I looked at her hard. The blood sounded dully in my ears and the back of my neck was hot, but my voice sounded relatively steady when I said, “You’re remarkably well informed. How did you say you’d come by my name?”
The smile-sneer stayed put. “You did a friend a favor—by not doing anything, which I’d say is typical of you. It doesn’t matter.” She turned away from me and suddenly her voice was weary, played out. “It doesn’t matter,” she repeated. “I don’t …”
I took her by an upper arm and forced her to look at me. “Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said after a long moment.
“It matters to me.”
Her dark eyes held mine for a long time. Then she shook her head, gently, almost sadly, and pulled away from me with equal gentleness. “I want you to go now,” she said. “Just go. Send me a bill for what I owe you. I’ll pay it.”
“Mrs. Berens—”
She left the room. I followed, followed her into the living room, where she stood holding open the door.
I can take a hint.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A block from the Presbyterian church at Fiftieth and Leavenworth, on an anemic bump of scruffy lawn, a pale-brick apartment building sat hunched on a long, narrow lot that was much too small for it. The building was similar in construction to my Decatur Street digs; that is, it was Early Motel, every apartment opening to the great outdoors rather than a central hallway or lobby. Like the Decatur Street building, it sat sideways to the street that gave it its address—my building undeniably faces not Decatur Street but Forty-fifth Street, or what would be Forty-fifth if Forty-fifth cut through that block. To the untrained eye, then, the building faces the Northwest Radial Highway, although the post office insists the address is Decatur Street.
There could be no such confusion with this place, however. Situated as it was in the middle of the block, it faced only the small stone-fronted house to its south, turning its broad back on an almost identical house to the north. I suspected that at one time there were three like houses situated there, but some ill fortune had befallen the middle house and, by extension, its two neighbors.
The building held only six units, one-third Decatur Street’s tally. It also lacked our charming little balconies, which, under the proper conditions, could hold two adults in something roughly approximate to comfort. The mailboxes were your typical gray-steel lock-boxes, set into the brickwork near apartment number one. Although the phone company had helpfully provided me with an apartment number, I double-checked at the mailboxes anyway. Jahna Johansen’s name, in weathered blue ballpoint-pen ink, was written on a strip of white card tucked into the slot on the door of box number six.
Apartment number six was on the top level, nearest the street. The bell was answered almost immediately by a not-young, not-old woman in pale pink sweats and white Reeboks and wavy blond hair whose shock of white over the left ear was perhaps just too artful to be natural. The woman opened the door wearing a smile that changed character immediately, albeit subtly. It was the smile of someone expecting someone else at the door. I put on one to match it, and hastily turned up the flame under the old charm. Just because Donna Berens had flung me out on my ear, figuratively speaking, didn’t mean I didn’t still have what it takes. I hoped.
“Hi, there,” I boomed good-naturedly. “Are you Jahna?”
Her smile widened and she laughed a little, in that half-embarrassed, self-conscious little way that people often have, as she admitted the fact.
“Sorry to drop by like this without calling, Jahna, but—well, truth is, I did try calling earlier but there was no answer and, as I was in the neighborhood just now anyway, I figured I’d take a chance and just stop on up.”
“Why, I’m glad you did.” To my surprise, she stepped to one side and gestured me into the apartment. I’m good, maybe, but not that good.
I stepped in and she shut the door, slipping the little brass chain into place. The living room was small and fussy, with lots of this and that here and there and too much dainty yet overly ornate furniture. The walls held small, anonymous paintings in big filigreed frames that were badly done in fake gold leaf, the type of paintings you have to go down to the Holiday Inn to buy at “special discount prices” for one weekend only.
I shrugged out of my windbreaker and she took it and hung it over one of the pegs on the wall near the door and said, “I’m sorry, but I can’t for the life of me remember your name …”
There was, I thought, a very good reason for that. But on the very first page of the private-eye manual, although it is in a footnote, it says play along. So I played: “Ned,” I supplied helpfully.
“Ned …”
“Brazda. Ned Brazda.” I read in a Travis McGee novel once that you should always select a phony name that sounds something like your real name. That way, when you’re prowling around one of the exotic places McGee prowls around, under your assumed name, you won’t fail to react when someone calls you by it. It’ll be close enough to your real name that you’ll at least give a glimmer of a response. Well, hell, it sounds good, and I knew a couple of guys in town named Brazda, and it was better than the first name that popped into my head, which was Leonard Elmore.
“Ned!” Jahna Johansen said triumphantly. “Sure. And we met …”
I could see this getting out of hand real fast—what a tangled web we weave, and so on. “To tell you the truth,” I said laughingly, “I don’t remember either.” I spread my hands and grinned. “You know how it goes.”
Evidently so, for she laughed and said yes, she did, and indicated a sofa that she seemed to think I should sit on and offered to get me a drink.
“If you had a beer collecting dust somewhere I’d take it,” I said easily, affecting the lazy, twangy, aw-shucks tone and cadence that seems to come naturally, and which seems to come in handy, in situations like this. “But I don’t want to take up any of your time, Jahna. I really stopped by to see if you’d seen Meredith lately.”
As in my place, the kitchen was a barely disguised extension of the living room, and Jahna had ambled into it and into the fridge and back into the living room with two squat brown bottles, no glasses, in about the time it took me to speak those sentences. “Oh,” she said, perching on an armless chair nearby, “are you a friend of Meredith’s?”
I twisted the cap from the bottle and said I was. Jahna deposited her bottle cap in a huge orange-glass ashtray on the coffee table, so I did likewise.
“Well, I haven’t seen Meredith in just ages,” the woman said. I guessed that she was several years younger than me—thirty-three to thirty-five, perhaps—although there was something wise and weary about the way she held her pale eyes, the set of her small pouting mouth. She had a very pale skin, smooth and delicate, which indicated that the hair was at least partly natural in color. Her teeth, when she smiled, were small and unnaturally white and somehow feral. Her voice was a high-pitched, breathy little-girl voice. The childlike character of the voice was contradicted by the long-legged and very womanly body wrapped in pink fleecewear. “In fact, I was trying to reach her just this morning. To tell her about a … party tonight.” The pale, almost colorless eyes turned shrewd as they sized me up for however long it took her to take a pull on the beer bottle and make it seem like a sexual act. “How ’bout you, Ned … what would you say to a little party later on tonight?”
My first impulse was to sidestep the question and get back on the subject of Meredith; but it was superseded almost simultaneously by a second impulse that said to keep playing along, that said there might be more to learn, about Meredith and other things, via the indirect route.
“I’d say … ‘Hello, ol’ buddy!’ ” She laughed and I laughed—just a couple of fun-lovin’ friends who couldn’t remember each other—and I took a drink and said, “What kinda party you got goin’, Jahna?”
“Oh, you know,” she said lightly. “Usual kind.”
“Uh-huh. Who’s gonna be there? Anyon
e I know?”
Again she laughed. Her laugh was even higher and more silvery than her speaking voice. “How would I know who you know?”
I laughed too, forcing it, and tipped some beer.
“Naw,” she said when she was tired of laughing at her wit, “there’s some guys from Kansas City up for some kind of meeting or convention or something. I don’t know—you know how it is.”
I grinned. “Boy, do I,” I said wolfishly, playing the part—and beginning, just beginning to feel that maybe I was reaching the point where I wasn’t merely playing along, the point where the scene and my role in it came into sharp focus.
“We’re getting together at their hotel later on,” Jahna continued. “There’ll be some other girls, plenty to drink. It’ll be a lot of fun.”
It sure sounded like it. I said, “It sure sounds like it. Won’t these guys—won’t they mind your inviting strangers to their party?”
She might have been annoyed; with the Shirley Temple voice it was hard to tell. But her thin, pale little eyebrows came down and met over the bridge of her nose and she said, snippily, “It’s my party too.” Then just as fast the mood evaporated. “Anyhow, no one’ll mind. There’ll be plenty for everyone. Just bring a bottle, if there’s something special you like.”
“Is Meredith going to be there?”
Jahna grinned the sort of grin that my mother always told me nice girls don’t grin. “That’s the ‘something special’ you like, huh?” she said in good-natured accusation. I smiled and shrugged in a way that I hoped would seem embarrassed enough. It was the response called for by the moment. “Well, your guess is as good as mine,” Jahna continued. “I’ve been trying to get her for two days with no luck. No answer at her place, so I finally called her work and she wasn’t in there either.”
“Huh,” I said, making my voice sound perplexed and making my face match my voice. “Where could she have gone to?”
“Beats hell out of me.” She took a swig.
I said, “Well, what about family? She got any people around she might be spending a couple’a days with?”
“Beats me,” she repeated. “You know how it is, Ned. Someone doesn’t volunteer it, you don’t ask it.”
“Sure,” I said hastily.
“I don’t know from nothin’ about Meredith except she likes to do these parties.”
“Do you guys do a lot of these parties?”
She made a sound that was a shrug, and accompanied it with a real shrug. “I do, I guess, and some of the other girls. Sometimes Meredith calls me, when she’s short of cash, I think, but mainly I call her when there’s a real good one coming up. Like tonight’s. She’s gonna hate to miss it.”
In my mind it had been fifty-fifty whether Jahna and her crowd were prostitutes or merely fun-loving girls. Now the coin came to rest, and it was definitely heads. Meredith, too, obviously, if only part-time. If I was shocked or surprised—and I was—the effect lasted mere seconds. By now I was becoming almost used to the contradictory, compartmentalized nature of Meredith Berens’s existence, the many roles she played and the skill, or cunning, by which she kept the various facets of her multifaceted life hidden from those who belonged in other areas of it. Somehow it all had to do with the passive rebellion that seemed to characterize her life. Rebellion against Donna—that much was obvious. Rebellion against Dianna—less obvious, but nevertheless there, evidenced by nothing more or less than the way Meredith kept her at arm’s length, too, kept her in the dark about the real nature of her life. Whatever the real nature was.
Give the girl credit, though: There was little overlap. The only common denominator, in fact, was that nobody in any of the corridors of Meredith Berens’s life knew where the hell she was.
“You don’t know where she’s been keeping herself, Ned, do you?”
I was momentarily lost in thought, and it must have showed. “No, Jahna,” I said. “That’s what I stopped by to ask you, remember?”
She laughed. “That’s right. Wonder where the girl’s got to. By the way, Ned, how did you say you got my address?”
If you weren’t looking for it, waiting for it, you might have missed the slight tone of suspicion that had crept into the thready little voice. It was barely there, but there. In her voice, in the way she held herself, in the steadiness of the almost colorless eyes. Too many questions about Meredith from a guy who maybe wasn’t the good-time Charlie he tried to act.
“From Meredith,” I said casually. “There was one of your parties back, I don’t know, a few months ago. Anyhow, you know, I kind of see Meredith off and on and she told me about this party and I said who’s gonna be there and she mentioned your name and later she pointed you out at the party. That’s probably when you and me met, Jahna. Meredith spoke very highly of you.”
“Really?” The woman tried to sound flattered, succeeded only in sounding unconvinced. “And then she told you where I lived.”
She wasn’t buying into it.
“Of course not.” I tried to make it sound like the very idea was ridiculous … which, of course, it was. “But she told me your name, naturally, and it stuck in my head. Jahna Johansen. It’s a very unusual name …”
“Thanks,” she purred. “I made it up. The Jahna part, I mean. It used to be just Janet, but I think Jahna sounds more special, don’t you?”
“I sure do. That’s why I remembered the name, because it’s special.” Good God, the things I have to put up with. “So when I tried to get hold of Meredith here the last couple of days, with no luck, I said to myself, ‘Now, who would know where that girl’s got to?’ And I thought of Jahna Johansen. And I looked you up in the book. Not too many Jahna Johansens in the White Pages, Jahna.” I drank some more beer and smiled innocently.
She smiled back, and I fancied that some of the slight tension went out of her.
“Well, Ned, I’m afraid I can’t help you. What are you looking for her for anyway?”
I grinned a doggy grin. “What do you think.”
Jahna laughed. “Sorry I can’t help you, then,” she said. “But there is that party tonight.”
She gave me the details and I wrote them down. If Meredith Berens hadn’t turned up in the meantime, I might drop by and see if by chance Jahna Johansen had succeeded where I had failed.
When I got down to the car, a white OPD cruiser was parked behind it. When I approached my Impala, the driver’s side door of the cruiser opened and the cop who had been sitting behind the wheel edged out, one foot on the floorboard, the other on the wet pavement.
“Nebraska,” he said.
The afternoon was cold and the seemingly limitless mist had congealed into a fine drizzle that was designed to discourage conversation alfresco. Nevertheless, I zipped up my nylon jacket and stuck my hands into my pants pockets and wandered over to the patrol car.
I hadn’t recognized the cop at first, but I did now. He was a big blond kid named Nowaczyk. It was to get away from names like that that my forefathers came to America. “I was writing you a note,” Nowaczyk said. “Sergeant Banner’s been looking for you.”
“I know. She left a couple of messages on my machine. Must be pretty important if she has prowl cars combing the streets for me.”
The blond cop laughed around a wad of gum he was working on. He was one of those big, blunt, somehow incomplete kids you probably knew in school. Athletic, but never a star. Okay scholastically, but no genius. Looked like he belonged two grade-levels ahead of everyone else, acted like he belonged two behind. I gave him maybe five years before the muscle turned to fat and the blond hair, now as light and full and fluffy as meringue, became thin and flat and the big blond kid began to wonder what was going on. Or maybe not. Maybe he was smart enough to realize that eight years of second-string football wouldn’t carry him forever, that the muscle was probably already well-marbled with fat and when it was completely saturated the fat would be stored subcutaneously, where it would show, and maybe he would even be smart enough to do somethi
ng about it before he became just another big fat cop. Every so often you do come across one like that.
He said, “That isn’t it. I was passing by—this is one of my streets—and I recognized your car.” I followed his gaze. More and more, eleven-year-old red Impalas were becoming noticeable cars. “I knew the sergeant and you had been playing telephone tag, so I thought I’d let you know she was back at the station now and really anxious to see you about something.”
“It’s hell being so popular,” I said, scrunching further into my thin jacket. “I’ll head straight over there. Thanks for the word, Nowaczyk.”
“No prob,” he said, sliding back into the police car.
I went and unlocked the Impala. On impulse, I looked back over my shoulder as I opened the door, up to the second floor of the pale-brick building, up to the window that probably belonged to Jahna Johansen’s bedroom. If anyone was watching from there, I couldn’t see him or her through the thin, white curtains covering the glass. If anyone had seen me in conference with the cop, there wasn’t much I could do about it now.
I went downtown—that’s private-eye talk—and stashed the car in a ramp and went into the police building and asked for Sergeant Banner. The civilian behind the desk picked up her phone and spoke into it and, to my surprise, instead of issuing me credentials and sending me on my merry way, pleasantly informed me that Banner would be out in a minute.
It took slightly less time than that, and she had a long tan raincoat with her when she came.
“Hey, Sam Spade,” she said by way of greeting. “Let’s take a walk.”
Don’t ask me why, but I didn’t need to ask her where.
CHAPTER NINE
The morgue isn’t the kind of grim, creepy place that it always is in old movies. Sometimes I think it’d be easier on people if it were. After all, that’s what they expect. That’s what they’ve braced themselves for. Then they’re taken into these well-lighted, antiseptic surroundings, rather like a hospital or a large clinic, a place of healing rather than of death. Not cheerful, exactly, but not scary either. Professional. And, in its own antiseptic way, distinctly unnerving—probably the last thing people need when they’ve been called down to the morgue. Perhaps we need the stone walls and the bad lighting and the cold, echoing corridors. Meet the grim expectation. Feed the psychic need.
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