The Boardwalk Bomber

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 13

The next morning I was sitting in my shop flipping through a rare book catalog, not really paying much attention to it. I was sleepy and my eyelids were drooping shut on me. Then I heard the jangle of the door open and a gravelly voice say, "There you are, bud." It was Bigfoot.

The catalog fell to the floor as I jumped up, turning to face him and backing out of the counter area into the open so he couldn't pen me in.

Bigfoot read my expression and waved his big hand across the air in a dismissive gesture. "Don't worry, bud, I'm not mad anymore. I never stay mad at nobody mor'n a few minutes."

I stepped out from behind the counter anyway, just in case. "So," I said. "Did you get that car fixed."

"Sure did, smooth as anything. I told April her car needed a tune up and took it over to a garage me and Chad rent ... Well I guess I'm the only one renting it now. Anyways I used some body shop adhesive on that little spoiler, taped that puppy down tight overnight and it's good as new. April never knew what happened. Good think I'm sneakier than I look."

He stood there beaming and I knew he wasn't just suckering me. I was pretty sure with Bigfoot you probably always saw exactly what was on his mind. "I'm glad it worked out for you," I said. "But I don't think you came all the way over here just to tell me that."

"No, you're right, I didn't." Bigfoot looked around the shop, which was nearly empty. He shifted his considerable weight from foot to foot, something on his mind like a boy about to ask someone for a date -- which I hoped to god wasn't what was happening.

Finally he got it out -- "Has that redheaded detective been bothering you?"

"Pardon?"

"That McCain chick. She's been over to my place twice asking questions about Chad and who he was friends with and who didn't like him and whether the bar is losing money. Which it ain't."

"Okay."

"Well what kind of question is that -- was the bar losing money? I'm not stupid. That's like saying, Bigfoot, did you blow up your business partner for his insurance money? What the hell else does a question like that mean?"

"Detectives ask a lot of questions," I said. "If you've got nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about."

"I've got nothing to hide!" he yelled, slamming the palm of his hand down on the glass counter. A hairline crack opened like an earthquake fissure, diagonally across the glass. He looked down at it and his anger was instantly gone. "Shit, man, I'm sorry. I'll pay for that."

I found myself laughing. "Does this happen to you a lot?"

He threw up his hands. "What can I say? I got a hell of a temper, but it don't usually last long, unless I've been drinking too much -- which I hardly do anymore. That night I gave you shit I was pretty ripped, you know."

I nodded. "That was the night of Chad's funeral. No harm done."

"If I hadn't been so drunk I'd have kicked your ass," he said wagging a finger at me. "Course, if I hadn't been drunk my anger would'a passed over so quick, nothing would have happened."

"Well, either way I got to keep my teeth. So, you want some coffee? Or would I be asking for trouble -- putting caffeine into you?"

He laughed. "Caffeine don't bother me. Sure, coffee'd be great. Thanks."

I found an extra cup and poured him some. He motioned me to stop when it was two thirds full and proceeded to fill up the rest of the cup with cream and sugar. He noticed me watching and glared back. "What?"

"Nothing."

"Just cause I don't like it black--"

"Fix it however you like," I said and walked over to one of the easy chairs as he dumped another spoonful of sugar into his cup. He followed and sat down across from me.

"The thing I wanted to find out," he began, "is whether this McCain chick has been asking you a lot of questions too -- things that make you feel like she suspects you of something?"

"Sure she did," I said. "Like whether I made a profit off of the insurance fixing my place up." I held up my damaged hand. "And how I did this. That sort of thing."

"How did you do that bro?"

"A word of advice: If you ever encounter a polar bear, don't try to befriend it."

"A polar bear did that?"

"No, this was just a workplace accident. But that's still good advice, don't you think? About polar bears?"

He laughed and seemed to almost relax. "I'll keep that in mind if I come across one."

"So, "I said, "which of McCain's questions got you so worked up."

That reminder got him hot again and he exhaled through his nostrils like a bull for a few seconds, but his temper didn't flash and he seemed weary. "Seemed like every question she asked insinuated something. About how the bar was doing financially, the business partnership between him and me. Which I'll admit wasn't a fucking marriage made in heaven, okay? I mean, Chad was good at bringing people to the beach, I'll give him that. We'd sell a lotta beers every time he'd pump up some race or something. He'd get those DJs at WMLJ-ROCK to broadcast from the beach and one of them would go up in a glider or some damn thing. Really put us on the map. But at the end of the day we rarely made much money at that shit."

"Why not?"

"Fucking liability insurance for one thing. And those god damn speedboats ain't cheap. Of course they might have paid for themselves if he'd just rented them to people by the hour like he was supposed to, but he was out there half the time himself burning up every fucking gallon of gas on the peninsula."

"So you're worried the police will suspect you because of that."

"They already do. Because of the life insurance policies."

"On Chad?"

"On both of us. When we made the partnership we each took out extra life insurance with the other guy as beneficiary, so the business could survive one of our deaths. It was his idea, not mine."

"How much is the benefit?"

"A million dollars, which sounds like a lot but you know how it is running a business." He gestured at the interior of my shop. "I mean, look at how much you got tied up in inventory. You know what I'm talking about, right?"

"Sure," I said. "That's a reasonable amount of money for business partners to have on each other. Still, I can see why you're a little worried about how it looks."

"Damn right. Especially since everyone knows we weren't getting along. And that wasn't just business problems either."

"What else?"

Bigfoot squirmed in his seat. "He was getting weird about April lately. He always flirted with her, even when she was underage but he was never really serious about it. Nothing ever went on between them, mind you. April never thought about him in that way and he knew damn well I'd kill ... kick his ass if ever put his hands on her."

"So if nothing happened, what's the problem?"

"Well this summer things were just different somehow. Maybe because she's more grown up than the other summers they were around each other. I don't know, but Chad was just getting to be more and more of an asshole around April. And then after that day I threw him off the balcony things were just real tense between us."

"Wait a minute. Back up. You threw him off the balcony?"

"Didn't I tell that part? It was about two weeks before he died. I came upstairs to the part of the house where me and April live and the two of them were on the front deck that goes in front of both apartments. It wasn't so unusual him being there, but he was standing too close to her, kinda backing her up against the railing. I couldn't hear what he was saying but I could tell what he was trying to do. He saw me coming and tried to bullshit me but it was too fucking late!" At this point Bigfoot slammed his empty coffee cup onto the table next to him. It shattered and only the handle remained in his finger. He looked at me sheepishly.

"Don't worry about it," I said, and quickly scanned the immediate area for anything else breakable that mattered to me. I decided the risk was acceptable and went on. "So ... that's when you threw him off the balcony?"

"Well yeah. He wasn't hurt though. He landed on the dry sand and just got the wind knocked out of him and kind of sprained his wrist a little. But after that things were pretty much over and I was looking at how to buy out his share of the business. So him dying right then doesn't look too good."

Bigfoot seemed completely sincere to me, and I'm pretty good at spotting liars. Still, it certainly occurred to me that he might be just priming me to support his version of events if need be later.

"And if that ain't enough," Bigfoot went on, "I also went to high school with Brandi Greene, who works for the Brinckman family. It's just a coincidence -- I hadn't seen her since graduation -- but the cops might not see it that way."

I was careful about my next question, because I knew Brandi's name hadn't been mentioned in any of the news reports. "There're bound to be connections like that in small towns," I said. But I'll bet you were surprised when you saw her name in the news."

He shook his head. "No, I must have missed that or it didn't click or something if I saw it in the paper. I wouldn't even have known she was still in the area, but she called me up because she saw me in the paper. We must have talked for an hour about high school and people we both knew and shit. I gotta tell you, I always did kinda like her, but she was basically the most popular chick in the whole school. I wasn't too bad myself -- varsity linebacker -- but I was kinda second-string in the popularity department."

"So she just called you out of the blue, huh?"

"Yeah. Said she saw my picture in the paper. So at least she knew about this." Here he ran his hand over his bald head. We went out to lunch and damn she's just as pretty as she was in high school."

"Yeah I saw her at Mrs. Brinckman's funeral," I said. "So are you two an item now?"

He grinned like a kid and I'm pretty sure I've never seen a man his size blush the way he did. His whole bald head became red. "Nah! Hell, I guess I don't know, dude. "Sure seems like it could that way. I'm a little worried about how it looks though."

"Because you were both close to one of the victims."

"Shit yeah. But it's just a coincidence. I didn't even know she worked for them until halfway through lunch when she says, by the way we have something else in common. Then she tells me about working for the Brinckman chick who got blown up down the beach here on this side. So now I'm worried it'd look suspicious, on top of all this Chad shit, to be linked to someone connected to the other explosion. What do you think?"

"Well, the police would eventually figure out you two went to the same high school. That sort of thing turns up eventually in an investigation. Did they ask you if you knew the Brinckmans or anyone associated with them?"

"Yeah, McCain asked me that and I said no, cause that's what I thought at the time."

"Well it wouldn't hurt to call her up and amend that. Just say you didn't realize it at the time, and that Brandi called you up after seeing you in the paper. Just the truth. If you over-react and go out of your way to keep the investigators from knowing about this, then it'll just look worse later on."

He twirled the broken coffee cup handle absently in one hand, thinking. "That's a good idea, bud. Just fuckin' tell the truth and don't worry about how it looks."

He pushed his big body up out of the chair and gathered up the broken cup parts and carried them over to the cracked glass counter where he left them with a $50 bill. I tried to refuse it or negotiate a lower amount but he insisted. "That's a good book," he said, tapping his finge/r on a copy of "The Sound and the Fury" laying on the counter.

"You've read it?"

He turned back at me. "I said it was good, didn't I? How could I know that if I didn't read it?"

"I didn't mean it that way," I said, realizing he was now standing next to an antique clock that I really liked.

"Sorry," he said, his anger not peaking this time. "People always look surprised, like somebody who looks like me can't fucking read or something. I'm taking a literature class at the university Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. We just did a section on Faulkner."

"Faulkner's great, " I said, struggling for something that would not set him off.

"Well, see you, bud," he said and pushed out the screen door. It banged against the side of the house at his touch. He caught it on the bounce, steadied it and closed it gently. "Later dude."