Mary, Mary, Shut the Door Read online

  Just as they started to move forward, Sylvester spun away and began to walk back towards them. They turned towards a seafood carryout and pretended to pore over the menu.

  “Why are we saying no to chicken lobster?” Sean asked as he pointed to a hand painted sign above the menu.

  “Well I’m generally against interspecies breeding. I think that a chicken lobster would be both ugly and tasteless.”

  Sean saw Damien walk past in the carryout glass.

  Sylvester went into a restaurant called The Lobster Pot. Matt sent Sean around to see if there was a back door to the place. He came back shaking his head.

  “You want to get something to eat? We may not get a chance later on.”

  “Yeah, but not inside. I don’t want him seeing us too often.”

  Across the street there was a sandwich shop. Matt got a lobster roll and Sean a bifana, a Portuguese pork loin sandwich. They sat in the shop and watched the door across the street. When Sylvester appeared, they followed him back to the inn.

  Around eight, he came out of his room in a robe, went down to the Jacuzzi, dropped it on a lounge and joined two blondes in the water.

  “He’s not likely to go anywhere dressed like that. Let’s just watch him from here,” Sean said.

  Matt nodded. He was on the phone. “Hi, Mom.” He gave her the inn’s name and their room number. It was she who had insisted that they get cell phones once they started to do surveillance work. The illusion that they were never out of touch let her get to sleep before they walked in to their apartment.

  “We’ve got to be back before Thursday for exams. Anything you’d like us to get you from here? I’d recommend the lobster. It’s as cheap as peanut butter up here, but I don’t think it’ll travel that well. Love you, bye.”

  “Did you call Sandy?”

  “Yeah. She said to sit on him as long as we can. She’ll send Tom and Bruce up before we have to leave. I also filed a report with Jim Gruber. What are you going to do?”

  “There’s not enough light to draw. I’ll watch Damien if you want to study.”

  “Cool. Thanks. Tomorrow, if we’re in town, why don’t you go to some galleries? I picked up a couple of street maps at the front desk. Take one in case you have to find us in a hurry.”

  Sean sat back from the window, so he wasn’t visible from the outside and watched Damien and the blondes cohere. At ten they separated and went to their rooms. He went out and sat by the Jacuzzi until Damien’s light went out.

  At five, Sean went for a run through town. On the way back, he scribbled the names and addresses of the galleries he wanted to visit. Matt left for his run at six-thirty. At eight they were having coffee and muffins by the pool when Damien walked into the dining room to get his breakfast.

  Sylvester went back to his room and stayed put until noon. At a quarter past twelve he popped out of his room, took the stairs three at a time and dashed across the courtyard to his car. The Ellis brothers didn’t even look up until he was in the driveway concentrating on traffic.

  He turned right and two minutes later they did. Sylvester crossed Route 6, drove past the town dump and entered the national seashore. He parked near the visitor’s center, walked quickly to it, entered and went upstairs. Sean followed while Matt sat in the car writing down the license tags of the other cars in the lot.

  Sean wandered around the first floor displays alert to any sounds from above. After a few minutes he casually made his way to the observation deck. What’s with this guy and precipices? He thought.

  As he climbed out of the stairwell he saw Damien in an animated conversation with an older man. Sean turned away and went to the other side of the deck and busied himself learning about the eternal war between rapacious man and the vengeful dunes. Denuded of their trees to provide building materials and firewood, they became nomads bent on erasing all signs of our existence. The moving sands threatened to cover up the roads and encroached on the town until vegetation was planted to hold them in their place. Reparations for past crimes against nature.

  The older man towered over Damien. Thin with deeply etched cheeks, his stubble of beard was white. He listened to whatever Damien had to say and responded both verbally and by tapping out his message with an insistent forefinger to the chest. The man pushed by Damien who said, “I couldn’t get the money. I tried.” He followed him downstairs and out to the beach. The older man trudged across the sand to his car. Sean watched from inside the visitor center. The old man tapped his watch and pointed at Damien who nodded understanding.

  Damien drove back to the inn with the Ellises in his wake. He spent the rest of the afternoon in his room. Matt studied by the pool and Sean wandered in and out of half a dozen galleries. When Damien left for town, Matt called to have his brother meet him. Damien met the old man on the sidewalk outside an upscale craft store on Commercial Street. They walked leisurely into town. The old guy stopped for an ice cream cone near city hall. He was handed a flyer by a volunteer helping with the flood of marriage license applications that had been taken out that weekend. He scanned the flyer, turned it over and looked to chuck it in the trash. He stopped, went back to the front and read it carefully. He slapped Damien in the chest, broke out in a big grin and walked across the street to city hall. Matt and Sean followed and watched as Damien Sylvester and his friend filled out an application for a license to wed. The brothers followed the lovebirds back out to the street.

  “I know my ‘gaydar’ is jammed, but this makes no sense at all,” Matt said.

  “I know. I thought he was pretty interested in those two blondes at the pool.”

  “Which proves nothing. In case you hadn’t noticed, not only is symmetry in short supply in this town but also nobody seems too keen on respecting the sanctity of categories either. Girls want to be guys. Guys want to be girls. Opposites attract and repel.”

  “Okay, so Damien Sylvester is bisexual. But why get married? Most of the couples in that line were a lot older. They probably wanted to do this for a long time. Better yet, why this guy? Provincetown is not Richmond and everyone is real comfortable expressing affection in public. These two haven’t touched each other except for that one finger typing bit out on the dunes. They aren’t even staying in the same hotel. Where’s the romance?”

  “It looked like the old guy’s idea. Maybe it’s some way to get the money Damien owes him.”

  “How? Blackmail mom? Give me money or I go public with your son’s dirty little secret. A wedding license would add some heft to that claim.”

  “About the only thing we’ve ruled out here is true love.”

  “Did you see the sign in there for volunteers to help with the paperwork? Why don’t you see if you can get a look at the application, ID the guy? I’ll keep tabs on them out here,” Sean said.

  “Okay. If you get the chance, give Sandy a call. See if she has any ideas.” Matt turned away and went back into city hall.

  Sean nodded and set off behind his quarry. An hour later he was back at the inn, sitting by the pool when his phone rang. It was Matt’s number.

  “I’m on my way back. I got enlisted to help with the filing and let’s just say I was successful. I’ll tell you more when I get there.”

  When Matt made it back to the inn, he found Sean holding court with the two blondes. Their names were Merete and Helle, they were from Copenhagen and they were a couple. Sean’s drawing had attracted their attention and they were vigorously debating whether post-modernism had been doomed from the start, a victim of its own faulty premises or had been assassinated by the academy in a backlash of corrupt classicism, or some such thing.

  When the wind had died down and the girls had gone, Matt said, “You know, that art thing is as good as sitting a baby on your lap. Girls love that stuff. You gotta teach me some.”

  “Okay, I’ll give you a cover story for your stick figures. Repeat after me: You’re an outsider artist; you’re into neoprimitivism; you’re trying to recapture a child’s view of the w
orld before it was corrupted by society. Got it?”

  “Yeah. What does that mean?”

  “You can’t draw worth a shit but you don’t know it.”

  “And that’ll work?”

  “Just don’t talk to any art majors. Don’t worry, your time will come. I’ll be a starving artist in some sketchy part of Brooklyn and you’ll be a plastic surgeon in Malibu with a supermodel on each arm.”

  “I’ll settle for just getting into medical school.”

  “You will. You’ve never failed at anything you set out to do.”

  “Then why do I think that failure is just way overdue in finding me?”

  “’Cause you’re you, big brother.”

  “Where’s our metrosexual?”

  “Up in his room contemplating eternity with Ichabod Crane.”

  “What did you learn at city hall?”

  Matt tapped his shirt pocket. “I Xeroxed the application. They’re getting married at eight a.m. on Monday. You have to wait seventy-two hours after the application is filed. Buyer’s remorse I guess.”

  Sean laughed. “We should get that info to Sandy.”

  “The application included name, address, DOB and social security number. For that marriage to be legal, all that info has to be correct.”

  “Christ, Sandy will know if he’s boxers or briefs in ten minutes.”

  “Did you learn anything from those girls?”

  “Not really. He hit on them at first. Over and above his anatomical handicaps, they found his boundless self-regard off-putting. There’s no ‘u’ in ‘the joy of me’.”

  “Did he tell them why he was here?”

  “A fairytale about being in law school at Harvard, just down here for the weekend, catch a little sun, surf and sand, recharge the batteries before finals.”

  “Lifestyles of the rich and shameless. I’ll call Sandy. Can you watch for Sylvester?” Matt asked.

  Sean nodded and went back to his drawing of Merete and Helle’s smiling faces, foreheads touching, happy through and through.

  Matt returned with his biochem book. “Oh, by the way, I found this really cool bracelet in town. River stone, onyx and silver. The lady said that Uma Thurman’s sister designed it.”

  “Did you touch it? That’s as close as you’ll ever get to ‘The Divine Miss U’.”

  “I think mom would love it.”

  “How much was it?”

  “Six hundred.”

  “Ouch. I know that this has been a great gig, but all the money we’re making here is spoken for.”

  “I know. It would be nice to get her something special. A complete surprise. A reminder that good things can also happen to good people.”

  Matt’s phone rang. “Hello. Oh hi Sandy. What do we know?”

  “Nothing yet on Mr. Docherty. I’ve called Jim Gruber. He has lots of contacts in the Boston PD. We’ll see if he has any criminal record. Maybe Damien owes him money for drugs, or its gambling losses. More importantly, I spoke with our client. She’s not aware of any such problems with her son. She says he likes to drink, to party; he’s generally irresponsible but nothing criminal. However, she doesn’t strike me as the most attentive of mothers. She is adamant that she does not want that wedding to take place and she doesn’t care how we stop it. She’ll be down to talk to Damien late on Monday. She has some business in Chicago and can’t get away until then.”

  “Okay, she doesn’t care how we do it. How about you?”

  “I care. I don’t want you breaking any laws. Be creative.”

  “How about a bonus if we pull it off?”

  “Like what?”

  “A thousand dollars.”

  “Total. Done. You stop the wedding and you don’t wind up in jail and it’s yours.”

  Matt hung up. “Hot damn. You hear that? A thousand dollar bonus if we stop the wedding.”

  “Got any ideas?”

  “We don’t know what the reasons are for them getting married, so we don’t know what arguments would sway Damien away from that. We’re only going to get one chance at this. If we don’t succeed, Docherty will keep us away from him. He was the one who seemed to initiate the idea,” Matt said.

  Peter John Docherty stood in the doorway to the courtyard. His hands were stuffed into his trench coat pockets and his collar was turned up against the early evening breeze. He was slightly hunched over so it was difficult to gauge his true height. Six-three at least. Close-cropped gray hair stood out like magnetized metal filings on his head. His face was an unreadable hieroglyph of creases and slits.

  Damien came down the stairs and the two men went off to town.

  After a thirty count, Sean slapped his brother on the leg. “Let’s go save the day for Mother Sylvester.” They tagged along trying to figure out how to separate the two men but came up empty.

  In the middle of the street a conundrum in army boots, tutu, make-up and five o’clock shadow yowled and hiccupped, “I’ll never call you again, you bitch,” to the back of another equally transgressive soul, striding away, head up despite the terrible news.

  The rejecter lurched drunkenly backwards and caromed off the Ellis brothers. Turning around, he crooned “Hello, boys. Here for the festival are you? I could make both of you very happy. What do you say we go to my place?” He tried to wriggle himself between the brothers and snake his arms through theirs. They both jumped back swatting at their arms as if they were covered in spider-webs. An immediate reaction of horror and revulsion.

  “Get away from me, you …” Matt snarled.

  “Unfortunately confused, extremely intoxicated, grief stricken inhabitant of this fair town,” Sean said, pulling his brother away.

  “What the …”

  “Stay cool, man. We can’t afford to lose Damien. They’re going into that bar up ahead.”

  Docherty’s height helped keep them in sight. They ducked into a doorway and followed a brick path to a recessed entrance. The brothers gave the cover charge to a bald guy sitting on a stool. Pinned to the wall behind him were the house rules. No murder, no mayhem. The usual.

  The bar was to the left, tables to the right and a dance floor in between. Live music began at nine. The crowd was mixed, gays and straights. Docherty and Sylvester took a table at the edge of the dance floor and were engaged in a hushed conversation. Matt and Sean sat at the bar, nursed a couple of light beers and watched them in the mirror.

  They’d stopped talking and Damien was scanning the crowd. He seemed interested in a quartet of girls seated across the dance floor. Spectacled twins in matching outfits. Sean wondered why they dressed like that. Why reinforce their sameness? The other two would never be mistaken for each other. The older woman had an angular, sharp-featured face that was all smiled out. Her hair was a crinkly cascade and her back was covered in a baroque tattoo with a weeping eye in the center. Her companion was a waif, with darting, anxious eyes who picked nervously at the label on her beer. Damien moved to get up. Docherty clamped his wrist to the table and he sat back down. Damien smiled at the girls and raised his beer in salute.

  “I have an idea,” Sean said, “but if we do this, the loser decides when it becomes a cool story to tell. No exceptions. Agreed?”

  Matt nodded and leaned over while his brother whispered in his ear. They made fists and shook them three times. Matt’s stayed a fist, Sean’s became a sideways V. Sean shook his head. Matt pulled out his cell phone. Sean took a deep breath and pushed away from the bar.

  He came up behind Damien Sylvester, put a hand across the back of his chair, smiled at Docherty, turned to Damien, and staring deeply into his eyes, said, “You’re just the prettiest little thing in this whole room. I don’t know what you’re doing with Lurch here, but I’d love to …”

  Sylvester spun around and took a swipe at Sean’s head with his beer bottle. It grazed his head but did not stagger him. Docherty pushed away from the table as if he might join in then settled back down with a look of resigned indifference.

  Sylv
ester stood, called Sean “a fucking faggot” and launched a roundhouse that took forever to catch Sean high on the side of his head. Sean staggered back, fell on his butt and rolled over holding his head. Matt spoke loudly into his phone. The bar’s bouncers separated the two of them and looked at Sean’s head. Matt flipped his phone closed and watched his brother.

  Three minutes later two policeman entered the bar. They took statements from Sylvester, Sean and other patrons. They asked Sean if he wanted to press charges, which he most assuredly did. Sylvester was read his rights and marched off to jail. Since it was Friday night, he couldn’t be bailed out until Monday, when the court opened. Because of the huge number of civil ceremonies being performed each day, he’d have to wait until additional magistrates arrived to handle the overflow of work. Sean declined medical attention and returned to the bar.

  “I don’t know what was harder, coming on to him or waiting for that roundhouse to arrive.”

  “I’m proud of you little brother. You earned that bonus. Your plan and you executed it.”

  “I just thought about how immediate and unthinking our reaction was to that guy in the street. If we were right about Damien, that he wasn’t gay and he’s as impulsive as his mother described, it was worth a try. Remember it’s my call when this gets to be a cool story. I don’t care if you’re trying to impress Uma Thurman.”

  “Look, Docherty’s leaving.”

  “Let him, our work is done.”

  “Is it? We still don’t know why they were going to get married. He’s the only one who does. We can’t get to talk to Damien. I’d like to know if we were on the right track.”

  “Do you think he’ll tell us?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. What’s the harm in asking? He says no and we’re no worse off than when we started, He tells us and it might be useful to Mrs. Sylvester in fixing things with her son. And it might impress Sandy.”

  “That’s always a good idea. I’d like to get more work like this.”

  They followed Docherty back through town to a chain motel near Route 6. He went into the motel’s restaurant, slid into a booth and ordered a drink. The Ellis’s approached him.