The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1)

by William J. Reynolds

  “He blew on out of town then—I know because I looked for him for a couple months, with an eye toward putting him in just about the shape you see him now. But with no money coming in, and bills yet to pay on the reclaimed furniture, I had to involve myself in more profitable ventures. They say revenge is sweet; all I ever learned was that it’s damned expensive. I went solo then, and ever since I’ve either worked for myself or jobbed out to agencies. Of course, I make most of my living now as a writer—chiefly magazine articles.” I didn’t say anything about The Book. I tend not to talk about The Book, my great work of detective literature that was going to put my name up there with Hammett, Chandler and Macdonald. And, not incidentally, make my fortune. I thought about it a lot, daydreamed about it a lot, worked on it when I could steal the time, but kept pretty closemouthed about it. Would-be writers spend too much time emoting about their would-be writing.

  “And that’s the last you saw of him?” Oberon prompted.

  “Till tonight, of course. That makes it just over six years—which was your next question, right?”

  Oberon grinned a little. “Maybe something like that.”

  “Thought so. I watch all the cops-and-robbers shows, you know. Anyway, that’s just about how he showed up. I’m amazed he even made it over the railing—he could hardly stand up, as you’ve probably gathered from the condition of those screens. My landlord’s gonna love this.”

  “Tell him it was big moths.” Oberon turned his large, sad, liquid eyes in the direction of the ruined patio doors, nodding slightly to himself, as if making mental notes on another subject altogether. After another look at the dead man, he rose and wandered the short distance to the doors, looked out into the night and then back at me. “So what’s the story?” he wondered aloud after thinking about it a while.

  Moisture had collected on Oberon’s top lip, and I found myself reflexively wiping my own mouth before I answered. “I heard a noise on the patio. I’d had trouble sleeping so I was up and out in the kitchen. I came over to investigate.”

  “And this was …?”

  “A couple minutes past four.”

  He wrote it down. “ ’Kay.”

  “Someone was coming over that rail there. I always worry about that when I have the glass doors open, like I did tonight, to try to get some breeze through here.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Tell me. Anyhow, you can see that anyone of reasonable height can hop up onto the railing around the patio of the apartment downstairs and hoist himself onto mine. Which is what he was doing, though of course I didn’t know who he was yet; all I could see of him was a silhouette. He fiddled with the latch some, and then hit on the clever idea of poking a hole in the screens with his head. Only he strained himself too much so he had to lie down on the floor and rest.”

  The moist eyes fixed on me. “How’d he get wet?”

  “He came that way. At first I thought he’d taken a dip in my private pool, but I notice it’s been drained.”

  Oberon looked at me like he was going to ask what rock I’d come from under. Contritely, I said, “In weather like this people leave their yard sprinklers on all night. Copel was trying to get away from whoever did this to him; he could have stumbled through a sprinkler somewhere.”

  “It’s kind of miraculous he was even able to get up here, isn’t it?” Oberon said musingly, half to himself. Then, before I could compose a witty rejoinder, “Any idea who roughed him up?”

  “Not the slightest.” The police photographer’s flash exploded then and sliced through the room like heat lightning across the Midwestern sky, reminding me, guiltily, of the pictures Copel had carried—the negatives and slides that the detectives carefully removing and cataloguing his effects wouldn’t find. I didn’t like misleading Oberon and his men, didn’t like withholding evidence, or potential evidence. After all, they were just guys, just trying to get their jobs done. But I knew that those pictures, once in OPD’s mitts, were as good as in the public domain. While I couldn’t deny my profit motive in the matter, I also thought I’d give Adrian Mallory a break, if only for her father’s sake.

  That didn’t make lying to Oberon any easier. I liked Oberon. He’d always been more than straight with me. I wanted to be upfront with him now. “He started to say something but he didn’t get past my name,” I volunteered limply. So much for up-frontness.

  Oberon looked up briefly, then back down to the silent body and the men who labored over it. “Why do you suppose he came to see you? I mean, with everything and after so much time …”

  “I wonder. I didn’t spend much time thinking he’d come to settle up because his conscience’d been bothering him all these years. So I figure he must’ve been in big trouble—pretty obvious, I guess—and managed to get away from whoever put him in big trouble. Probably not far from here, this was, because he couldn’t’ve gone far in that condition. He must’ve remembered I lived around here, and decided to try his luck and see if I’d hide him.”

  “Who from? The mob?”

  “He did have a history of sort of rubbing them the wrong way from time to time.”

  “Yes he did. Then I suppose that’s how we’ll have to approach it until we know otherwise.” He trained a suspicious eye on me. “Meantime, I’m not going to have any trouble with you, am I?”

  “I’ll be around town,” I said.

  “What I mean is, I’d rather not have you poking your nose into this, gumming up me and my men.”

  I gave him a look. “You have me confused with Sam Spade. My devotion to a partner—especially that partner—just doesn’t run that deep.” Oberon started to speak. I cut him off. “Look, in the first place I’m not that interested in who killed Copel. Uncharitable, but true. He was a small-timer with the bad habit of trying to cross big-timers, and I figure he just did it once too often. Good riddance, as the saying goes.”

  Oberon studied my features as if memorizing them. I stared back, the very picture of innocence, trying not to think about all I was holding back from him.

  “And in the second place?” he said, catching me off guard.

  “Say what?”

  “You said that in the first place you had no interest in knowing who killed Copel. That implies a second place.”

  “Yes it does. And a third place, in fact. In the second place, I’m trying to make my living as a writer. I go back to the old business only when I’m forced to—I certainly don’t go out of my way looking for busywork when I don’t need the money.

  “And that brings us to the third place: you know as well as I do that it’s bad policy—and damned expensive, besides—to take on a case without a client to foot the bills.” I spread my arms. “I certainly don’t see anyone busting in the door to hire me to find Copel’s killer, Ben, do you?”

  Oberon gave me a distracted, narrow smile. It could have meant anything, or nothing. I smiled back and went on trying not to think of the penalties for withholding evidence in a homicide.

  CHAPTER TWO

  For the second time that night/morning I couldn’t sleep. It was almost full light by the time I got rid of the cops, the coroner and a nightside metro reporter for the World-Herald, and though my body had had it, my keyed-up brain, whizzing like a perpetual-motion machine stuck in high gear, tried vainly to make sense of the equation it had only a couple of variables to. The desire to have everything fit together like pieces of a well-made puzzle is an occupational hazard shared by writers and detectives alike. After some fifteen years building stories or cases, trying to make sense of everything is second nature. It gives me trouble when I’m faced with sheer, unlogical happenstance—or when I don’t have all the pieces to play with. My mind still insists on sorting the variables, building an equation, reaching a quotient.

  My involuntarily active mind needed distraction. I stretched out on the living room couch and grabbed a book called Detectionary
from the coffee table, turned to a random page and read about Simon Templar, The Saint. After some time I must have slipped off to sleep, to fuzzy subliminal thoughts about how far removed I was from that fictional detective, or a more recent incarnation, Travis McGee. Leslie Charteris’s Robin Hood of Modern Crime, true to his saintly nickname, would look into the story behind Adrian Mallory’s nude poses simply because it was the right thing to do, and it might be fun, and he might even end up with pockets lined with the ungodly’s filthy lucre. John D. MacDonald’s knight in slightly tarnished armor, as the dust jackets have it, would find some way to be prodded into the matter by his omnipresent, overpowering sense of guilt and responsibility.

  And then there is Nebraska. No descriptive apellation for this one, please. He isn’t propelled by good, or guilt; just greed. The long green. The hope that someone else’s misery is deep enough that he—or she—will pay for some glimmer of hope, some filament of help out of it. Cloak it in humanitarianism, slap a coat of “Auld Lang Syne” over it like cheap paint, it still comes down to the same bottom line: lucre. “The struggle for the legal tender.” I heard that in a song once … .

  I woke, hot and sticky and generally uncomfortable, to a room flooded with light. Ten past ten, according to my trusty Timex, which made it just about ten o’clock, but still too late to be able to get away with calling it an early start. Groaning, I snapped off a table lamp and tried to shake from my head the heavy, dull, clinging sensation that too little sleep leaves.

  I shuffled into the kitchen like an old man and set the kettle boiling, then went and stood under a hot shower that melted most of the kinks from my neck and shoulders but left the fog that socked in the thought centers of my brain and kept anything from taking off or landing there. A few cups of strong black coffee would handle that. Toweling myself, I went back into the kitchen and took the kettle off the flame.

  The tap water in that place ran very hot, so I used it to preheat the glass beaker in its metal handle assembly. I measured eight spoonsful of generic coffee into the bottom of the beaker and added water that had just come down from a boil. This I stirred with a knife before I fitted the plunger gizmo into the top of the beaker and let the concoction sit while I went back to the bathroom.

  It was too humid to shave with an electric razor; reluctantly I dug out the throat-cutter, put a fresh double-edged blade in it so I could get nicked twice as fast, and lathered up.

  I thought about Adrian Mallory, or rather the photos of her. There seemed only two likely possibilities: someone was blackmailing her (or going to) or someone was blackmailing her old man (or going to). I didn’t have any trouble with that. I did have trouble figuring how someone like Morris Copel, who would’ve had to take a rocket to get as high as the bush leagues, connected to something that could result in a great deal of dirty money. Of course, the fact that Copel was dead might’ve said something about the connection.

  Useless speculation: I washed it down the drain with specks of whiskers and shavings of the skin of my throat, combed my damp hair—no point trying to dry it in that humidity—dressed and set out in search of coffee and the telephone book.

  Back in the kitchen I lowered the plunger on the coffee pot, pushing the suspended grounds to the bottom of the beaker, where wire gauze on the plunger held them in place, and poured a cup. The advantage of this coffee-making system is the same as its disadvantage: because the coffee doesn’t sit and cook, it doesn’t turn bitter; but because there’s no heat under it, the coffee must be drunk immediately. Or cold. The price we pay.

  I took the cup and the pot into the living room, where I sat down with Northwestern Bell’s premier publication.

  There were plenty of Mallorys listed, but only two with the right initials, and the second of them was an Andrew S. I punched up the first and was eventually answered by a woman who sounded only a little better than I felt. I assumed my most trustworthy tones and asked for Adrian Mallory.

  “This is her.”

  With effort, I restrained the impulse to correct her grammar. Never put the client off with your second sentence. More important, never open yourself to having your own grammatical slips pointed out. I identified myself and quickly added, “I don’t think you know me”—there was, after all, no reason she should remember me from times gone by—“but I think we have a mutual friend we should get together and talk about.”

  There might have been a slight hesitation, or it could have been my own sluggishness, but it seemed a while before she asked, “What kind of a friend?”

  “I wonder that myself. A friend with a camera.”

  Definitely a pause. The kind mystery writers like to describe as “pregnant.”

  Her voice, when it reappeared, had gone as flat as last week’s 7 Up. “Looks like you’re in the driver’s seat, then,” she said dully. “Come on over.”

  The line went dead in my ear before I could speak. I cradled the receiver and poured another cup of coffee, feeling very proud of myself. Put the heat on ’em, boy. Sweat ’em. Whatever you do, don’t tell ’em you’re just trying to sell something they probably don’t need. Shake ’em up and then hit them with the pitch. Why did I want out of this wonderful business?

  In any event, I decided that as long as I was in it I might as well do it right, and that part of the sweating technique involves giving the subject time to perspire. So I repaired to my modest but inelegant kitchen and threw together a peanut butter omelette, which I ate with three pieces of English muffin toast and a glass of milk while figuring my plan of attack. Eventually I rinsed and stacked the dishes, brushed my bicuspids, poured yet another cup of fastcooling joe for the road and headed out.

  The day was bright but not sunny; the world was a glare that assaulted the eyes. I inspected the sky: no danger of rain. Eleven A.M. and ninety-two degrees already, with humidity to match.

  The address in the phone book corresponded to a set of ten-story sand-colored buildings that jutted up from the side of a gentle slope set back from the Seventy-second Street strip. I drove around two or three acres of parking lot before coming upon a building with the right wrought-iron numbers on it, by which time I knew why they call such places apartment complexes: finding your way around them is anything but simple.

  I stepped into a closet of a foyer, pressed the white plastic stud on the wall next to Mallory and was buzzed right through the security door.

  The place was nice, upscale but not overwhelmingly luxurious. I found the elevator, it found the seventh floor, and I found her apartment. The door opened almost as soon as I rang.

  She wore a kind of velour monk’s robe, hood down, that sheathed her in pale blue from collarbone to bare feet. Her hair, the color of wheat, was brushed straight back, so severely that I wondered how she could close her eyes. The eyes, which matched her robe, were set in puffy little sacks, probably caused by too little sleep and two or three drinks—one of which was eating a ring into an end table within sight of the doorway. Adrian could have done with a few hours’ sleep and some sun, but there was still an underlying natural attractiveness that, as in the photographs resting in my coat pocket, couldn’t be ignored.

  “You’re Nebraska.” It wasn’t a question; it was a statement wearily made in a low voice that I could imagine being soft and caressing but which was now only bored, flat-sounding, as it had been on the phone.

  I agreed.

  She stood aside and waved me into the apartment.

  Her rooms fitted in with as much of the rest of the building as I had seen—very nice, bordering on the posh. Tall picture windows looked southward toward the angry intersection of Omaha’s major north-south thoroughfare, Seventy-second Street, and its east-west counterpart, Dodge Street. Heat made the scene waver outside the glass and I realized with a shiver that the room was almost uncomfortably cold.

  Adrian locked the door—chain, dead bolt, doorknob lock-button—and followed me into the r
oom. We stood on a carpet that I recognized from the pictures while she scrutinized me as if I were a newspaper ad. The room was silent but for muffled background noises from the rest of the building, the humming of the refrigerator in the kitchen, the rhythmic ticking of a pendulum clock in the living room.

  “So what’s the set up?” she demanded after a while. Her esses were a trifle mushy, which they hadn’t been on the phone. She’d done a fair amount of drinking in the interim. When I sweat ’em, boy, they sweat.

  “The set up?”

  “Christ, mister, get with the program! Am I on loan or did he sign over the pink slip?” Her unpainted mouth turned downward at the edges and stayed downturned.

  “I must’ve missed yesterday’s exciting episode. Who ‘he?’ ”

  Adrian made a disgusted sound and, from the end table, took a glass of liquid so close to the color of Scotch that it had to be Scotch. She took a respectable slug and set down the glass, realigning it with exaggerated, intoxicated care with the moisture ring it had left. “Our ‘mutual friend,’ ” she said scathingly. “Remember?”

  “Yeah, him. Well, I should explain—”

  “Explain what? That you won me in a card game? Who cares?” Another slug of her drink, then another close look-over. “No camera, huh, lover? Guess the game’s changed a little now. Well, never mind. I learn quick, you’ll see.”

  I started to say something clever about the sense our conversation wasn’t making, but Adrian shut me up. She shut me up by lifting a delicate hand and drawing her robe’s blue plastic zipper, in a single smooth stroke, from throat to navel. The robe slithered to the floor.

  Whoever said the camera doesn’t lie was right.

  She wasn’t showing me anything I hadn’t already seen, of course, but the suddenness of it, the utterness of it, kicked me hard in the stomach and left me feeling a little breathless and inexplicably foolish.

  Adrian’s pale nipples rose—but from the cold, not passion. Her voice was totally empty of passion when she spoke. “Well, what’s it going to be, lover? You’re not going to take any pictures so I suppose he told you you could take … me.” She spit the final word at me, if it’s possible to spit words emotionlessly. Then she stepped clear of the fallen robe and seemed to unfold herself, in a graceful, dancer’s movement, until she was supine on the soft carpet, a swatch of sunlight burning gold on her white thighs.