Mermaids in Paradise - Lydia Millet (phonics story books txt) 📗

right,” said Chip, agitated. “You know it isn’t. This isn’t right, none of it is. It’s like no one else cares. And someone’s dead who shouldn’t be! A good person, a person who has tenure at a major U.S. university!”

“Believe me, I agree,” said Steve.

“Deb,” said Chip, turning to me. “Please, honey. Can’t we call someone and give them a bunch of money to solve this? Aren’t there police you can just hire? Who figure out the crime and catch the bad guys? And make sure justice is done?”

“They call them private detectives,” I said. “I don’t think they handle the justice part, though.”

“I didn’t know if those existed anymore,” said Chip. “I thought maybe they went out with black-and-white movies, or maybe when Columbo died.”

Steve nodded sympathetically, did some neck rolls.

“I’m serious, Deb,” said Chip. “We can’t just let this go.”

I nodded too, wondering why the hard-boiled sleuth of the 1940s and ’50s had morphed into crime procedurals. People didn’t believe in a lone sleuth these days; they didn’t believe one man could solve a crime. Or one woman, either. Miss Marple was a joke, same with the Murder, She Wrote lady.

Deductive reasoning? Get the fuck out, was what Americans said to the obsolete sleuths of yesteryear. Even in the heyday of sleuthing, American detectives relied mainly on guns, not brains like the unmanly English. (I’d hardly thought of Gina since the mermaids, I realized then, Gina and Ellis in their love nest of Union Jacks and irony.) The gun is mightier than the pen, was our true opinion, and the RPG is mightier still.

Gina had discussed this subject with me too; Gina used me as a sounding board now and then. She said she liked to talk about her work to people outside the academy, people who weren’t constantly baffled about how she got tenure in the first place.

The sleuths who went solo, looking cool, smoking cigarettes, etc., had been replaced by highly efficient teams of police officers with integrity, brilliant forensics specialists, earnest lawyers, and superefficient computers. It doesn’t matter to the TV-watching public that in real life America has basically none of the above, Gina says, due to the fact that we stoutly refuse to cough up taxes to pay for it. Gina studies what she calls the formulas/standard deviations of TV, along with junk food and pop song lyrics. On our TVs, she says, we like to see the governmental institutions functioning perfectly. People don’t want a lone man armed with nothing but a snarky wit and a lame analog peashooter. They just can’t take that seriously.

That was my train of thought, walking along the beach in the British Virgin Islands while only partly attending to Chip’s worries over memorial-service protocol.

“. . . want to send something ourselves, maybe a flower arrangement? Or maybe a donation to a charity?” he was saying as we came up to the marina, where the dock’s pilings, in front of us, stretched barnacle-encrusted above the lacework of the tide.

“Whoa,” said Steve, finally noticing the traffic. “I don’t like this. I don’t like being so close to boats.”

“What the—? What’s going on up there?” asked Chip.

I’d been walking a few steps ahead of them, and now I turned around. I was wearing a creamy sarong over my bikini, albeit a flowing sarong with pouchy pockets for my cell phone and room-key card, strands of my shining hair floating around my face and neck in the ocean breeze. I like to think I looked attractive at that particular moment—as well as authoritative and trustworthy.

To Chip, anyway. Along with being a universal ear, a spouse is a universal eye. A spouse is watching your biopic at all times, much as you’re watching theirs. And even if you don’t admit it you want both those biopics to be well filmed, in warm, nostalgic colors. Plus heart-achingly scored.

“I think you know what it is, Chip,” I said gently.

CHIP TOOK IT hard. I’d known he would, I’d feared he would take it hard and I was right: he did.

We got up on top of the docks, though Steve stayed down below. He didn’t do ship, boats, anything seafaring, he said, a matter of personal policy. Chip and I found ourselves among the slips, among the boats, within the throng rushing to and fro and readying vessels for excursions. Small boats but mostly larger boats, soaring white yachts you might almost feel comfortable calling ships—all manner of watergoing vehicle was being fitted out. Gorda’s the yachtiest of the Virgin Islands: yacht people swarm daily off their boats into the restaurants, onto the beaches, looking for terra firma and their share of landlubber food and sport. This was one of several marinas on the island, and it was white with yachts.

Also there was an overwhelming vibe of haste, mission, even urgency: a vital enterprise under way. We couldn’t get an answer out of anyone because they were ignoring us, in their furor and commotion. They wouldn’t stop to explain; they didn’t even look at us in passing. We moved among them like shadows or ghosts.

Presently, as we stood there being buffeted by hurrying people—a little dazzled, a little lost, now and then jostled by a passing workatron—Chip located someone from our dive group and grabbed his shoulder, stopped him mid-rush. It was a recent Listserv defector I hadn’t ever paid attention to, a thin guy with bulging eyes.

“They’re paying time and a half,” he told us, sweating from the exertion of hefting a sack. It wavered on his shoulder. “Plus open bar tonight.”

“What for? What’s going on?” urged Chip.

“We have to cordon off the area, these boats here are kind of the support system for those other ships we’re using, these big ships with fishing nets—trawlers, I think that’s what they are. Or maybe it’s purse seine. They’re going to drop the nets around where the marvels are so that they can’t escape,” said the guy.

“The marvels?” said Chip.

“The marvels, you know, the attraction. The fish