Acting Dead (Michael Quinn Thriller) Read online

  ACTING DEAD

  BY

  JOHN MORALEE

  Previously called Cape Mistral.

  © 2014

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Contents

  Chapter 1-9

  Chapter 10-19

  Chapter 20-29

  Chapter 30-39

  Chapter 40-49

  Chapter 50-51

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  I drove for days thinking of home.

  I caught the last car-ferry from Providence to Mistral Island just after midnight, when the heat was going out of the day. The ferry crossed the dark water for two hours, maybe longer. I wasn’t keeping track of time. I was involved in my own dark thoughts. I watched the water churn behind the ferry, occasionally looking up to see the distant lights of other boats and the receding shoreline of Narrangasett Bay. The night was cold. To warm myself, I drank bitter coffee out of a paper cup with a plastic lid and tried not to scorch my fingers. I reckoned the drink could do with some Jim Beam added, but that was one of my problems. Luckily, I’d thrown away my hip flask. You can’t be tempted by something that’s not there.

  I was nervous and jittery, though.

  For something to do, I walked the length of the ferry and looked at where it was heading. Though it was dark out there, it wasn’t the solid black of a Los Angeles night sky. It was midnight blue, flecked with shimmering stars. The harder I looked the more stars I could see. I’d forgotten the strange emotions a few stars could stir. I’d missed them. I loved stars. Billy had given me his telescope when I was ten. How had I forgotten that?

  Staring across the water, I recognised the triangular wedge of blackness that had been my home when growing up.

  Mistral Island.

  To the south, the island jutted out over a mile like the tail of a mouse, ending with the fuzzy blue glow of Cape Mistral. The town was sleeping. Hundreds of boats were tied to the marina, bobbing up and down on the soft waves. The town looked so serene and magical. I almost felt sorry for it. Cape Mistral had no idea I was coming back. It had no idea the kind of trouble I could bring.

  Slowly, the island grew nearer and brighter as the sky started to lighten with the coming of dawn.

  Harry Quinn did not hear me approaching the jetty. He had his broad back facing the water, and he was working on something on his lap. He broke open the hard shell of a quahog using a long, curved hunting knife, wet with juices. Then he tipped back his head and swallowed the shell’s contents. He grunted with satisfaction. The exertion was making him sweat, staining his black and blue checked shirt around his armpits and neck an even darker shade, but he pried the next clam open, swallowed the juicy meat, then started on the next one. He stopped only to arch his back, relieving a pain. His spine looked more hunched and bony than I remembered. He would be sixty in July, but he looked damned fit considering the hard life he’d had, first in the Marines and Vietnam, then later as a father and widower.

  Under his breath, he was humming something from his childhood. I wondered if he still had the old Wurlitzer jukebox that he’d bought as scrap and restored to better than new. Whatever he was humming, he seemed in a good mood for so early in the morning. His bald head gleamed like gold in the orange sunlight creeping over the flat horizon.

  When I stepped onto the jetty, the wood creaked loudly, and my father tensed, but did not stop working on his collection of quahogs.

  “Who is it?” he said.

  “Cook me a big one until it looks deader than Elvis,” I said.

  He nearly fell into the water. I’d just said what he said at family barbecues. He dropped the unopened clams on the jetty, jumping up with a crack of hipbones. “Michael? You’re back from Hell-A!”

  That was what he called Los Angeles. “Yep. I’m back.”

  He turned around, his whole face one big, wrinkled smile. “You staying long, son?”

  “Hope so.”

  He walked up to me and started to reach out for a hug –

  “The knife, Dad.”

  “Oh, right.” He slid it into his belt. “Now, no excuses, hug your old man.”

  I hugged him. He crushed the life out of me. I squeezed back. It felt good. Very good. So much had happened that I wanted to tell him, but it could wait. I suddenly realised how much I needed a hug. My eyes watered. I was home. Damn it, why had I left it so long? For many years I’d made excuses to not come back until I’d ran out of them, but even then I’d stayed away. With hindsight, I saw those excuses as being pretty feeble.

  He released me, stepping back to look at me again. “You need a shave, you know it?”

  I rubbed my chin. He was right. There were two days of stubble on it. “I’ve been driving all night, Dad. In fact, I’ve been driving most of the week. Sort of thinking about things. I really screwed up, Dad. I –”

  “Let’s eat, kiddo. Talk later.”

  I was glad he interrupted. I didn’t know what I was going to say. I was tired beyond sense, aching after sitting in the same position for hours, and then having the long ferry ride. Yawning, I watched him collect the clams and his fishing rod. He told me he’d caught a butterfish this morning, just before dawn. I was suddenly ashamed that I could not remember how to fish; it had been so long. When I was a kid my dad had taken my big brother and me out in a rowing boat to show us how to tease the fish out of the water like a magician. Now, we walked down the jetty and between the maple trees, neither saying a word. My white MG was parked in the shade. My dad decided to walk home so he didn’t get anything smelly on my car. Personally, I wasn’t used to walking anywhere. In LA it was a prerequisite that you drove to the mailbox in the morning. In LA, you drove from your bed to your slippers.

  The day was warming up as we reached the house. The house looked smaller, somehow. Or maybe the oaks and white pine around it had grown taller. I parked beside the dark-red barn. It used to be our garage until my father caught the boat-building bug. His red Ford was parked on the lawn. He left the pickup truck outside in all weather conditions, leaving the garage/barn for his boat-building hobby. He’d been building a boat for as long as I could recall. Like many hobbies, the fun was in the doing, not in the completing. The barn doors were wide open. I could see into the darkness, just. There was the boat lurking in the shadows. It still looked as though he’d bought the wood and engine parts but hadn’t started putting the pieces together.

  “When are you finishing that old thing, Dad?”

  “Eventually,” he said.

  My dad went straight into the house via the back door into the kitchen. I paused before stepping onto the porch. I looked up at my old bedroom. The windows reflected the sun like mirrors. The curtains were open. Then I looked at my brother’s room. His curtains were closed as they always were. Dad didn’t want sunlight fading any of Billy’s belongings. Sighing, I followed my father into the cool kitchen, where he’d placed the clams in the refrigerator. He pulled out a six-pack dripping with beads of chilled water. “Beer?”

  I shook my head. “Can’t.”

  “Can’t? What does that mean?”

  He didn’t know I was dry and trying to stay that way. “It just means I don’t want to.”

  “One beer …”

  “No.”

  He returned them to the refrigerator. “So. What do you eat these days?”

  “I’m not a Martian, Dad. I still like bacon and eggs.”

  “Go
od - because that’s what I’ve got.” He cooked a pack of bacon on the skillet. I sat at the table and watched him flip it over. The bacon sizzled and spat. The kitchen was warming up with the heat of the cooking. I thought about drinking a beer, but I knew it was a bad idea. I refused to look at the refrigerator.

  Straight after eating, I carried my suitcases up to my room. I could barely keep my eyes open. I put the suitcases down beside the bed, then lay down on top of the covers – fully intending to rest just for a minute. The covers were soft and smooth, and my body sunk deeply into the mattress as if it belonged. I stared at the white plaster on the ceiling, cracked and lined like the surface of the moon. It swam out of focus.

  I woke up at noon, feeling far better.

  After calling downstairs and hearing no reply, I stretched and ran on the spot until I counted to a hundred. Then I did some chin-ups on the doorframe, like I’d done as a teenager aspiring for bigger biceps. I managed twenty before I gave up. I showered and changed into fresh, comfortable clothes: jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of running shoes.

  Something made me look in Billy’s room before I went down the stairs. It was exactly how he’d left it on the day he died – even the wallpaper was the same. I kept the Tribune article about the accident folded in my wallet. I knew it by heart, but I pulled it out and read it again.

  PROM NIGHT TRAGEDY KILLS TWO

  At approximately midnight yesterday, two brilliant students of Cape Mistral High School died following a car crash. The students were William Lee Quinn, 18, and Hanna Mary Devereaux, 17.

  Mr Quinn was driving his father’s car when it crashed at over fifty miles an hour into a tree. Miss Devereaux was in the passenger seat. Both victims died from injuries sustained on impact, but it is not yet known what caused the crash. Paramedics arriving at the scene were not able to do anything to save their lives. Sheriff Keith Malloy said that it was the “worst car crash I’ve ever seen in all my years of living. Those poor kids didn’t stand a chance.”

  Earlier, Mr Quinn and Miss Devereaux attended the prom. They were seen dancing and enjoying themselves. Miss Devereaux was crowned prom queen at ten p.m. Friends described them as being in good moods throughout the evening. Neither was seen at the prom after eleven.

  Mr Quinn and Miss Devereaux were witnessed drinking vodka in soda cups on more than one occasion. They left together some time before midnight, but the police do not know where they spent the hour before the incident. Inquiries are continuing. The school is also investigating how alcohol got on the premises when it was banned. The police do not know as yet if Mr Quinn’s drinking was to blame for the crash, but an investigation is under way.

  That investigation had concluded that my brother had been solely responsible for the car accident. It had taken me years to accept it. Now, standing in his room, missing him, I wondered why I was so good at dwelling on the past, analysing it like I could do something about it. He was dead - I could not bring him back.

  I retreated from the room and closed the door.

  My dad had left a note on the kitchen table along with the spare keys. He was working at the bar. He wanted me to go over if I felt okay. First, I looked in the Tribune’s job section, but apart from temporary staff for the many restaurants and cafés on Wharf Street there was nothing I was qualified to do. You needed a college degree just for waiting tables, washing dishes and cleaning toilets. It was depressing and demoralising. It was one thing thinking of myself as a fifth wheel, but another having it confirmed by an independent source.

  I locked up the house and drove to The Boat House. The bar was named after an event over a century ago, when the town had only one bar. That bar had been in a hollow below sea level. During the winter of 1892 floodwater had filled the hollow with a mudslide that had destroyed every home for two square miles. Twenty-six people survived by climbing on the roof of the bar and waiting for the storm to end. After the flood receded, the bar was completely wrecked, but the people had been saved. They started thinking it was a miracle. The owner of the bar moved to higher ground for the construction of a replacement. He had the bizarre idea of putting a rowing boat on the top of the roof in case there was ever a time that his second bar was flooded. And so the bar was named The Boat House. My father had bought the bar shortly after coming back from Vietnam.

  Dad was polishing the chrome counter, half watching the game, half watching me. There was a black and white poster behind the counter that showed me in one of my movie roles. Dad clattered a glass with a spoon until the customers took notice and looked around, then he said, proudly, “This is my son, Michael. The movie star.”

  Everyone cheered and welcomed me home; then they continued drinking beer. I sat on a stool, looking at the poster. I couldn’t remember much about the movie. “Have you seen that?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “They had it on HBO. You were good, but I didn’t like the swearing. Why do they have to put so much profanity in the movies they make?”

  “Makes it realistic, I guess.”

  He poured lemonade into a glass, adding six ice cubes. “Do you often sleep until the afternoon in Hell-A then?” A wry smile crossed his lips. “Well?”

  “No. I’d forgotten how comfortable my bed was.” I sipped the lemonade and reached for my wallet. He stopped me with a shake of his head.

  “Put it in the jukebox.”

  “You still have it?”

  “Never would get rid of it.”

  I spun my stool around. The jukebox seemed to shine like a rainbow behind the pool tables. It looked beautiful. The chrome, the neon, the curves. It looked alive, like a machine in a Stephen King novel. I went over and put some coins in the slot, touching the cold chrome. I studied the music list. There was an abundance of blues and rock’n’roll from the 50s and 60s. There were many Roy Orbison songs. He was Dad’s favourite. Like my father, Roy Orbison lost his wife when she was young.

  My mother Caroline died when I was four of an ectopic pregnancy. She was only twenty-seven. I have clear memories of it happening and not understanding what was going on. She collapsed in the garden while playing with me. I remember the sheer quantity of blood that gushed between her legs onto the grass. My father rushed out of the house, but could do nothing. She died before the paramedics arrived.

  I selected the records and watched the machine pick them up and put them down on the turntable. Old, black vinyl singles. The music came out like a sweet caress.

  Over at the bar, my dad nodded appreciatively. You could feel the pain of loss in Roy Orbison’s voice.

  When I took my seat again, my dad told me some people had been asking about me over the years.

  “Yeah, who?”

  “Scott Taylor and Wayne Leary mostly. And a couple of other guys from your high-school days I can’t remember, but I’ve written it all down.”

  “Scott still lives here? I thought he was a hot-shot lawyer.” I imagined Scott in New York or Washington accepting poor people’s lawsuits against big, bad multinational companies on a no fee basis, a sort of crusader for justice and the American Way. That was how he’d talked when we were growing up, and I wanted to believe it had happened that way.

  “He is a lawyer. He works for a law firm on Main Street.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Just wanted to know what you were doing. He hasn’t heard from you in years, Michael. No one has. I know it’s none of my business, son, but you’ve treated your friends like you didn’t care about them.”

  “I care, but –”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know what LA was like, Dad.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Anyway, forget it. I’m a new man now. I’m looking for a new career – that’s all I can say right now. Something different. Something challenging.”

  “Like what?”

  “I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  “Go,” he said. “Don’t come back until you’ve seen your friends and made amends.”

 
; Chapter 2

  By the shoreline Cape Mistral consisted of old narrow streets. The streets twisted left and right and up and down in ways no sane town planner would tolerate. Many streets had one-way signs designed to confuse tourists. Every street was packed with antique shops crammed with oddities, craft shops selling the work of local artists, cafés, book stores and fashion boutiques. In some areas there were stores above stores, accessible by wrought-iron stairways squeezed between buildings. The town hall marked the end of this zone. Further from the shore, the town had newer shopping malls, hotels, offices and bars. I wasn’t sure if I like these new things. Their only redeeming feature was they’d been designed to blend in with the older buildings. I liked seeing ornate stonework and wooden awnings on fast-food restaurants. The malls were pretty tree-lined buildings of glass and stone. The wide boulevards offered good parking beneath antiquated street lamps. Flower baskets hung down from them filled with red, yellow and orange blooms. The air smelled of their rich fragrance. Childhood memories flashed into my head of quieter, less busy streets, where a boy could ride a bicycle without worrying about being struck by a car – or running over the toes of a tourist. I once raced through these streets against my friends. I once knew every twist and turn, every nook and cranny. Now, everything was different. Where was I going? How did I get there? I learned the hard way by making wrong turns and plunging down side streets.

  Then I did the unthinkable.

  I asked a stranger how to get onto Main Street.

  I parked my MG in the parking lot of a small mall and walked down Main Street looking for where Scott Taylor worked. Some shoppers and tourists stared at me, no doubt wondering where they’d seen me before. I used to find the attention exciting, but today I felt uncomfortable and avoided eye contact. I’d been in some big movies, but never as the starring role. I was usually a bad guy. You’d probably recognise my face, but not be able to place the name. When some old ladies pointed at me, whispering, I wished I’d worn a baseball cap to hide my face. They started following me, but I was faster. I lost them in the crowd. Ahead, I could see a little office building with oak trees planted in front. DYLER AND WESTBROOK LAW caught my eye, written on a gold-plated plaque above the glass doors. It was the firm Scott worked for. A man I vaguely recognised stepped out of the door with a group of smartly dressed lawyer-types. He was dressed in a grey suit and bright red tie. He was wearing a pair of gold-rimmed glasses with small lenses that made him look bookish and a little like John Lennon. I knew him.