Getting him in the boat in the first place might have been a trick, as drunk as he was, but the rest of it must have been a snap.
I glanced to my right. An old bum with a shopping cart was picking through a trash container. I crossed the sand, heading toward him. As I approached, I could see that his skin was nearly gray with accumulated filth, tanned by the wind, with an overlay of rosiness from recent sunburn or Mogen David wine … Mad Dog 20-20, as it’s better known among the scruffy drifters. He looked in his seventies and was bulked up by layers of clothing. He wore a watch cap, his gray hair hanging out of it like mop strings. He smelled as musky as an old buffalo. The odor radiated from his body in nearly visible wavy lines, like a cartoon rendition of a skunk.
“Hello,” I said.
He went about his business, ignoring me. He pulled out a pair of spike heels, inspecting them briefly before he tucked them into one of his plastic trash bags. A two-day-old newspaper didn’t interest him. Beer cans? Yes, he seemed to like those. A Kentucky Fried Chicken barrel was a reject. A skirt? He held it up with a critical eye and then shoved it into the trash bag with the shoes. Someone had discarded a plastic beach ball with a hole punched in it. The old man set that aside.
“Did you hear about the guy they found in the surf yesterday?” I asked. No response. I felt like an apparition, calling to him from the netherworld. I raised my voice. “I heard somebody down here spotted him and called the cops. Do you happen to know who?”
I guess he didn’t care to discuss it. He resolutely avoided eye contact. I didn’t have my handbag with me so I didn’t have a business card or even a dollar bill as a letter of reference. I had no choice but to let it drop. I moved away. By then, he had worked his way down in the bin, his head almost out of sight. So much for my interviewing techniques.
By the time I got back to the parking lot, the light had faded, so I registered the fact that something was wrong long before I realized what it was. The door on the passenger side of my car was ajar. I stopped in my tracks.
“Oh no,” I said.
I approached with caution, as if the vehicle might be booby-trapped. It looked like someone had run a coathanger in through the wind-wing in an attempt to jimmy the lock. Failing that, the shitheel had simply smashed the window out on the passenger side and had opened the door. The glove compartment hung open, the contents spilling out across the front seat. My handbag was missing. That generated a flash of irritation, swiftly followed by dread. I jerked the seat forward and hauled out my briefcase. The strap that secured the opening had been cut and my gun was gone.
“Oh nooo,” I wailed. I gave vent to a string of expletives. In high school, I had hung out with some bad-ass boys who taught me to cuss to perfection. I tried some combinations I hadn’t thought of in years. I was mad at myself for leaving the stuff in plain sight on the seat and mad at the jerk who ripped me off. Mine was one of the last cars left in the lot and had probably stood out like a beacon. I slammed the car door shut and headed off across the street, still barefoot, gesturing and muttering to myself like a mental case. I didn’t even have the spare change to call the cops.
There was a hamburger stand close by and I conned the fry cook into making the call for me. Then I went back and waited until the black-and-white arrived. The beat officers, Pettigrew and Gutierrez (Gerald and Maria, respectively), I’d encountered some months before when they made an arrest in my neighborhood.
She took the report now, while he made sympathetic noises. Somehow the two of them managed to console me insofar as that was possible, calling for a crime scene investigator who obligingly came out and dusted for prints. We all knew it was pointless, but it made me feel better. Pettigrew said he’d check the computer for the serial number on my gun, which was registered, thank God. Maybe it would turn up later in a pawn shop and I’d get it back.
I love my little semiautomatic, which I’ve had for years … a gift from the aunt who raised me after my parents’ death. That gun was my legacy, representing the odd bond between us. She’d taught me to shoot when I was eight. She had never married, never had children of her own. With me, she’d exercised her many odd notions about the formation of female character. Firing a handgun, she felt, would teach me to appreciate both safety and accuracy. It would also help me develop good hand-eye coordination, which she thought was useful. She’d taught me to knit and crochet so that I’d learn patience and an eye for detail. She’d refused to teach me to cook as she felt it was boring and would only make me fat. Cussing was okay around the house, though we were expected to monitor our language in the company of those who might take offense. Exercise was important. Fashion was not. Reading was essential. Two out of three illnesses would cure themselves, said she, so doctors could generally be ignored except in case of accident. On the other hand, there was no excuse for having bad teeth, though she viewed dentists as the persons who came up with ludicrous schemes for the human mouth. Drilling out all of your old fillings and replacing them with gold, was one. She had dozens of these precepts and most are still with me.
Rule Number One, first and foremost, above and beyond all else, was financial independence. A woman should never, never, never be financially dependent on anyone, especially a man, because the minute you were dependent, you could be abused. Financially dependent persons (the young, the old, the indigent) were inevitably treated badly and had no recourse. A woman should always have recourse. My aunt believed that every woman should develop marketable skills, and the more money she was paid for them the better. Any feminine pursuit that did not have as its ultimate goal increased self-sufficiency could be disregarded. “How to Get Your Man” didn’t even appear on the list.
When I was in high school, she’d called Home EC “Home Ick” and applauded when I got a D. She thought it would make a lot more sense if the boys took Home EC and the girls took Auto Mechanics and Wood Shop. Make no mistake about it, she liked (some) men a lot, but she wasn’t interested in tending to one like a charwoman or a nurse. She was nobody’s mother, said she, not even mine, and she didn’t intend to behave like one. All of which constitutes a long-winded account of why I wanted my gun back, but there it is. I didn’t have to explain any of this to G. Pettigrew or M. Gutierrez. They both knew I’d been a cop for two years and they both understood the value of a gun.
By the time everyone left the parking lot, it was fully dark and starting to rain again. Oh perfect.
I drove home and started making out a list of items I’d have to replace, including my driver’s license, gasoline charge card, checkbook, and God knows what else. While I was at it, I looked up three “800” numbers, phoning in the loss of my credit cards from the Xerox copy I keep in my file drawer at home. I’d only been carrying about twenty bucks in cash, but I resented the loss. It was all too irritating to contemplate for long. I showered, pulled on jeans, boots, and a sweater, and headed up to Rosie’s for a bite to eat.
Rosie’s is the tavern in my neighborhood, run by herself, a Hungarian woman in her sixties, short and top-heavy, with dyed red hair that recently had looked like a cross between terra cotta floor tile and canned pumpkin pie filling. Rosie is an autocrat-outspoken, overbearing, suspicious of strangers. She cooks like a dream when it suits her, but she usually wants to dictate what you should eat at any given meal. She’s protective, sometimes generous, often irritating. Like your best friend’s cranky grandmother, she’s someone you endure for the sake of peace. I hang out at her establishment because it’s unpretentious and it’s only half a block away from my place. Rosie apparently feels that my patronage entitles her to boss me around … which is generally true.
That night when I walked in, she took one look at my face and poured me a glass of white wine from her personal supply. I moved to my favorite booth at the rear. The backs are high, cut from construction grade plywood and stained dark, with side pieces shaped like the curve of a wingback chair. Within moments, Rosie materialized at the table and set the glass of wine in front of me.