The Boardwalk Bomber

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 4

It is not yet sunrise and I hear Angela exercising on the deck next door. She is doing step aerobics outside, nude. With my window open I can hear her grunting and breathing and counting in a whisper to herself. "One, two, three-and-four. One, two, three-and-four."

I walk to the screen door and push it open. I step out into the cool morning air. She waves, barely visible in the growing light, but does not stop stepping up and down and counting to herself. I watch, and in a moment she stops, her workout completed. She wipes her face with a white towel, luminescent against her dark skin, and tosses it aside. The sun is rising and its first rays reflect off her muscular little body, still shiny wet with perspiration. She walks toward me ... 

I woke at the sound of a bundle of newspapers being dropped on my doorstep downstairs. I rolled over and looked at the clock: six-fifteen. Closing my eyes again I tried to remember the dream I was having. It had been something really good; something I really wanted to get back to, but it was just out of reach ... and then gone. My body seemed to remember better than my mind and the first pee of the morning was logistically difficult. (And women wonder why we miss the toilet).

I could hear Angela outside working out as usual. I stepped out the screen door, taking in a breath of cool morning air and noticing the fog on the horizon. Across the way on her deck Angela was doing aerobics, counting to herself. "One, two, three-and-four. One, two, three-and-four." She wore a gray t-shirt and spandex shorts.

"Good morning!" she called. I waved back. Our buildings are about eight feet apart but her deck and mine come together at a little bridge. Most of the rooftops on the strip are connected in one way or another. I started back inside, but suddenly remembered my dream in total, vivid detail. I looked back at her, seeing it.

"What are you looking at?" she yelled, still stepping and huffing.

"Oh, nothing," I called. "Have a good workout."

I went downstairs for the newspapers remembering what it felt like to have her little body in my arms. Something pretty nice almost happened between us, but I had only been Jack Durham a few months when that opportunity presented itself, and I hadn't handled it very well.

After putting on a pot of coffee I opened the front door of the shop and used my pocket knife to pop open the three bundles. I get the New York Times, the Brayton Journal and the free campus paper called the "P.M.a.m."

"Bomber strikes again" was the headline of the Brayton Journal. In the P.M.a.m. the top story was "Prof apologizes for 'girls' comment," but there was a brief item on the most recent bombing on an inside page.

I don't normally open the shop until after nine so I leave the papers stacked out on the boardwalk with a coffee cup for payment on the honor system. It would never have occurred to me to try this in New York, but here it seems to work. Now and then some kid steals my change, but I'm usually sitting right above on my deck and I make a little noise to let them know I'm watching.

I took one copy of each of the papers, sneaked a cup of coffee quickly while the pot was still dripping, a few drips hissing on the hot plate until I pushed the pot back in place. I climbed back upstairs and went back out on the deck. Angela was still huffing and sweating. I glanced at her but she was preoccupied, still counting to herself in a trance of concentration. I settled in my usual morning spot - a bleached out adirondack chair I found on the beach in a heap and put back together during the winter. It has nice wide arms for my coffee cup. I sat facing the bay, wearing sunglasses so I could read. It was tempting to peek around them to look at her, but I did my best not to. Women can feel being watched and I'm sure they get tired of it.

I looked at a few early sailboats and at the skinny spit of sand that is Lighthouse Point. Life is pretty quiet on my side of the bay. The real action is on the Point, a long skinny peninsula that juts out into the bay like a finger. From my deck it's only a few hundred yards across the water and I can easily see the taller buildings -- hotels and condos mostly -- and of course the lighthouse itself, which was built in 1815 and is one of the oldest surviving lighthouses on the Great Lakes.

Interestingly, it was the lighthouse that created the point. Its foundation created a jette which redirected the natural migration of sand along the shore, marching it out into the bay where it built up over 200 years into a sandy peninsula that has long been this area's main tourist attraction. In the 1920s there was a fabulous hotel on the Point which was frequented by gangsters and movie stars. It burned to the sand a few years after it opened, under mysterious circumstances.

Sometimes I sit out here and watch the activity over there with binoculars. You can even hear the Point from this side. Usually it's party music but sometimes a radio announcer's voice when one of the bars is having some promotional event like hang-gliding or skimpy-bikini contests. I sometimes get out my telescope on those days because, well, it's something Jack Durham would do, right?

In the mornings the Point is mostly silent and I sat back and enjoyed the quiet while I read the papers and drank my coffee. This had been my morning routine since the first warm weather of Spring, but now that Angela was back things were a little different.

She'd only been back about a week after having been away since autumn traveling with the dance company. Although the city of Brayton is for the most part a decrepit old Rust Belt port city whose glory days were long long past, it has somehow become a center for the arts.

About the only thing happening downtown these days is in the arts district which is somehow thriving. There's an old warehouse that's been reclaimed by artists' studios, a really nice jazz-blues bar that sponsors a festival in the spring, and there's the Brayton Modern Dance Company, founded by Clementine Brooks, who had been a dance prodigy in her teens but couldn't get into any of the regular studios because she was a little black girl in the 1950s. She received private training by the local dance teachers who couldn't let her into their classes so taught her in their homes.

Clementine Brooks went on to a spectacular career on the New York stage in the 1960s and 70s. She came back to her home town and opened Miss Clementine's Dance Studio and that evolved into a performance troupe which, nowadays, is dominated by African-Americans. The BMDC became one of the leading dance troupes in the country, touring internationally to great acclaim during the winter -- and then in the summer the dancers go on food stamps because despite their success they make very little money.

Of course I didn't know anything of this the previous summer when Angela and I had our brief almost-romance. I just knew she was a dancer working as a waitress during the off-season. I went to the Canary Cafe almost every day for lunch, sat at the same stool at the counter and flirted with her relentlessly until she agreed to go out with me. I took her sailing on a Saturday afternoon, trying to impress her, but it turned out she grew up vacationing in the Caribbean and she knew more about it than I did. But that made it pretty exhilarating because we were both pretty confident about what we and the boat and the wind could do. It was a brisk day and we kept the sail full, leaning together against the wind, our bodies perpendicular to the mast as the little boat knifed crisply through the water as if powered by a silent jet engine.

About the only thing I knew about sailing that she didn't was that the wind is a lot trickier on lakes than it is on the open sea. On an ocean the waves are rough but the wind is predictable. On the Great Lakes, especially in a narrow bay, the wind changes suddenly on you.

We had dinner on the Point and sailed back at sunset. As we pulled up to the dock we could hear Rex playing out on the deck. Like a lot of the bars around here Jockamo's has walls that open like garage doors so there is little barrier between inside and outside.

There was a nice crowd on the deck, a mix of college kids, vacationers and townies. Rex was playing something bluesy and some kids were jumping around the way kids dance, but old Fred and Vi Woodman, a retired couple who own a marina here on the strip, were swinging a smooth jitterbug that had some of the college kids watching with admiration.

Angela watched them for a moment also, and then turned to me with seductive eyes that pierced me, and in an octave lower than her normal voice she asked, "do you swing?"

Like most guys my generation I didn't have a lot of experience on the dance floor. As a kid I danced like these college kids, just jumping around affecting a series of presumably cool poses and then for most of my adult years I was too serious to even do that. But Jack Durham was a much more relaxed guy.

"Teach me," I said. "I'm a quick study."

And she did. I'm pretty good at learning physical things. Sports came easily to me and I never had to struggle at any of the physical training I'd been through in police work. Angela showed me the basic moves and I picked up on it pretty quickly. Of course, like most dances, the jitterbug is a lot easier for the guy, who mainly has to keep the rhythm and indicate to his ·partner which of a series of complicated maneuvers he'd like her to perform at a particular moment. So pretty soon we were putting on almost as good a show as the Woodmans.

The rhythmic sound of Angela's exercise routine stopped and I looked up over my sunglasses to see her toweling off in the bright sunlight. "How'd we do today?" I called.

"We?" she asked. "I put in 45 minutes on a six-inch step. You sat on your butt reading the same page of the newspaper. You should take up speed-reading."

I laughed. "I was just meditating after my workout. While you were still in bed I swam across the bay. Only twice though -- today's my light day."

She waved dismissively and disappeared into her apartment, her back muscles intricately defined in the morning sun.

I watched her until she disappeared inside the apartment, remembering what it was like to hold that strong little back as we danced at Jockamo's that night. She was spectacular and we became the focal point for the crowd. I had no idea what I was 'indicating' as I moved my hand one way or the other. She'd perform six seconds of graceful acrobatics and then twirl back into my arms for a moment and then swirl out again. All I had to do was catch her and spin her back out.

After a few swing tunes Rex played a ballad called "Louise" and we slow-danced. Our clothes were damp with sweat, but there was a nice breeze from the lake that cooled us down as we turned slowly around the floor. Then he went back to the fast numbers and by the time he quit we were hot again. While Rex was packing up his gear Angela and I left the deck and walked down by the water, where the breeze was stronger. It had been overcast for hours and finally rained, the drops coming down fat and smelling like dust. We stopped at one of the park benches along the shore and kissed, making out like teenagers as the rain came down on us, drenching our clothes. But then it started to get cold and I felt her shiver so we walked back to the boardwalk and kissed again in the sandy alley between our shops. I wanted things to keep going, but she pecked my cheek and said goodnight, disappearing up the steps to the little apartment above the cafe. I stood in the rain a few more minutes, watching the light go on in their apartment and then I went inside.

The clock downstairs chimed the hour and I snapped out of it, glancing at my watch. Eight o'clock. I took a lukewarm sip of coffee and tried to concentrate on the newspaper. 

The Post and the campus paper both had big stories on the bombing. Both called it the third in a series of bombings, which it probably was, though the lead investigator on the case -- Detective Molly McCain of the state police -- said that fact wasn't established yet. True, they wouldn't have the forensics results yet but from what I saw it looked like the same size and type of bomb.

On the Post's cover there was a picture of the dead woman. She was smiling at the camera, and wore the same crucifix around her neck. The eyes I had seen dead and staring were very much alive in the photo and it was clear she had been a lively and vivacious woman. The story said she was "killed instantly." No shit.

Her name was Barbara Brinckman, 43, director of the Brayton Bay Partnership, a quasi-governmental organization that tries to keep control over development. I remembered seeing her photo once or twice before in the paper. She was married to a professor at the university who seemed to be well known. Ä The story quoted McCain, saying the things you usually say: we're pursuing several leads, anyone who knows something should call, etc.

There was a mention of some of the other survivors, including Dr. Raymond Hulman, English Lit prof. There was no picture but I thought it might be the guy named Ray who had the puncture wound.

I had just put the paper down and was gazing across the bay thinking about something and looking at nothing in particular when I saw it -- a flash along the shore. And then a second later I heard the thud of an explosion. I looked across the water and saw smoke rising in a plume by one of the bars. 

I spend a lot of time out on my deck and I'm fairly snoopy by nature, so I have a pair of high-powered binoculars handy on a shelf just inside the door. I grabbed them and scanned the opposite shore where I had seen the flash of light. I couldn't see much but there was a sandy dust cloud and smoke was coming from something that looked like a small boat lying on its side.

I ran inside and brought out my telescope and set it up on its tripod. I usually use it to look at the moon, but I've pointed it across the bay a few times and it didn't take me long to set it up. As I brought it into focus and turned it slightly southwards toward the blue umbrellas I could see two or three people moving around what I guessed to be another person on the ground. There were a couple of jet boats parked on the beach and one of them was on its side, smoking.

Without thinking, I grabbed the phone and called 911 and told the dispatcher exactly what I saw. Then I grabbed my wallet and found McCain's card. I started to call it, but hung up on the second ring. She'd know about this just as soon without my message -- and now I regretted making the 911 call, suddenly feeling wary of being profiled as the kind of suspect who commits crimes so he can help investigate them. Not that I'd actually get charged on such supposition, but if they investigated "Jack Durham" at all they'd soon see he doesn't have much of a past.

Putting the phone down I looked through the telescope again. There were more people, but I didn't see an ambulance yet. I wanted to get over there and do something, but it'd take half an hour by boat and longer by road.

So I just watched. There was an ambulance there now and I could see the EMTs crouched by the figure on the ground. From their behavior I could tell the person was obviously dead. There was no flurry of resuscitation and no hurry to get the body onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. Plus I saw an EMT walking around the scene picking things up and putting them in a plastic bag. Body† parts.

I cranked the telescope up and down the shore a little, looking to see if there was anyone acting suspicious. Nothing caught my eye so I cranked slowly back to the immediate crime scene. And now I saw another person on the scene and a flash of red hair. The telescope is awkward to move around at this distance and when I focused in again I could see it was indeed McCain. She was standing over the body, looking at it. Then she nodded and the EMTs rolled it into a body bag and carried it away.

I watched as McCain interviewed some people on the scene and as she poked at the smoldering jet boat.

Then she had a pair of binoculars and was looking acΩross the bay. At me.