Читать книгу Death in the Polka Dot Shoes: A Novel - Marlin Fitzwater - Страница 9

Chapter Two

I hate digital alarm clocks because you can never make them alarm, or it’s a.m. when it should be p.m., or it’s radio when it should be buzzer, and the settings are too small to read in the dark or when you’re snockered. So I just leave those blinking red digits staring at me in the night and trust I’ll wake up to read them, remember my appointments for the day and respond accordingly. This morning I thought about my father getting out of bed at three o’clock in the morning to ready his crab boat for six hours on the Bay and I knew my returning to the water was folly. On the other hand, is it a law that you have to start crabbing that early? Why not nine o’clock? I decided to roll over until 8:30 and consider the matter again.

After a couple of cups of instant expresso, I slipped into a pair of kakis, docksider boat shoes, no socks, and a blue denim shirt, the daily outfit of the dot com generation, even if we are lawyers. I was taking the day off after the memorial service, mainly because everyone would expect me to. And I needed some help in thinking this matter through. The answer seemed to be Diane Sexton, a very attractive lawyer in our firm who I had been warned to stay away from. She told me once that she had met my brother in association with one of her clients, somebody with interests on the Chesapeake, and although she wouldn’t know a blue crab from a shark, she might have good career advice, at least about the law. She specialized in real estate development.

My Saab swung into a tight parking space in front of Hamilton House on Pennsylvania Avenue, just as Diane stepped through the revolving door. With the top down she recognized me immediately, waved and walked to the car. I couldn’t help but notice that although she was wearing a light green summer business suit with brown heels, her jacket was low cut exposing the curve of her cleavage, with no evidence of a blouse or scarf underneath. I imagined her talking off her jacket in my living room, and I wondered if she had imagined me imagining her. I always think women have baser motives than they admit.

“Diane,” I shouted, “glad I caught you. Could I buy you coffee?”

“Don’t you think I have a client waiting?”

“No,” I replied, “you would have been in at six getting ready.”

I pushed the door open and she climbed in. One advantage of a low and small sports car is that women have to swing their fanny in first, which she did, and I reminded myself again of the colleague who said Diane was dangerous. But that might be the best antidote to sadness. So I swung out in traffic and headed for the Willard Hotel.

The Willard is the best thing about Washington. As a boy, Dad would bring me to the city to visit the museums and we would drive by the Willard. The museums were the extent of my cultural training because they had ancient wooden boats on display, and were located on the Mall where parking was plentiful. I liked the natural history museum best because of the prehistoric skeletons of elephants that flew, and the like. And I always liked the tired old Willard when it was closed, for about 20 years with pigeons flying through the upper windows and a faded wooden sign on the front that read: Closed for Renovations. A smaller For Sale sign below, suggested that the former was contingent upon the latter. But so many Presidents had lived in, or at least visited, the Willard over the years that the building could never be torn down in this era of historical preservation. Nor could it be renovated at a reasonable price. This project was going to require deep pockets and somebody who would repair the elegance and splendor of the 1930s in a way that would fetch four hundred dollars a night. After a couple of decades, it happened. Somebody bought the hotel and restored its legendary elegance. And now, the marble columns in the grand foyer, the circular mahogany bar, and the plush carpets often drew me to the hotel. It embodies the fine plush world of money and power that I thought the law should engender. And after I discovered that you didn’t have to own the firm to visit the Willard, I went about every Saturday night. In fact, you don’t really need much money at all. If you have twenty dollars you can spend the evening with two drinks at the Round Robin bar, or the morning with a pot of coffee in the restaurant, and feel very good about yourself. With Diane it was even better.

“Diane,” I began after we were seated by the window, “I don’t know you too well, but I want to talk about my future. I need a little help.”

“Sure Ned,” she said. “I’m so sorry about your brother. Is that what this is about?”

“Yes.”

“Well, be careful,” she said. “Never make decisions in sorrow or in anger.”

“Right.”

“Let me just lay out the situation,” I continued. “Tell me what you think.”

She picked up her coffee which had just arrived, raised it to her lips, and took a small sip, noticing the Willard eagle on the side. When she set the cup back on the small, circular table, I blurted it out: “I may leave the firm.”

She didn’t blink an eye, probably not really caring one way or the other. But she did show the proper concern by asking why.

“The truth is,” I said, “I’ve always wanted to go back to Parkers. I thought it would probably be retirement, to some big mansion on the water.”

“Looking for grandeur?” she asked. “Or recognition as the hometown boy who made good?”

“Both, I guess. Parkers isn’t much of a town, really. Just a few crab houses with bars and not a one of them has tablecloths.”

“Is that your standard of excellence?” she said through a smile.

“Pretty much,” I said. “Even as a kid I wanted tablecloths. Clean and white. I think I went to law school to get away from formica.”

“I thought you were a fisherman,” she asked with a slightly scornful look. “With scales and guts and cutting those slimy fish open on the dock. Now you tell me you want table cloths.”

“This may be part of my problem,” I said, wanting to get the conversation back to my future. “I miss the water, the independence and orneriness of the people. But there’s a Brooks Brother in me that likes the city as well.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“My brother left me his boat. It’s an old wooden thing that my father left him. I have a lot of sentimental memories about it. Dad used it for crabbing for nearly 30 years. My brother was turning it into a charter fishing boat. Taking people out to catch rockfish. I guess the business is changing.”

“You want to run a crab boat?” she said incredulously.

“I used to tell my brother that I wanted to get back on the water. I thought it was romantic when I didn’t actually have to do it. It sounded great knowing that I had a law firm and enough money to buy any crab boat on the bay. So I dreamed of the smell of the saw grass in the morning, when the herons stand frozen in the marshes, or the egrets line the bulkheads, and the water is as still as porcelain. I miss dropping my hand over the side of the boat and letting the water rush through my fingers.”

“Oh brother,” she interrupted. Then she looked in my face and saw the yearning that could not be hidden. “Why not just do it. Buy a boat. Or take your brother’s. And slip out there on Saturday mornings for a little nostalgia.”

“There is a catch to this trotline Diane, that I haven’t mentioned,” I said. “My brother also left me about 75 acres, much of it on the water, probably worth several million dollars if it’s developed right.”

“What’s a trotline?”

“Sorry for the pun. It’s what the crabbers use,” I said, “they go out early in the morning, lay out about a thousand feet of trotline -- that’s what it’s called -- with a piece of bait every few feet. It settles down to the bottom of the bay. The crabs come to the bait for breakfast. The crabber waits a while, then pulls up the trotline, and as each crab comes out of the water, the waterman scoops him with a net and tosses him in a basket. Kids do the same thing when they tie a chicken neck to a string, let the crab take it, then pull him up. Same idea only the trotline makes it a kind of assembly line. Crabs are a hundred and fifty dollars a bushel today so the guy does all right. Pull in ten bushels a day and you live pretty well. Of course, you can’t do that every day. Actually, not many days.”

“Let’s get back to the land and the millions,” Diane said. “What’s the catch there?”

“I have to work the boat for five years to get the land.”

“What!” she exclaimed. “Was your brother a practical joker, or did he hate you? What’d you do to this fellow?”

“No, you don’t understand,” I said. “I think he thought he was saving me from myself. He thought I belonged on the water. And this was a way to get me back. He probably also thought he would never die, or he could change the whole thing later if I turned out to be a phony baloney ambulance chaser.”

“What’s 75 acres worth out there?” she asked.

“Probably millions,” I said.

“Ned, for ten million I would leave Simpson, Feldstein and James so fast I couldn’t remember what the building looked like,” Diane said. “Besides, your brother didn’t say you couldn’t practice law. Hang your shingle in Parkers. Fish in the morning. Lawyer in the afternoon.”

“That may be a little much,” I offered. But I fell silent, realizing this was a new idea, worthy of consideration, and maybe a solution to lots of things.

“I may even have a first client for you,” she said, showing some enthusiasm for the project. “Listen Ned, you don’t have a problem. With millions at stake, you only have opportunities.”

This is why I liked Diane. Alone among most of the lawyers I know, she was a woman who could see opportunities. Admittedly she had detractors who saw her creativity as unbridled ambition, but I had never known her to chew anybody up or set a course that benefited her more than the client. Seeing around corners was a good quality for a lawyer, and I wasn’t the best at it. Mostly, I am a goal oriented, slightly lazy, above average intellect who sets a course and sticks to it, except for Saturday evenings at the Willard when I am likely to stroll off into the unknown with the first lady lobbyist who believes my line about becoming a Congressman some day. That’s not a pickup line I use often, but it has worked in some very ambitious circles, and it works amazingly well at the Willard because everyone who goes there expects to become President some day. That’s why the Willard is a very strange setting for discussing a new career as a waterman.

I dropped Diane off at the firm, noticing the warmth that comes from having a strong confident professional woman at your side. And the faint smell of pricy bath soap under starched linen was also nice.

My greatest fear of going back to Parkers was that it had changed. I might have lost my sense of reality about the place, with all that education, travelling around the country, seeing Europe for nearly three months after college. Just yesterday, after the memorial service, Parkers seemed raw and slightly dangerous. In high school I never feared going into a bar in Parkers, or visiting a crab house on Saturday night when you knew fights could occur. I knew everyone and their intentions. Now I was an outsider, under suspicion for my ambitions and perhaps my income. The safety of familiarity was gone. But still, I couldn’t forget the independence of heading your own boat out on the bay, spending six or seven hours in a cradle of waves, and returning home with the evening sun turning bright red. As I said goodbye to Diane, a single line of poetry floated through my mind: red sky at night, sailors delight. I never knew a waterman who could tell you who wrote that line, but they could all recite it, and most set their lives by it. I was doing it too.