’t any.”

“Well, there’s gas,” I said, wanting the foolish words back even as I spoke them.

“To Orleans? It’s no more than twenty miles. Is it done this way?”

“No. Of course not. You’re right. Just the four hundred.”

I hung up and scribbled some figures under his name and number. It was cold in the kitchen and I was shivering. My first case, and already I’d be eating a few dollars of gas money. I felt cheated, unprofessional.

I got to Amy Minten’s office early, around ten to five, and was just settling into the vinyl sofa in the empty waiting room when she came out the door. She was dressed as usual, thin cotton slacks and tennis shoes and a loose green smock, her beautiful blond hair pulled back severely into a ponytail. She wore no makeup at all, but her serious enthusiasm for her work lit up her face as always.

“Oh,” she said. “You’re early. Come on in.”

She sat across from me, fingering through the file, and I could see the diplomas, both her husband’s and her own, in cheap frames on the wall behind her head. I was reading them, squinting to get the small print, and when she looked up she saw me doing it.

“Hey,” she said. “Can you relax a little? You’re wired.”

I looked into her face, her clear eyes, and realized it was true. The shower at three o’clock in the afternoon, the job, and since her call at nine in the morning I’d been roaming around the house, straightening things, cleaning, and now I was sitting still and there was nothing to do. She told me to take a few deep breaths, and I did that. Then she asked me if I was okay, could I listen, and I said I could.