9H 9375
by John Davis Collins.....© 2001 by John F. Clennan, All Rights Reserved
It was a rickety ride on the chug-chug train that connected the city with the out islands. Across from me on the scratchy wicker seats, sat Jim Gary, whose polyester grayish blue suit jacket and narrow tie spelled Cop. He looked up from his newspaper to look around. The longest leg of the journey was coming up.
Today, Detective Gary over saw the entire detective's division from his office in the Central Court's Building on the mainland. I worked on an upper floor of this same building. Coworkers chided us to relocate on the mainland.
"Why would any one," people asked, "want spend hours on the toonerville trolley?"
"Once," Detective Gary would answer, "you get the sand in your shoes, you can never leave Seaside."
I had known Detective Gary on and off since his appointment a decade ago, as detective in the Seaside division, in fact, since his very first case. Then as now, no expressions ever sprouted on the detective's unlined face.
At the last mainland station, which serviced both the airport and the racetrack, a short thin man boarded the train. He nervously looked in either direction.
Detective Gary looked up from his newspaper. Without a hint of emotion. Gary motioned the stranger over to our seat.
I took no interest in the stranger, though he chatted congenially with Detective Gary. The stranger was returning home. Not a rarity, then! Many young men were still straggling home from the war.
I looked out the window. Along side the rails, the bay grass grew taller as the train sputtered heading into the swamp. Long stemmed reeds topped by a thick pod of seeds swayed in the breeze left by the train's wake. I nodded off in the hypnotic effect of the dancing blades into a commuter's nap.
I was taken back in my dream a full decade. I was twelve or thirteen again. The day was a bright April day with a gentle breeze blowing through Seaside off the water. I was standing at the door of my father's house. I saw the blue car stopped in the middle of the street. A man took a small child, maybe age three or four, from the hands of a nurse in starched whites. Then the man escorted the boy to the back of his car and lifted the boy into the trunk..
A neighbor screamed . . .
The jolt of the train roused me from my catnap. I heard Detective Gary say to the stranger, "Did you get any training while you were away?"
My tired eyes looked to the stranger. Training?, I thought, not a soldier! A soldier would take the policemen's test.
I drifted back to my dream.
I raced toward the car. Tires squeaking, the blue car sped off. All I could see was the circle around the lights of the Olds 88. I looked down Port Avenue; the nurse was walking away unconcerned. The neighbor was holding her chest grasping, yelling, "Did you get the license plate?"
I woke up. The train was stalled on a railroad bridge over the bay. What happened to our sunny day? It had vanished into one of the thick low-level fogs our off islands were famous for.
"You'll find," Detective Smith told his companion, "little change - - bars, Bizaarland, the white washed churches are as they were. Fortunately. . ."
There had been a string of kidnappings, mostly of kids from rich families in West Seaside. A young Detective Gary had visited our school and told the students to call about "suspicious activity."
Mainland newspapers reported many kidnaps, some with tragic endings. The papers never breathed a word about such a problem in Seaside. Seaside then kept its problems at home.
I remember overhearing Detective Gary stoop to confide in nervous teachers. "We're fortunate here in Seaside. Everybody knows everybody else's business. Nothing is a secret that long."
I called the police and asked for Detective Gary. "The purpose of my call? To report a kidnapping, like Detective Gary told me to."
I heard muffled sounds in the background. "A second one, Sarge." The voice returned to me, "Where did this one happen kid?"
"Port and Third! You'd better hurry. The guy left tire marks in the road. And ---" I rambled on with the story.
The train's forward thrust woke me up. Detective Gary was still chattering away about local families in Seaside. I knew someone in every single household from grade school, the boy scouts, the little league . . . the stranger mentioned one name, a West Seaside, name and Gary commanded, "Don't ever think of them! Ever."
I was nervously pacing in front of my house. The ambulance came and left weighted down by my heavy set hysterical neighbor. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, forty minutes.
When the train's screeching brakes announced the stop at East Seaside, I awoke to look over the rotting bungalows and dilapidated tenements.
"No problems with kidnappings here," joked Detective Gary, as he looked out at unpainted houses bleached grayish white by the salt air. "You wouldn't get enough ransom money to pay for gas." Gary looked at his traveling companion. "That's one difference," Gary slapped his companion on the knee, "you'll notice. Fifty cents a gallon of gas. Isn't that outrageous! Back when I first got the gold shield, was it twenty-two cents or fifteen?"
I drifted back asleep. When the police arrived, it was nothing like what they showed in my favorite TV program. A beaten up Ford Fairlane with gigantic fins sputtered and died in front of the driveway. And a chubby man in a grease stained white suit struggled to get out from behind the wheel. I would have given up the little boy for lost, except from the passenger side up sprang Detective Gary, tall lean, neat with the correct gun buldge under the left side of his suit.
The whale of Detective swarmed past me into the house. "You got the plate number?" The fat cop growled.
"9H9375, Blue Olds 88. Royal Blue. This years model . . ."
The fat detective waddled in the kitchen toward the phone. "I got a plate number . . . 9H9375." The fat detective spoke in the phone. There was a pause. Slamming down the receiver, the fat detective exclaimed, "Not issued!"
The train rocked on its rails past Bizaarland; its towering steeplechase and ten acres of fun houses separated East Seaside from Seaside proper.
I looked out. The image of the stranger in the window was destorted into the form of a wild bird of prey.
"You know," the older detective told Detective Gary, "if these swells in West Seaside took care of their own kids . . . we wouldn't have these problems."
On the night of the snatch, I hadn't been questioned adequately. I wasn't asked to come down to the station house. I wasn't asked for a statement. I wasn't shown mug books. The cops didn't want to take tire castings.
I pointed this out to Detective Gary as he left trailing in the wake, left behind the old fat detective who wanted to rush off to get some greasy fries before Surf Snacks upon on Division Avenue closed.
Gary paused and waited to hear the door slam behind him palter before he spoke. "We already know who we're looking for. It's the car you can help us with and - - - "
From the dingy window of the rickety train, I looked out on Bizaarland. Its main attraction was Fun Maze, a series of interlocking darkened corridors walled in by fun house mirrors. The objective was to reach the center of the puzzle without falling through one of the trap doors.
I hadn't heard from the police for a week or two. In spring, I was busy with baseball; I had forgotten the whole story until after lunch I was ordered without comment to the principal's office. Classmates with gritty smiles, razzed me. In the principal's office, I was told, "Your 'friends' are waiting round the corner."
I did not question early dismissal. No child does. I skipped out of the school building and looked across the street at the McCaine Estate. Just as Bizaarland separated seedy East Seaside from Seaside, the McCaine Estate stretched across the whole island as the barrier between average Seaside and its wealthy neighbor, at the west end of the island.
I stood for a second and looked at the wrought iron main gate. Open? I wondered why. The McCaines wouldn't show up until June.
Around the corner I found the beaten up Ford with the fat detective behind the wheel and Detective Gary seated as perfectly as a soldier.
"Hop in," the fat detective told me, "we're going for a ride." As we cruised up and down the side streets, the fat detective ranted to Gary. "Follows a script these - - eh - - inside jobs. Eh - - quiet pay off - - cops not involved."
"In this Seaside backwater, where cousins marry," the fat detective whispered as he drove. "We can't be sure if some blue suits know more than they tell."
"How long can we hold onto this nice little nurse?" asked Gary.
"We can keep the nurse - - eh - - lost in the syst - - eh - - space - - only so long. We gotta find that car." The fat detective still driving turned to me in the back seat. "See anything that looks like the blue olds?"
We rode around for hours, through the big parking lot at Barrier Beach Park, down Division Avenue, through every part of Seaside, East and West and through the shuttered arcades at Bizaarland. "Nothing?" quipped the fat detective, as he dropped me off.
"We didn't check the McCaine Estate," Detective Gary reminded. "It's right near the school - - "
"Shuttered no one's expected there til June." The fat detective growled. "Besides I want to get my greasy fries before they roll down the gates at Surf Snacks."
The train waited on a siding just outside of Seaside. "The big change you'll appreciate," Detective Gary told the stranger, "the McCaine Estate - - gone subdivided, must be 100 houses there."
I was back in the dream. I was left in front of my father's house. My books were locked away in the school. Worse, my bike was chained to the school fence. I'd better get it before dark and I decided I could cut through the McCaine Estate and check for the Olds.
The sun was setting as I slipped under the wrought iron fence at the rear gate and I leaped through the terraces straight toward the central courtyard of the mansion.
As I jumped into the central courtyard, I stumbled and fell onto the concrete drive. When I looked up, I saw the short man staring from a balcony of the main building the mansion at the wild froth of the breakers glimmering in the sunset. I lay still. He hadn't seen me. When he turned to pass through open louvered doors into the house, I scampered down the driveway for the open front gate.
When I retrieved my bike, I peddled for Surf Snacks.
In the train, passengers grumbled their usual complaint, "we could have walked home faster" as the train sputtered toward the last station: Seaside, home.
"Ah, once the sand is in your shoes," Gary told his companion, "you can leave Seaside for a while but you'll always come home."
When I reached Surf Snacks, right next to the railroad terminal on Division Avenue, Seaside's pretence to a shopping district, Detective Gary was alone with the fat detective. The owner was standing over a mop, yawning, waiting to close up.
The old detective was pontificating. "Half of detective work is plain luck - - if the kid hadn't called just at the same time as the crooked nurse - - "
I screamed out. "I seen 'im!" The owner and detectives glared at me. I looked down. In my haste I had driven my bike into tiled floor.
Gary motioned the owner away and came up to me and spoke at low breath. "See what? The car?"
"No the guy," I yelled. "He's holed up in the McCaine mansion. I cut through the mansion grounds - - I saw him standing on the balcony."
The old detective in his greasy spattered beige suit, "Now what do we do?" The old detective moved his hat to the back of his head, "Call the County Detectives and get all the squad cars rolling, flood Seaside in blue, raid the mansion!"
"No," Gary coolly looked to the older fat detective, "we're dealing with an amateur. Too much blue would scare our friend into doing something rash."
"Then how do you suppose we retrieve the victim? Go up to the door and ask for the rich kid back!"
Gary paused deliberately. That's the only occasion he ever allowed himself so much as a half of a smile.
The train lurched from its pause at the control center, just outside Seaside stations.
The old detective stopped the car just a few feet from the main entrance to the McCaine Estate.
At the open gate, Gary paused for final instructions. "Say nothing. Stand there while I talk to the guy. If it is the guy run to your left back to the car; if it isn't just stand there."
We walked up to the mansion up a flight of marbled steps to a patio. A solitary lamp was light on the second floor. Detective Gary knocked on the front door and muttered under his breath, "hide out just paces away from the kid's home. Last place anybody'd look." Gary banged a second time. "Hey Mr. McCaine, I need to talk to you." Gary screamed out.
The slender man tentatively opened the door a peak. Gary's huge arms pulled it all the way open and gently pulled the slender man onto the patio. "My kid," Gary said in a friendly voice, "tells me - - one of his friends threw my autographed Johnny Unitas football through one of the windows on the second floor. . . I'd like to pay for your window and - -"
The slender man came into my view. I nodded to Gary and skipped off to the left to return to the unmarked car.
Back at the unmarked car, the fat detective was still nibbling on a snack of french fries, Surf Snacks had given him. I came up to the driver's window. A smile came across the fat detective's face. "It's the guy!" He exclaimed as he grabbed for a french fry and revved up the motor. "Scram," the detective ordered as he drove onto the estate grounds. The taillights of the rusty, Ford Fairlane were the last I saw.
The train came to a stretching halt into the station. The conductor, passing through the cars, announced, "Seaside Station, last stop." The conductor tapped the stranger on the knee and winked. "Welcome home."
The stranger locked eyes with me for a full minute before he challenged, "Do I know you?"
Until I came eye to eye with the returning stranger, I hadn't known what happened after I was left on the street in front of the McCaine Estate. I waited on the street for several minutes before I started to peddle home. Seaside kept its secrets; not a word appeared in the papers.
Without betraying even the hint of emotion, Detective Gary answered for me. "Nobody you need to remember. Just another guy recalled home by sand in his shoes."
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