Free Lush Life: An Artie Deemer Mystery by Dallas Murphy Page B

errand I went on…
    Crystal had tears in her eyes when she returned. I slid back to my side. “How is he?”
    “He loved the asshole.”
    “Did you invite him along?”
    “No.”
    I was glad to hear that, but I didn’t say so. I was busy vainly adjusting the mirror on my side to see the Buick.
    “What’s the matter?”
    “Check that big black car double-parked across the street.”
    She looked in her mirror, pretending to straighten her hair. “Which one?”
    I described it further.
    “There’s no Buick.”
    I spun in my seat. The Buick was gone. Crystal and I looked at each other.
    The ferry ride from Bayshore, crossing the Great South Bay to Fire Island, seemed a voyage to a fresh, foreign shore. We sat topside in the open, where the wind blew urban grit from our brains. About halfway across the bay, gulls and cormorants crossing our stern, I began to relax. My shoulders dropped to the horizontal. Easing tension, fresh air, ocean breezes, cormorants made me randy. I whispered a moderately lewd proposal in Crystal’s ear. She giggled.
    “Don’t make any promises you can’t keep.”
    I sat there anticipating, and by the time the captain slowed his boat to approach the dock at Ocean Beach, I had again forgotten about Trammell Weems. But Crystal hadn’t—
    “Maybe Trammell drowned accidentally, and that’s too bad, I’m sorry for him, but that’s the end of it.”
    “What do you mean,
maybe
he drowned accidentally? Didn’t he?”
    “…A lot of people drown in boating accidents each year, right? A guy I know named Arnold towed Billy’s boat in. I called him from Aunt Louise’s. He said there was forty feet of rope tangled around the propeller. He said they were lucky it didn’t pull the propeller shaft right out of the boat. It could have sunk. So that part checks.”
    “What are you thinking?”
    “Naw, nothing…Nothing really.”
    Fire Island is a long, narrow barrier beach, cars prohibited, an utterly different world from the city, but it lies only an hour and a half from the Triborough Bridge. The residents and renters are New Yorkers. They travel here with that New Yorker don’t-hassle-me, self-involved mentality. It wears off after a day or two, but debarking the ferry at Ocean Beach still feels like changing trains at Times Square. Our fellow passengers didn’t even notice Jellyroll. They were absorbed in lugging their bags, groceries, bicycles, boogie boards, cats in crates, plants in pots, rubber trees, sand chairs, volleyball nets, stereo equipment, laptop computers, electric bug zappers off the boat, hefting the stuff aboard little red wagons. Traveling light, we beat it off the dock.
    Ocean Beach, a block-long stretch of shops, noisy nightclubs, and restaurants, is the island’s major metropolis. I went with a woman briefly—the one who told me about toe cleavage—who owned a house there, so I knew the lay of the land. We bought our island-priced provisions and set off for Lonelyville, about a twenty-minute walk west.
    “I forget how loud New York is until I leave,” said Crystal, pausing to sniff a bright red flower drooping over someone’s garden fence.
    During the eighties, when people had absurd quantities of money coming in, they built houses too big for the scale of the island. But the older ones fit perfectly, little single-story cottages nearly enveloped by indigenous vegetation—beach plum, holly, other low-slung, gnarled trees I couldn’t identify—and like most things that fit, they seemed full of peace and pleasure. I was definitely interested in some of the latter, even if the former was too much to hope for.
    The best of the day was gone now, so deeply tanned bathers in French-cut suits passed us heading home. It seemed an island of burnished breasts and hams. Crystal glanced at me to see if I was ogling the bouncing flesh. I let my jaw fall slack and bugged out my eyes. She giggled. Had her shoulders dropped some, too? I thought they had. We were the only