Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 36, No. 6, June 1991

“The bomb was heavy duty, Charles. Gelignite. Completely erased the cabin. There wasn’t enough left of Kessler to use for bait.”

“Time device?”

“Uh-uh. Motion sensor. Mercury switch. Very tricky, but once Kessler picked it up he was a dead man.” Gilliat took a bite of his eggs. “Jesus, what is this, rubber cement?”

Floyd strolled by, wiping his hands on a filthy towel.

“What do you time your eggs with, Floyd, a calendar?” I asked.

He gave me a disgusted look. “And who styles your hair, Charles? Your gardener?”

Gilliat grinned. “You guys been married long?”

“Say, Floyd. I’m having trouble with this puzzle.” I recited the problem of the ten guys moving the ten tons of sand. He hardly missed a beat.

“That’s simple, Charles. It takes them seven hours. A schoolboy could have figured that out.” He smiled smugly and disappeared into his kitchen.

Yeah. A schoolboy. I tried not to appear too humiliated.

“Any motive for someone swacking Kessler?”

“No. He was a nonentity: widower, bookkeeper, quiet, smalltime all the way. No bad habits, no known enemies.” He took a tentative sip of his coffee. “The way we figure it, the bomb was meant for someone else.”

“Why?”

“Well, it’s early in the season yet, and there were only two other cabins rented: couple of old guys up for the fishing. And Kessler. But here’s the interesting thing. The owner said that he gave Kessler a cabin that had been vacated just that morning. Seems that a homeboy, guy named Richard Manso from Provincetown, reserved the cabin for two weeks but only stayed a couple of days, then checked out.” He paused to bang some ketchup onto a pile of greasy fries.

“Manso is a part-time fisherman and a full-time drug dealer: coke and pot mostly, some steroids. Been arrested a couple of times. Used to be a dealer and also a thief in New York before gracing our peninsula with his presence.”

“What was he doing in Hay-shaker, Maine?”

Gilliat shrugged. “He told the camp owner that he was up for the fishing, getting away from the girlfriend for a couple of weeks. We haven’t proved otherwise, mainly because we haven’t been able to locate him. Yet.”

It seemed right. Small-time dealer gets too ambitious, maybe rips off the wrong people. Goes to northern Maine to cool off, but doesn’t go far enough. Someone, from either New York or the Cape, had been very angry with him.

Gilliat reached for his coffee, thought better of it, and downed a glass of water instead. “Looks like a mistake was made. It’s happened before. What’s your interest here, Charles?”

“Kessler’s brother. He wants to make sure justice is served.”

Gilliat raised an eyebrow. “Justice?”

I shrugged. “I have no problem with revenge. It’s an honest emotion, and it helps balance the books a little.”

“You’re starting to sound like a courthouse shrink, Charles. You know, the kind that hums a little Austrian waltz on his way to the witness stand to testify on behalf of some kink who sprayed the post office with an Uzi. ‘It vas, you see, a vay for dis conflicted man to lash out at the fadda figure—’ ”

I picked up the check, thanked Bob, and headed for my car.

A couple of hours later I was in Provincetown. I started at Manso’s last known address, an apartment just off Commercial Street. I was met at the door by a thin, tired-looking woman wearing jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. When I asked for Manso, she snarled three words at me, two of them rather impolite, and slammed the door.

It went downhill from there. No one knew where Manso was, if they admitted to knowing him at all. I’d expected it. This was a small, tight-knit community where outsiders asking questions are routinely shut out. I ended the day with nothing but sore feet to show for my efforts.

The next day was more of the same, and by midafternoon I’d had enough and headed for the Windjammer for a beer. The ’Jammer was the place of last resort for the fishermen and tradesmen in a town overrun by restaurants featuring salmon en croûte, medallions of pork in sweet potato sauce, and fusilli with capers and sun-dried tomatoes. Shot and a beer, pork rinds, maybe a burger — that was the order of the day in the Windjammer. I got a beer and settled into a booth.

I’d lived in Provincetown for awhile a few years earlier, and I still knew some people. One of them was Phil Cook, a personal injury lawyer specializing in dogbite cases and Jack Daniel’s. Especially Jack Daniel’s.

“You aren’t getting any better looking, Charles,” he said, sitting down across the knife-scarred table from me.

“It’s indelicate of you to say so, Phil. How’s the ambulancechasing business?”

He shrugged. “ ‘Sero venientibus ossa,’ my friend.”

“Say what?”