But I don’t see any egregious lurkers, anyone who looks as if they don’t belong. There are a couple of shirtless teenagers drinking beer and snagging pilchards; a row of retirees in folding chairs, dozing under hats the size of garbage-can lids; a smoochy young Hispanic couple sharing a single fishing rod, taking turns reeling in baby snappers; a trio of weekday regulars, leathery and windblown, laden with bait buckets and bristling with heavy tackle.
After yanking off my necktie and loosening my shirt at the collar, I set off at a breezy amble for the phone booth at the end of the pier.
Each step puts me that much farther from a clean escape, but it’s not as if I haven’t got a backup plan—should one-eyed Jerry burst out of a trash bin and start shooting, I’ll simply dive over the rail and swim away like a dolphin.
Pretty darn clever. Always be halfway prepared, that’s my motto.
And naturally some old guy is tying up the damn phone. I check my watch—twelve minutes until noon. I hope Cleo doesn’t give up because the line rings busy once or twice.
Assuming she tries to call.
I sit down on a worn wooden bench and notice too late that it doubles as a bait table, leaving the seat of my pants covered with lady-fish scales and gummy snippets of rotting shrimp. I am one smooth operator.
The man at the phone booth hangs up and waves to me. “It’s all yours, son.”
A cheery little fellow topping out at maybe five-two, he’s got small wet eyes and fluffy gray hair and a pink pointy face with sparse white whiskers. He looks like a 120-pound opossum.
“Thanks, I’m waiting for a call,” I tell him. “Shouldn’t be long.”
He says his name is Ike and he was talking to his bookie in North Miami. “Don’t ever bet on a horse named after a blonde,” he advises ruefully.
Ike is fishing three spinning rods. He reels in one and rebaits with a dead pilchard plucked from a five-gallon bucket. “I caught a twenty-three-pound red drum standing at this very spot,” he says, “on August 14, 1979. That’s my personal best. What’s your name, son?”
“Jack.”
“Strange place to take a phone call, this pier.”
“It’s going to be a strange phone call.”
“You look familiar. Then again, everybody looks familiar when you reach ninety-two.” He laughs, flashing a mouthful of shiny dentures. “Either that, or nobody looks familiar.”
I whistle. “Ninety-two. That’s fabulous.”
“When I get to ninety-three,” he says, “I’ll have lived longer than Deng Xiaoping.”
“That’s right.”
“And Miss Claudette Colbert, too.” Ike’s button-sized eyes are twinkling.
“And Greer Garson!” I exclaim.
“And Alger Hiss!”
“Hey, you’re good.”
“Well, I been at it a long damn time,” the opossum man says.
This is too much. I can’t help but laugh.
“Just look at you!” I say.
“It’s this healthy salt air. And the fishing, too.” Ike rears back and casts the silvery minnow over the rail. “But that’s not all,” he says. “What I did, son, early on I made up my mind not to die of anything but old age. Stopped smoking because I was afraid of the cancer. Swore off booze because I was scared of driving my car into a tree. Gave up hunting because I was scared of blowing my own head off. Quit chasing trim because I was afraid of being murdered by a jealous husband. Shaved the odds, is what I set out to do. Missed out on a ton of fun, but that’s all right. All my friends are planted in the ground and here I am!”
“Where’d you start out?” I ask him.
“At The Oregonian. After that, three years at the Post-Intelligencer in Seattle.” He pauses to put on a faded long-billed boat cap with a cotton flap in the back. After nearly a century under the ozone, Ike’s still worrying about sun damage. “Then the Beacon-Journal in Akron, briefly at the Trib in Chicago, and a bunch of rags that aren’t around anymore.”
Phenomenal. He’s probably the world’s oldest living ex-obituary writer. I ask him what else he covered.
“You name it. Cops, courts, politics.” Ike shrugs. “But obits is what stayed with me. Funny, isn’t it, how it gets a grip? That was the first beat I had out of college and the last beat I had before retiring. Twenty-seven years ago that was… “