John Finn 17: Confrontations

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Perhaps I could have gone to Burley’s for Thanksgiving. His mom is a wicked cook and still directs the kitchen traffic at home. But Becky’s request had struck me as something I had to do. Besides. It couldn’t be that bad. She’s a perfectionist. I was willing to bet she’d cook two turkeys, just to make sure she got one right. She did that with a lasagna she made for me in July.

And I’m not that stupid. I know she’s keeping an eye on me. God knows why.

The doorbell rang on Thanksgiving morning a little early. I assumed it was the girls and it was a little irritating. I was still shaving. They were going to take me out for breakfast and I was looking forward to the pancakes because I can’t seem to make a good batter just for myself these days–but I’m tired. I only managed to get a couple of hours of sleep. And I’m not as young as I used to be. A common thought in my head these days.

I went downstairs to let them in, but the face through the glass was a new one. And it’s blank. Like a kid staring at his English teacher at about 2:25 in the afternoon in the eighth grade. But this guy is at least forty. About five foot eight not counting the thick soles. Slightly over-weight but not flabby. Good shoulders. His hair is slicked back. No hat. He has his hands in his pockets. The black wool coat looked like it was from Louis, but off the rack.

I open the door right up but I use my left hand. My right hand is in the pocket of my robe. I have a firm grip on my cell phone. It’s all I had. Besides, if he has a gun and he’s going to shoot me, he doesn’t need me to open the door.

I say, “What can I do for you?”

He says, “You John Finn?”

I nod.

He says, “My name is Fabian Lugano.”

My brain had just gotten to him in the catalog of possibilities.

I say, “I hear we were neighbors.”

He frowns. “How’s that?”

I say, “I grew up in Hingham. I hear you’re from Scituate. Small world.”

His frown dissolves and it’s back to the blank face. I’m not sure where he learned the act. Maybe at the movies. In any case, it makes me smile.

He says, “Don’t be cute.”

I shrug. I say again, “So what can I do for you?”

He says, “You’ve been using my name around.”

I frown, now. Not an unhappy frown. My best, ‘What are you talking about’ frown. My daughters are going to be showing up pretty soon. I want to get this over with as quick as possible. I say, “Not likely. A friend of yours was acting like a jerk. I just made it clear to him that his habits are known and he ought to be more polite.”

Fabian says, “What makes you so smart?”

I shrug again. “Common knowledge. I have no interest in it. Just your friend Higgins. He doesn’t seem to give a damn about the people who work for him. That’s not the way to be.”

My guess is that because this guy’s a middleman, he’s not a full-blown thug. He has some people skills. Thuggery is bad for that kind of business. He has to make over paid jerks like Des’ boss Walsh Higgins feel comfortable as they shell out their fresh bills for a little white powder.

Fabian is frowning now. I think he’s losing his footing on the matter. He says, “You mean the girl?”

Now I’m curious. Why should Higgins tell Fabian about Desiree? This puts me back on my heels.

“Do you know Des?”

He says, “None of your business.”

I say, “Crap.” It just came out.

Fabian reacts too quickly to that. He says, “She tell you about me?”

Or maybe he’s simply stupid. I took a breath on the thought. I said, “I didn’t know until just now that she had any idea you existed.”

Now my legs are getting cold. I have nothing on under the robe and the cold in the vestibule is welling up where I don’t want it. The shaving cream is getting stiff on my face. I clinched my jaw on a shiver, but I think he saw it. I don’t know what’s going on–in his head or otherwise.

He misinterprets the shiver. He says, “So, this is the deal. I don’t want to hear about you ever again. From nobody. Understand?”

My jaw was already clinched. I couldn’t help the way I said what I did.

“No deal. Not with me. I’ll tell you what. My deal. I’ll leave you alone if you tell me everything you know about Des. Everything. Otherwise you got a lot a grief you don’t need. You’ve got a kid coming. You’ve got some good coming. Don’t screw it. Give me a call.”

I see my daughters coming up the steps. He turns and looks at them. I still have no idea what he’s thinking. If he takes too long I’m going to break his right collarbone so he can’t get the gun out of his pocket. Instead he turns all the way and pulls the outer door open for them and waits until they are all in the vestibule before he says a word.

“You’ll hear from me.”

His words get lost in my daughters talking at me all three at once. Then he’s down the steps and into a double-parked dark gray Cadillac sedan.

I give him that. The gray looks better than the black.

The girls didn’t give me much of a chance to dwell on any of that for the next few hours. We had our breakfast at a great place over on Broadway. It was the first time the girls had all been together in awhile, so they talked non-stop, mostly to each other. I think they figured they already know what I’ve been doing. I was happy enough just to listen. Matty managed to ask her older sisters all the questions I would have anyway.

I was the oldest guy in the room. Every one else looked like they were probably going to school at Tufts. But the pancakes were the best and the coffee was good enough.

It was after noon by the time I was at home again, trying to sort it out. I wrote down what I knew. I wrote down what I thought could be the case. The part of my brain that wants to make things up was over active. Even so, it was difficult to imagine why Des might know Fabian Lugano. When it was time to leave again, I walked. I think I was hoping for some inspiration along the way.

Becky made a nice small turkey. Looked like a picture in a magazine. She was obviously very pleased with herself. The stuffing was okay but not as good as Mary Ellen’s. Still, more than just an ‘A’ for effort

She was very talkative. She brought up a couple of times we had at school in Amherst I’d forgotten about. She wanted to know about my brother. I used to tell stories on him all the time. Mostly lies. They were just ways to talk about myself, I suppose. Then she brought up the house in Maine. It was her true home as a girl, and it was hers now. Her mother had left it to Becky in the will. I had never met Mrs. Sawyer, but now that I’ve heard a few stories, I’m sorry I missed her. But then, the stories were about Becky as much as they were about her mother. I guess that was the point. She was trying to fill in some gaps. Last August had been Becky’s first time there alone.

She said, “You really should have come up to Maine. It was very nice. It only rained four days out of five. We could have finished all the puzzles on the shelf.”

I laughed a little harder at that. I think she knew why. I would never have met Des if I had gone. I think she might even have been hinting in that direction with the comment.

I admitted that, “Maybe I should have.”

She wore a light green and blue dress that reached her ankles. Probably silk. It was pretty spectacular. The last time I saw her in a dress it was the 4th of July.

She said, “There were no strings, John. Then or now.”

I had the contrary thought. I subscribed to my own sort of string theory. I said, “The strings in life have a way of getting knotted up. You wonder how anybody gets along.”

She said, “Ignore the knots. And the warts. It’s the only way. I’ve learned that much, at least. That and how to cook a turkey.”

I added, “You make a good lasagna too.”

That pleased her.

I had told Becky about Des in September when she’d gotten back from Maine and called me for a date. She had taken the information like an unexpected notice from the IRS. A lot of silence. I didn’t hear from her again until she called in October with some ideas about Izaak Andrews and his murdered daughter Mary. That time she had even slipped in a quick inquiry about “your new girlfriend.”

I had spoken to Becky three times since Halloween. Once, ostensibly about what else I had found concerning the Andrews family, but again there was an inquiry about Des. I had told her about the disappearance then. I was upset then. The disappearance was fresh. I had just gone to Desiree’s apartment for the first time. When Becky called about a week later she asked about Des again. She seemed concerned more about Desiree than about me so I told her everything I knew at that point. It was just good to run through the thing end to end rather than to keep turning it in a circle in my own head. The next time Becky called was when she invited me over for Thanksgiving dinner.

She didn’t mention Des until we were eating a sweet cranberry dessert she had found the recipe for in a book. You can’t go wrong with maple syrup and custard. My mood had brightened considerably by then. I was telling her about a cranberry bog down near Carver where I had worked clearing brush one summer when I was in high school. I got a good case of poison ivy the very first week. It was an unpleasant memory but it made a funny story. After I told her about my failed attempted to seduce a local girl while covered with a dried crust of calamine lotion, Becky got serious.

“I don’t blame your little cranberry girl for not showing up to scratch you in the right places. But Des…” Her voice dropped and she gave me a look I swear I saw in my mother’s eye a thousand times when she wanted me to listen. “Des is another matter. She wouldn’t have simply disappeared.”

“No.” It was all I had to say then. I had thought that circle around. It was the same conclusion. I wasn’t looking at Becky then. What she said next took me by surprise.

“I think she loved you, John.”

The surprise was that she had even said it. But it was something that was in my head like a dull ache. I just didn’t expect it from Becky.

I said, “Why do you think that? Intuition?”

She smiled defensively, “No. Maybe a bit. I’m not fond of intuition. It never did me any good. I think that because she told me that, and I believed her when she said it.”

I did not say ‘crap.’ I could have. I dropped my spoon loud enough on her eighteenth century Wedgewood to have put a chip in it.

“When?”

She shook her head as if she wasn’t interested in telling me. I waited.

“I wanted to meet her. I wanted to see what I was up against. That’s all…When you first told me about her, I went from all kinds of girlish fantasies back to being a middle aged woman. Just in the space of an instant. I felt like something wonderful I had found again had been stolen.” She looked up to see how I had taken that last revelation. Then she looked away again. She was not happy with herself about any of this. “I tried to be very mature about it. I tried for weeks. But I couldn’t handle it. It was on my mind all the time…I had an inkling, you know, when you told me you couldn’t come up to the island in August. I knew you had wanted to before. You practically asked. But I needed some time to think. I wanted to be sure of myself.” She looked at me squarely. “Yes. I see that look on your face. You know it’s all a stupid front. I’m not always so sure of myself. You can’t make it in this world letting people know you aren’t sure of things. They want the assurance for themselves…I should have called you that first night on the island. I knew then that I wanted you there with me. But no. I had to stick to my plan. And then—and then it was too late. I’d let you slip away. Again.”

I had to smile at it.

“This is very good for my ego. Like I’m the prize fish. I just have to remember what happens to the fish after he gets caught.”

“Yes. Well. It should be. You probably aren’t worth all the trouble you cause…So I bided my time. My hope was that she’d just appealed to your libido at the right moment, when I was not around to beat her off with a stick. You’d get tired of her. That was my hope. I just needed to keep the door open, so to speak. No. That mixes the metaphors, doesn’t it. I needed to keep my line in the water. That’s the one. But then the weeks passed. You were on my mind all the time. It wasn’t doing my research any good. And I had her number. Right there.” She pointed at the message pad on her desk. “I’d torn the sheet off that was underneath when you wrote her number down that day she called you. I didn’t know who it was, but I had a feeling. It was a very odd thing to do, but I kept it. And when it became clear that you were on her hook, so to speak, I called her. I told her I wanted to speak with her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said no. But I insisted.”

Most people have a well practiced set of facial expressions they start using when they are babies. They do them because they work. It’s part of the communication process. False or not, they are part of what we want to say. I’d just had a chance to watch my girls do some familiar mugging earlier that day. Becky has a good set of faces for nearly every occasion that she’s obviously developed in the classroom. They are a lot like Mary Ellen’s. It cuts down of the need to speak, I suppose. But looking at Becky’s face, I had no idea what was on her mind at that moment. The distress was all in her eyes. And I can only guess the kind of dumbstruck look that was on mine.

“Where?”

“At a Starbucks. I wanted to take her to lunch, but she wasn’t interested. She was angry with me for calling her at first. I think she thought I was going to harass her or something of the sort. But it was a good talk. I said what I thought needed saying. I told her I loved you…and about our past. I think she understood that I just wanted to know if this was some kind of fling for her. I don’t think it was. Unfortunately for me, I think she was quite taken with you. God knows why. As Jean Arthur would say, ‘You’re a big lug.’”

Becky does a good Jean Arthur. She has lines down from all the Frank Capra movies. I suppose it’s something that happens when you watch movies by yourself for too long.

For my part, I was a little numb. Suddenly, I was embarrassed. I don’t know why. Or I do know, and figure it’s not worth trying to figure. I had just been told that two women loved me. I hadn’t heard that from any female for about twenty years. That is, not counting my daughters.

What I did was try to move the subject line back.

“Why don’t you think she would have just disappeared–or walked away?”

“You are a ‘big lug.’ Why do you think? Because women don’t fall in love and then walk away. At least not the way I understand it.”

“Jesus Christ, God Almighty,” my grandfather liked to say that at key moments of confusion, so I said it. Becky shook her head at me and raised an eyebrow.

She said, “Something’s happened. Something serious.”

I went home on the early side. I was still pretty numb and tired enough to fall asleep without a lot of unnecessary thoughts.

I told Detective Wise all this, pretty much in detail, Friday morning, but with less emphasis on the love triangle. He picked up on that all by himself. He had one bit of additional information though. They had tracked Desiree’s credit card from the bar tab I had directed him to. She had not used that card again since the end of October.

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