Goofy Foot Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

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  13

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  44

  Copyright Page

  For my mother, Anne Daniel, and my aunt, Mildred Brandsema

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Ruth Cavin, Daniel Kotler, and James Evans at Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, and to Erika Schmid, Tim Trask, and David Bergquist. Thanks, too, to The Offering (spring 2002), edited by Anthony Szczesiul, and the Whistler House Museum of Art: Poets and Painters series, where portions of this novel first appeared.

  1

  I looked up and saw the old guy standing in my office doorway, pulling a sawed-off shotgun out of a brown paper bag. He was wild-eyed, winded from the three-flight climb. The bag was the long, thin kind that hero sandwiches come in. He tossed it aside and stepped toward my desk, where my morning coffee steamed in the cup. “You’re Mr. Rasmussen …”

  “Whoa!” I threw my hands high.

  “I’m gonna give it to you!”

  My heart was banging off the tin ceiling. “Hold on.”

  “It’s gotta be now!”

  The ugly snout of the shotgun glared at me in the June sunlight sliced by the venetian blinds—maybe the last sunlight I’d ever see. It was double-barrel, big-gauge, and this close it was like looking into the Ted Williams Tunnel. If it went off, I was pâté.

  “Mr. Rasmussen—”

  He knew my name. I tried to run the flushed mug. The loser in a bitter divorce case I’d done investigative work for? An insurance cheat I’d outed? A face in the crowd?

  And that’s when I recognized him.

  He worked in the pizza shop around the corner. Tony’s, what else? A nice old fellow, I’d always figured. So he’d cracked. Standing in the Bessemer blast of the pizza oven, one too many customers saying “Hold the anchovies,” and he’d wigged and come through the building at 10 Kearney Square—the Fairburn Building, if you take your irony straight—looking for people to shoot on sight. Another mad dog fizzing with rage, needing someone to blame. Except nobody else was around. The city golf tournament was on, and there wasn’t a businessman, accountant, or lawyer to be found; they were all out whooping it up at Mount Pleasant or at Vesper. Not private eyes, though. There was one working, and this old guy had found him.

  “Look—” I was still scrambling for a life ring.

  I heard the siren then—had been hearing it for the past minute, wailing somewhere. It was on Merrimack Street now, just outside, but rather than calm me, it was a razor strop across the raw edge of my nerves. Would the old guy get me before the cops could get him? He stepped closer, pushing the office door shut behind him. He said, “It ain’t working no more, Mr. Rasmussen.”

  I blinked.

  “I was cleaning the vent over the oven. I found it on top the ceiling.” I noticed now that the weapon was rust-spotted. “One of them dropped ceilings,” he said. “A gun I don’t know where it come from, and it’s lying up there. You’re some kind of cop, ain’t you? I don’t like guns. Guns scare me. I brung it for you to get rid of it.”

  I wanted to hug him. He’d found the old gun and it had spooked him and he didn’t know what to do about it, so he’d stuck the barrel in a paper bag and gone around the corner because he’d once seen the gold lettering on my third-floor window—ALEX RASMUSSEN, PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS—except someone had spotted him and punched 911. Carrying an unlicensed firearm, even in a sandwich bag, was a one-year mandatory in Massachusetts. And if this seemed silly, stranger things had happened. I couldn’t see the scared old guy coping with prison. Or me losing my ability to earn a living. I heard stealthy footsteps in the corridor. I looked around and grabbed an idea. Maybe it’d play. Or maybe it would get us both cells at Concord.

  “Give me that,” I said. “Quick.”

  I yanked open the coat closet and stood the shotgun in the dark back corner, behind my trench coat and a vacuum cleaner. I grabbed the vac’s flex hose and twisted the black plastic tube off the end. I kicked the closet door shut. I heard the outer door to my waiting room rattle open. I had the eighteen-inch-long tube on the desk as the inner office door flew open and a uniform edged in in a crouch, his 9-mm two-handed in front of him. He was nobody from my days on the job—the faces kept getting younger. He was panting, too: nerves, probably, or the climb. He knew the moves, though. Hands choking the thick rubber grip of the nine, arms twitching the piece this way and that, finger on the trigger. His tension rang off the metal file cabinets. “Where is it?”

  “Down, boy!” I said. “Where’s what?”

  “The weapon.”

  “Bottom drawer. What’s going on?”

  “Don’t move.” With his left hand he brought his walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Okay, I’m here on the third floor, suite three-one-five.”

  “I’m coming up,” said a second voice. “The elevator working?”

  The cop looked at me. “The elevator work?”

  “Not since before Clinton.”

  “No,” he told the other voice. The voice swore and signed off.

  “Okay, lay the weapon on the desk,” the cop ordered.

  I unlocked and opened the drawer carefully. I reached past the fifth of Wild Turkey—a gift from a client—and hoisted the .38 Smith & Wesson by the trigger guard and set it on the linoleum desktop. “It’s legal,” I said.

  “The other, I’m talking. Shotgun.” The nine ratcheted toward my visitor. “Someone saw you come up the block hauling steel.”

  “Hauling steel?” I said. “Where’d you get that? Creative writing class?”

  The nine leaped my way. “Knock off the crap. What’s your name?”

  I told him.

  “You?”

  The old guy couldn’t get a name out. He looked ready to jump from his skin. “He wouldn’t know a Glock from a glockenspiel,” I said. “What is this?”

  “It’s in a bag,” the cop said.

  “A paper bag?” I let out a breath that I hoped sounded like recognition and relief. “Three minutes ago?” I lifted the plastic pipe, and I retrieved the bag. The rest was easy: my old pal had borrowed my carpet sweeper and forgot to return the attachment, until now. The cop used his walkie-talkie and nixed backup. To justify the hike, I supposed, he asked to see paper for the .38. I was happy to oblige. He lamped the carry permit and my investigator’s license, both neat and up-to-date, and looked as relieved as we were.

  “How come you’re not out at the tournament with the rest of the city?” I asked him when he’d holstered his heater. “You’re missing the tee-offs.”

  “I might ask you the same.”

  “And give crime a holiday?”

  When the cop was gone, the old guy clamped my right hand in a damp double handshake. “I knew you was the one to come to.”

  “I’m him,” I said, my voice finally down in the range where it belonged.

  “You take care of the gun, eh? I don’t want.”


  “Okay. I’ll take care of it.”

  He was still pumping my hand. “You come by. Vito—that’s me—I make you a pizza, special. Whatever you like. You like anchovies?”

  I didn’t say a word.

  When he’d gone, too, I locked the outer door. I’d had enough company for one morning. I brought the sawed-off out of hiding. It was a Parker Brothers, according to the name etched on the housing; not the board-game makers, I guessed, though it wasn’t a gun name I’d ever heard of. It was twelve-gauge, ugly as sin and as empty as my safe-deposit box. Termites had been working on giving it a pistol grip. Under the dust and corrosion, I could make out some scrollwork, but the piece was in dire need of oil and blueing. I tried to remember what the pizza joint had been before it was Tony’s and came up with a string of grease pits. If the shotgun was wanted in some old crime, I’d check it out quietly with a sergeant I knew on the force. If it was clean, I’d take it home for dismantling and disposal. Or maybe the hawk shop downstairs would give me ten bucks for it as a curio. For now, it could rust in peace in the closet. As I shut the door, the telephone rang.

  “Mr. Rasmussen?” It was a woman asking this time. She had a nice voice, refined and a little uncertain. “Do you—I know it sounds crazy—my name’s Mrs. Jensen, by the way. Paula Jensen. Do you make house calls?”

  “Where to, Mrs. Jensen?”

  “I’m in Apple Valley. Would it be possible to have someone come out?”

  “What’s the nature of the business?”

  “My daughter may be missing.”

  “You’re not sure?”

  “Well, I know where she is … or who she’s with, at least. I just haven’t heard from them in a few days. I know it’s probably nothing. Still …”

  “How old is your daughter?”

  “Sixteen.”

  I could have pressed on with smart questions—Who was she with? Where?—could have told her to start at the beginning, but I was still shaky from my face-to-face with guns. Besides, voices sometimes told you things about the people they belonged to. Paula Jensen’s told me she was trying to mask real worry. “What’s your address?” I asked.

  2

  Apple Valley is fifteen minutes west of Lowell. Lauren and I used to go there for autumn drives to pick Macs and Red Delicious, but Lauren was ex, living in Florida, and acres of orchards and fields had been felled, plowed under, paved over—no connection. Even the old stonewalls, those fossil symbols of Yankee practicality, weren’t inviolable. The past was being dismantled to make way for housing developments and express malls and new roads for fossil-fuel guzzlers. Even so, Apple Valley seemed a world away from Lowell as I got off 495 and headed through the town center. My four-year-old black Probe GT had been payment in a barter deal I’d worked out with a fellow called Honest Abe—at least, that’s what it said on his marquee, complete with red, white and blue propellers spinning in the breeze. HONEST ABE’S PRE-OWNED WHEELS. I hadn’t taken the 8-ball shift knob off the 5-speed yet. I was starting to like it.

  I found the address Paula Jensen had given me—a large home ringed with lawn and oak woods, in one of the newer subdivisions—and pulled into the driveway. Eleven-A.M. sunshine was slow-cooking the asphalt in front of a three-car garage as I climbed out. I peered into the nearest bay and saw a Blazer parked there, along with a ride-on mower almost as big as the Chevy. At the front door I pressed the bell and heard it chime inside with a rich bing bong that I could never hear without conjuring up the tag line of a certain cosmetics giant—talk about the power of advertising. But I didn’t get a chance to use the line, or any line. No one answered. I wandered around the side where there was a stockade fence. Through the cracks I saw the aquamarine glimmer of a swimming pool. On a patio adjacent to the pool, a woman stood at a gas grill. I used the gate.

  “Mrs. Jensen?”

  She swung around in surprise and let out a breath. “Oh, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Are you from Mr. Rasmussen’s office?”

  I had to grin. “The one and only.”

  She wiped her hands on a chef’s towel and shook my hand. “You got here quickly.” The nice voice from the telephone fit her. She was small and pretty, with delicate features, her shoulder-length, sun-streaked brown hair tied back in a loose ponytail, a fine mist of freckles across her cheeks. Her eyes were the shade of her faded denim shorts. “I’m just getting a light lunch ready. Ross is coming home early, for a change—he likes to dine al fresco.”

  With that setting, I would, too. “Tell me about your daughter,” I said.

  We took chairs at a wrought-iron table. Under the umbrella the temperature was a pleasant eighty.

  “Shel—that’s Michelle—went to California to be with her dad. She goes every summer. Except this year, Ben—that’s her dad—arranged to drive back across the country with her and rent a house down on the South Shore of Boston for a week.”

  “And Ross is … ?”

  “My husband.” She blushed becomingly beneath her tan. “Current husband. Ben Nickerson was my ex—is my ex. Oh my, am I being silly?”

  “No, I just want to get the details right. Please go on.”

  “I guess they had fun driving cross-country, from what little I could get from Shel. Now they’ve been here for several days. In Standish. Only I haven’t heard from them since the day before yesterday.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “Not really, but she—”

  A portable phone chirped nearby. “Excuse me.” She answered it, listened for a few seconds, then lowered the phone and held it against her chest. “I’ll be right with you,” she told me. “It isn’t her.”

  I stepped away to give her space. I adjusted the gas flame, futzed at grilling chicken a moment with a long fork, the way I’d seen a chef on TV do, then wandered to the pool, where an inflated vinyl alligator floated in one corner. I went over to peer through a back door into the garage. In the bay adjacent to the Blazer a lot of toys were spread on the floor: a doll’s house, a small-size girl’s bicycle, a Barbie Corvette.

  Paula Jensen had slipped into the house, and now she reappeared. She had a kind of awkward grace when she moved. She handed me a framed photograph. “This is Michelle.”

  I looked at a pretty girl standing before a fireplace hung with Christmas stockings, wearing an I-really-don’t-want-to-be-here smile. Her eyes seemed wary and wise. “You said she’s sixteen?”

  “Well, that was taken last winter. I don’t have anything really recent.”

  “You’ve tried calling where she’s staying?”

  “And get no answer. She tends to turn off her cell phone when I call. I even drove to Standish last evening to see if they were at the beach house Ben rented, but they weren’t. I talked to the police. When I didn’t hear anything this morning—I don’t know, maybe I’m overreacting. Ross thinks I am. I’d be all freaked out if I didn’t know she was with Ben.”

  “What did the police say?”

  “They told me I could fill out a report, though the policeman said it might be premature—given her age and the fact that she’s with her dad.”

  “Is there someplace else they might’ve gone? Other family members in the area?”

  “No, none. I suppose they could’ve driven to the Cape, though Ben hates the traffic this time of year. He went the last time he was here, and it depressed him for days. He still has a Patti Page image of Cape Cod. Maybe they went out fishing. They both love the ocean—though if it was an overnight trip, I hope they’d have told me.”

  “Is it possible to take a look at Michelle’s room?”

  “Search it, you mean?”

  “Look at it. It could give us an idea of where she might’ve gone.”

  “Well … I don’t like to invade her privacy, but—”

  She lowered the grill flame further and we went inside. The house was spacious and cool. She led me up carpeted stairs. Her daughter’s bedroom was dim, the blinds drawn to the sills, an
d had a faint smell of oft-worn clothes, though when I put on a light I saw it was actually pretty neat for a teenager’s room. The bed was made, there was a computer on a desk, and a field hockey stick and a tennis racket were collecting dust in one corner. The walls were papered with rock posters. A few were of bands that my generation had liked and that hadn’t done an interesting thing artistically since. Most of the posters, however, showed recent musicians, bony-chested guys with wraparound tattoos and more hair than a beauty salon. A CD player sat on a bedside table. I poked a button, and music came from the speakers. The jewel case depicted a scaly half-human figure nailed spread-eagle to a boulder, its head, hands and clawed feet forming the points of a star. Blood was running down the boulder. There was a small child in the foreground, gazing at the figure. Nihilistic Angels was the title of the CD, by a group called Satan Bugg. I set the case aside and shut off the player. The music didn’t bear comment.

  “Does she use the Internet a lot?”

  “Doing papers for school, mostly. We’ve got a house hookup downstairs, but Shel isn’t much interested. She’s a rather indifferent student. Katie, on the other hand …”

  I glanced at her.

  “I’m sorry—Katie is my other daughter. Ross’s and mine. She’s eight. Her room is through there.”

  I opened a door to the adjoining room and poked my head in. The room was sunlit and had shelves overflowing with stuffed animals and books. The wall posters were of horses in misty meadows and Lord of the Rings characters. “Katie’s at day camp this summer,” Paula Jensen offered at my elbow. I drew the door shut, and we went back out to the landing. “Well?”

  “Unless your husband’s on the charcoal diet, we’d better get downstairs.”

  She managed to save the chicken and put it into a covered dish. “How old was Michelle when you and your former husband divorced?” I asked.

  “She was five.”

  “What’s her bond with him like?”

  “It’s good. Especially in the past few years. She looks forward to seeing him each summer.”

  “What about before the past few years?”

  “Mmm … it was okay. You know, an adjustment.”