Whale Season Read online

  Not even Leon can be that unlucky. And Trot’s been a cop long enough to know that there’s no such thing as coincidence.

  “Sorry if I woke you,” he says to Dagmar again.

  Dagmar is still standing by the door, unwilling to sit down. She shifts her weight from left to right. “Had to get up anyway.”

  Trot looks fresh-pressed. His jeans are ironed with a crease. She imagines him starching them in what probably is a tiny neat apartment, while a tiny loaf of bread is baking in one of those machines.

  Don’t wait for me anymore, she thinks. Please.

  The noon sun sheets in through the blinds like rain.

  “Want some coffee?” she asks.

  He shakes his head. “Don’t want to be any trouble. Just wanted to see how you were.”

  How she is is still half-asleep and wearing an old football jersey of Leon’s that she used to wear when they were still married. It’s three sizes too large and touches her knees. Looks as if it’s swallowed her whole.

  “I could make some coffee,” she says. She’s still holding on to the front doorknob. She’s poised as if she’s waiting for the starting gun to go off, the rabbit to hit the track.

  Don’t run, she thinks. He’s only trying to be nice.

  “You should sit down,” he says.

  “Coffee is easy,” she says, but doesn’t move.

  “I’ll get it,” Trot gets up. She doesn’t protest, has no energy for it. Trot goes into the galley kitchen. Despite its small size, it’s steel with granite countertops. There’s a new gas range and side-by-side refrigerator with flat-screen TV.

  Naked must pay well, he thinks.

  “Coffee beans are in the freezer,” she shouts, still standing by the door.

  They are. In fact, they’re all that’s in the freezer. He opens the refrigerator out of curiosity. There’s a pint of cream, seven kinds of hot sauce including a XXX habanero, a bowl of eggs that he suspects came from Jimmy Ray’s, and a six-pack of Diet Coke.

  Trot grinds the beans. Starts the coffee. Then he pulls out a pan and olive oil. He cracks three eggs and mixes in some cream. The noise makes Dagmar curious. She peeks around the corner. “You don’t have to do that,” she says.

  “I do. I’m hungry. Any garlic?”

  “Pantry.”

  He chops the fist of garlic as well as any chef Dagmar’s seen. It goes into the eggs, and he adds some dried chives. He takes a whisk and beats it into froth. Dagmar likes to watch men cook. It’s been a long time since anyone made her breakfast. Makes her feel comfortable. Trot knew it would; that’s what he was going for. He wants to make her comfortable so that they can talk. His face is still a little red from where she slapped him last night. Once was enough. But he needs answers.

  So when the olive oil sizzles on the pan he says, “Now, don’t get sore, but I ran the plates on that RV at Lucky’s. Do you know someone named Rose Levi? From New York? Or her husband, Irv? Leon ever mention them?”

  “This is an official visit?”

  You jerk, she’s thinking. He can hear it in her voice.

  “Come on, don’t be like that.”

  But Dagmar is, indeed, going to be like “that.” “So you think Leon swindled this Rose Levi out of the RV?”

  “I don’t think anything yet. I’m just trying to find out what happened.”

  “Ever think that maybe they traded it in?” Dagmar is scowling. “Lucky’s is a business. People come in off the street and buy RVs. That’s how it’s done.”

  At Lucky’s?

  That’s what he wants to say, but doesn’t. Knows better. Trot can’t remember the last time Leon had anything worth buying. He also wants to say that Leon is a gambler—and not a very good one. Come on, Dagmar, we all know that. He’ll do anything for a buck. But what Trot says is, “I’m sure that’s probably what happened. It’s just that I have to check up on these things.”

  In the frying pan, the eggs set into an omelet. The kitchen is fragrant with them. Trot jiggles the pan, pays attention to the eggs. He can feel Dagmar’s anger, doesn’t want to meet her eye.

  “So what aren’t you telling me?” she says.

  He hesitates, and then says, “A lot.” He shakes the pan a little too hard; the cooked eggs fall away from the sides. “It’s an open investigation.”

  And it is. And all he has is questions. At 4:30 A.M., Trot made a quick check on the Internet and discovered that the American Dream RV is worth more cash than Leon has probably ever seen in his life. But there didn’t seem to be any paperwork at the Round-Up about it. Or keys. Trot suspects that Leon had them with him when the explosion occurred. And what about that woman Trot and Carlotta saw Leon talking to at 2 A.M.? Rose Levi? If so, what would a seventy-eight-year-old nearly blind woman be doing at that hour with Leon? And where was her husband?

  The Levis seem to be the key to this case, but no one knows where they are. When Trot called their home number in New York, he was routed to Miami. Nobody answered. So he used a cross directory and called a neighbor back in Cicero. After some convincing, the suspicious Mrs. Edda Miller told him two things of interest.

  First, the Levis were going to Florida—“To die,” as Rose apparently told Mrs. Miller—“where everybody else is dying.” Not exactly a Chamber of Commerce motto, but more than accurate. And the second thing Mrs. Miller said was that the Levis had no children.

  “Just the two of them. I half expected you to tell me that they did one of those murder-suicide pacts. They were married for sixty-one years. Wouldn’t surprise me.”

  Nor Trot. But how did Leon fit in? Mrs. Miller didn’t have a clue. “This Leon lived in Whale Inlet, you say? Where is Whale Inlet?”

  “Harbor,” Trot corrected. “Whale Harbor.”

  “Inlet. Harbor. Who cares?”

  I do, Trot thought, and thanked Mrs. Miller for her time. He seemed to be getting nowhere fast.

  “You hungry?” he asks Dagmar. She nods, seems a little less angry. He turns the perfect omelet onto a plate, and the coffeemaker beeps. Dagmar serves the coffee. Trot divides the eggs. The moment has turned comfortable again, domestic. He sits down and takes off his baseball cap. He is waiting for Dagmar to pick up her fork, so that they can eat.

  Manners, she thinks. His mother trained him well.

  Dagmar takes the XXX habanero sauce from the refrigerator and splashes it on her plate until the egg looks as if it’s been bludgeoned. Trot’s eyes are watering from the fumes.

  She shakes the bottle at him. “What some?”

  “No thanks,” he coughs. “Makes my head sweat.” He pats his thinning hair. “Not a pretty sight.”

  She sprinkles a few drops on his eggs, anyway. “Good for your heart,” she says. “Besides, I’ve seen your sweat before.”

  And it’s true. Trot has sweated with Dagmar in backseats, in tents, and once, during the night of their junior prom, in a hammock. He had rope burns for a week. His face turns red at the memory.

  They know each other so well that she can feel him think this. “I meant in the summer,” she laughs. “I’ve seen you sweat in the summer.” She rolls her eyes. “Stop blushing.”

  His face goes flush again. “It’s the hot sauce.” Sweat is now pouring from his head like rain.

  “Good?”

  He coughs. “Hot.”

  For a while they eat without speaking. All that can be heard is Cocoa and Izzy in The Café below them. They are stripping away with collegiate vigor. After a while Dagmar says, “You know Leon is really more decent than you give him credit for.” And as soon as she says it, she regrets it. Trot stops chewing. Goes pale. She was only trying to explain, but it came out like an accusation.

  “He’s a decent guy,” she tries again. “Really.”

  “Was,” Trot wants to say, “Leon was decent,” but he doesn’t. “He was my best friend,” he says quietly. “I did love him.” Then Trot puts his fork down.

  Dagmar feels his sorrow. No longer hungry, she pushes her plate away. />
  “Gimme an ‘S!’” Izzy and Cocoa shout beneath them in unison.

  “S!” The crowd shouts back. Enthusiastic.

  Trot folds his napkin and places it next to the coffee cup. “I should go. Sorry about the mess in the kitchen.”

  “Look, I’m sorry—”

  Trot nods. It’s clear that they are both missing Leon. Despite everything—all the history, all the pain—they miss him.

  Beneath them the dancers work the crowd.

  “Gimme an ‘E’!”

  “E!” the crowd responds.

  “Gimme an ‘X’!”

  “X!”

  “Gimme an S! Gimme an E! Gimme an X!”

  Izzy and Cocoa bounce in unison. “Whadda ya got?” They lift up their tiny pleated skirts. The crowd hoots and whistles.

  “SEX!”

  The word is thunderous.

  Trot can smell sleep on Dagmar’s skin: like baby powder, like silk. His face feels so hot he thinks he can grill on it. “I really just stopped by because I thought you might need something,” he says. It nearly feels true.

  Downstairs the crowd kicks into a boozy version of “On Wisconsin.” Pom-poms fly.

  “So, do you need anything?” he asks.

  Dagmar shrugs.

  The crowd sings, “Fight, fellows, fight, fight, fight! We’ll win tonight!”

  The floorboards underneath Trot and Dagmar’s feet shake. It’s difficult to ignore any longer.

  Trot winces. Dagmar looks closely at him. For the first time, she actually sees him for who he is now, not who he was back then, so long ago. The years have changed him, as they’ve changed her. They’ve deepened the lines around his mouth. He’s thinner now. Hard-edged. Filled with more sorrow than she remembers.

  “I should go then,” he says. Stands.

  “Sure.”

  He’s standing so close, she can feel the heat of his skin, smell the peppermint Life Saver.

  She leans against his chest, exhausted.

  Trot puts his arms around her. He feels tentative. He’s unsure if she’ll run away from him again. Or slap him. But still he holds her.

  “Nobody gets to stay forever,” he says simply.

  The moment is awkward: a mix of desire, fear, and sorrow. Without a word, she kisses him. At first, the kiss is gentle. Then the wanting takes hold, then the grief.

  He pulls her closer. She can feel his heart beat.

  Underneath their feet, the crowd yells, “Touchdown!”

  “I really have to move,” Dagmar softly laughs and touches the side of Trot’s face with the back of her hand. He blushes. It’s been so long since she’s seen him blush. She’s forgotten how beautiful his smile is, how gentle.

  He kisses her fingers. She closes her eyes. He holds her in his arms, tightly, as if it were for the last time—because it is. He can’t do this anymore. Can’t love her. It’s too painful. Too complicated. Now, there’s Carlotta—he can’t stop thinking about her even though she may be dead. Her voice like crushed velvet.

  As if on cue, Trot’s cell phone rings. It’s Bender, he’s laughing.

  “Guess what pretty gal just walked into The Pink?”

  Trot doesn’t have to guess. He knows.

  Beneath his feet, the applause is deafening.

  Chapter 21

  All Trot knew for sure was that Leon and Carlotta met in Vegas.

  She was dealing cards in a small place just off The Strip called The Desert Aire. The Aire had a worn aqua charm with an all-meat buffet. “Fifty kinds of meat!” the sign read. “Bar-B-Que. Boiled Beef. Chipped Beef.” All fifty types were listed in alphabetical order. Painted on the wall. That drew Leon in. He’s a man who likes his beef, especially for “The one low low price of $6.95!”

  Once inside the revolving glass doors of The Desert Aire, Leon knew he’d made the right decision. The place smelled of bleach and gravy, reminded him of Sunday dinner at Mama Po’s. Made him feel lucky. Leon hadn’t felt lucky in a long time.

  When he first saw Carlotta, she was playing solitaire at the poker table. She had no choice. It was 4 A.M. and the place was deserted. In the dim light, she was sequin beautiful. Low cut and longing. “I like a woman who defies gravity,” Leon said to her chin-high cleavage. So she dealt him in.

  A couple of hands, he thought, then I’ll move on to somewhere else.

  But once Leon sat down he never left. There was something about Carlotta that he couldn’t walk away from. It wasn’t so much that she was beautiful—up close she wasn’t that beautiful at all—but she listened to him in a way he hadn’t been listened to in a long time.

  “How’d that make you feel?” she’d say every now and then. She sounded as if she really wanted to know. After a while, Leon found himself talking about all kinds of things he never really talked about with anyone. Carlotta had that way about her. She was easy to talk to and that made him think that he knew her, made him think she was his friend.

  By the time sunrise came around, Leon was losing money, winning a little, losing a lot more. It didn’t matter. He didn’t care. He figured that she knew that. Listening was her job, helped the house win, but he still told her about Grammy Lettie, Pettit’s Alligator All-Stars, and his beloved Miss Pearl, “The Amazing One-Ton Wonder.”

  “‘Miss Pearl, you sure are a looker,’ I used to say. ‘You are my best girl.’”

  “Everybody needs a best girl,” Carlotta said softly, and it made him wonder if she was anybody’s best girl. Or used to be. Or wanted to be.

  Then he told her the part of the story he didn’t even want to think about. He told her about Miss Pearl and the night he waited with her for the men to come and take her away. How she seemed to know it was over. Her head on his lap. How she looked at him.

  “You know,” he said, “I still got that straw hat. All these years.”

  Then Leon coughed. Rubbed his eyes. “That’s messed up, isn’t it?” he said. “Some kind of messed up.”

  Carlotta had worked at The Desert Aire for nearly five years. She’d seen a lot of men, heard a lot of stories, took a lot of money—it was her job after all—but there was something about Leon and his love for a toothless alligator that touched her. Something odd, she had to admit, but something sweet. He didn’t seem like all the other marks, so she leaned across the blackjack table and wiped the tear from his cheek with her cocktail napkin.

  “The cold-blooded ones always break your heart,” she whispered. Her hair hung away from her face for a moment.

  It was then that Leon could see the scar clearly. He figured it wasn’t an accident, made him feel sad for her. So he kissed her. At first, it was out of pity. But by the time he kissed the scar all the way down her hairline, Leon found himself kissing her because he wanted to. He was kissing her because of the steel inside her—the knowing how life can sometimes turn on you, but you have to keep going, can’t give up—that kind of steel. He liked that in a woman. Didn’t see it often. So he kissed her until the security guards escorted them both out of the casino. He kissed her until they tossed her purse out into the street.

  But, three weeks later, Leon and Carlotta were all razors and elbows. Leon figured it had something to do with the lack of large oceangoing mammals in Whale Harbor.

  “The longing for large aquatic life is a powerful force,” Grandma Lettie once told him. “Not an easy thing to get over.” Now he understood.

  Had Trot known all this, the real details of Carlotta and Leon’s life together, he might have stopped by Pettit’s All-Star Alligator Farm, or what’s left of it, just to take a look. He might have suspected that she was there waiting for Leon in the one place that brought them together. She was there waiting to start a new life.

  But Trot didn’t know any of that. Didn’t even suspect it. How could he? Nobody had been to Lettie Pettit’s in a long time, over twenty years. There was no reason to go. The former alligator farm sat at the edge of town, on a peninsula, where the Gulf of Mexico meets the harbor. Nobody lived out tha
t far anymore. Over time the road had become overgrown by passion fruit vines, deep red and purple. They crosshatched the canopy of live oaks, knit them together like fingers. They make the road impossible to drive though especially in spring when thousands of monarch butterflies come to rest, their burnished wings beating.

  And no one would come by boat. The shore around Lettie’s house had always been too shallow. Sandbars and swift currents hugged the coast.

  At least, that’s the way it used to be.

  During the past forty years, currents have eroded the shoreline and caused the sand to shift. Now, at that point in the harbor, there’s a bayou with a thriving ecosystem. Manatees breed freely. Shrimp swim in the fists of mangrove roots. Mullets and grouper churn the waters.

  And, perhaps more surprisingly, the sand around Lettie’s house has eroded. The house, with its rusted tin roof, has risen. The four walls, the front stairs—it’s all there.

  It’s not really a miracle, although it appears to be one. The house was built in the early 1920s; constructed tongue and groove from “junk wood”—cypress trees that were cleared to put in the roads.

  Cypress is an amazing wood. Ancient Egyptians used it for their mummy cases. Medieval craftsmen carved it into cathedral doors. It is naturally decay and insect resistant. It was once used for water tanks, water troughs, and well casings. It has little tendency to warp, twist, or cup. It will last forever.

  But in 1920, in Whale Harbor, nobody knew that. All they knew was that it was free.

  And so, all these years later, the tiny cypress house stands again, level as the day it was built. Saltwater and sun have bleached it into driftwood, reedy as knees, and the tin roof looks more like a rusted doily than a roof, but the walls stand. And only a few windows are broken. It looks, more or less, just as Mama Po and Grammy Lettie had left it. The curtains, now shredded and gray, still hang in the windows. Underneath, flower boxes seem ready to be planted. The white picket fence is peeling and rotted in most places. But the entrance gate, a gate like no other with its gigantic gator grin, is only slightly diminished. It leans a little more to the right than usual, but it still stands. Its pointy teeth appeared decayed. Its faux-gator skin is bleached to a pastel shade of green. But its sign, “You pays your money, you takes your chances,” still hangs and is still legible. Still provides fair warning.