the wind; roaring across the beach in a dune buggy; playfully wrestling on the boat dock with Teddy
and pushing him into the bay in his best sports coat and pants, then chasing me across the wide lawn
down to the edge of the bay.
Doe watching the sun set off the point at Windsong, an image as soft and fragile as a Degas painting.
Time had erased a lot of images from my mind, but those were as clear as a painting on the wall, even
after twenty years.
It came and went quickly.
She was talking to a chic blond worn ml; then she laughed and turned and joined a tall guy in
Ultrasuede who was holding open the door of a dark blue Mercedes sedan.
So that was Harry Raines. My dislike for him was intense and immediate, a feeling I didn‟t like but
could not control. I looked for flaws, blemishes on the face of this golden boy who had it all. His
blond hair was thinning out the way a surfer‟s hair thins out, and he had traded his tan for an office
pallor, but he was a handsome man nonetheless, with the bearing and presence that most powerful
men exude. Harry Raines wore success the way a beautiful woman wears diamonds. If he had flaws,
they were not apparent. I watched as he helped her into the car, trying to ignore the feelings that hit
me in waves, like the aftershock of an earthquake. A handsome, good-looking pair. I tried to shove
my feelings down in the dark places where they had hidden for all those years but it didn‟t work. As
the Mercedes drove off into the dark I was aware that my hand was shaking.
Easy, Kilmer, I told myself; that was then, this is now. The lady probably doesn‟t even remember
your name. I tried shrugging it off and joined Dutch.
Some things never change. The Ponce Bar was one of them. It was a dark, oaken room with a brick
floor, a zinc-topped bar, and Tiffany lamps over the stalls and tables. The mirror behind the bar itself
ran half the length of the room and was etched glass.
They had built the hotel around it, rather than change a brick of the place. Politicians had been made
and trashed in this room, business deals closed with a handshake, schemes planned and hatched. It
was the heartland of the makers and breakers of Dune-town. For two hundred years the room had
crackled with the electricity generated by the power brokers, arm-wrestling for position.
Only Findley and Titan seemed immune to the games. Together they called the business and political
shots of the entire county, unchallenged by the other robber barons of Dunetown. It was in this room
that Chief had given Teddy and me one of our first lessons in business.
“Right over in that corner,” he had told us, “that‟s where Vic Larkin and I locked horns for the last
time. We owned half the beach property on Oceanby together; our fathers had been partners. But we
never got along. Larkin wanted to develop the beach front, turn it into a damn tinhorn tourist trap. He
just didn‟t have any class. I favoured leaving it alone.
“One night it came to a head. We had one helluvan argument sitting right over there. „Damn it,
Victor,‟ I says to him, „we‟re never gonna get along and you know t. I‟ll cut you high card. Winner
buys the loser out for a dollar.‟
“Vie turned pale but he had guts, I‟ll give him that. I told the bartender to bring us a deck of cards and
we cut. He pulled a six, I pulled a nine. That nine bought me a million dollars‟ worth of real estate for
one buck.”
“You call that good business?” Teddy had asked.
“I call it gambling,” Chief had said. “and that‟s what business is all about, boys. It‟s a gambler‟s
game.”
From the look of the crowd, there weren‟t too many gamblers left among the Dunetown elite. What
was missing was the electricity. There was no longer a hum in the air, just a lot of chatter.
The blond woman who had been outside with Doe had returned to the room and was talking to a small
group of people. She was wearing a wraparound mauve silk dress and an off-yellow wide-brimmed
hat and her eyes moved around the room as she spoke, taking in everything.
“The blonde you‟re eyeballin‟ is Babs Thomas,” Dutch said. “Don‟t say hello unless you want
everybody in town to know it five minutes later.”
“Local gossip?” I asked.
“You could call her that. She does a snitch column in the Ledger called Whispers.‟ Very apropos You
wanna know the inside on Doomstown‟s aristocracy, ask her. She knows what bed every pair of shoes
in town is under.”
I jotted that down in my memory for future reference and then said, “I just saw Stonewall Titan out
front.”
“Yeah?” Dutch said.
“I figured Titan was probably dead by now,” I said.
“Mr. Stoney will tell God when he‟s ready to go, and offhand I‟d say Cod‟s gonna have to wait
awhile_ How well do you know him?”
“Too long ago to matter,” I said, which was far from the truth. I don‟t think Dutch believed it either,
although he was kind enough to let it pass.
“I saw him, too, coming out of the bar,” said Dutch. “We had words. He gave me some sheiss.”
“What does Titan expect you to do?” I asked.
“End it.”
“Just like that?”
“Yeah, just like that. „Get it done before Harry gets wind of it,‟” he says.
“Gets wind of it!” I replied. “How the hell does he hope to keep Raines in the dark? And why?”
“He‟s hoping we‟ll nail this thing down fast so the Committee can shove it under the carpet.”
“What Committee?” I asked.
Dutch hesitated, staring into his drink. He rattled ice in his glass for a few moments, then shrugged.
„Local power structure,” he said, brushing it off.
“You just took a left turn,” I said.
“Y‟see, Raines doesn‟t think beyond the racetrack,” Dutch said, still ignoring my question. “The
paper and the TV stations tend to play down any violence that happens. Now we got Mafia here, it
could be Raines‟ worst nightmare come true. I could get my walking papers over this.”
“So you said.”
The waitress brought our drinks. I decided not to press him on who or what the Committee was for the
moment.
“Fill me in on Titan,” I said.
He jiggled the ice in his highball.
“Only trouble with Stoney Titan, he‟s been sheriff for too damn long. Forty years plus; that‟s one hell
of a long time.”
“You think he‟s on the take?”
“Not the way you mean,” Dutch said. “Nothin‟ goes down in this town he don‟t know about, Not a
card game, not a floating crap game, not numbers. Not a horse parlour. He knows every hooker by her
first and last name, every bootlegger, dope runner, car booster. A man can‟t be around that long, know
that much, he isn‟t bent just a little, know what I mean? On the other hand, he‟s a tough little bantam,
not a man to take sides against.”
I remembered Titan differently. I remembered him on soft summer afternoons with his coat across his
knees, drinking bourbon with Chief and talking on the porch at Windsong. I remembered he always
put his gun in the trunk before coming up to the house and took off his coat because he wore his
badge pinned on the inside pocket and I guess that was his way of saying it was a friendly call. And I
remembered him as thinner and not as gray, a wiry little man with a fast step and twinkling eyes. Hell,
I thought, he‟s pushing hard on eighty. Funny how people never age in your memory.
“I wonder if he was on Tagliani‟s payroll,” I thought aloud.
“He isn‟t bent in that direction. No way,” Dutch said. “Stoney doesn‟t need money or power. And