The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1)

by William J. Reynolds

  “Come on, honey, what’re you waiting for?” Something in her words—or in the way they were spoken—made me unaccountably ashamed and angry in equal proportions.

  “Adrian—”

  “Or do you just like to watch? Is that your kick? Then you should’ve brought a camera, ’cause this is what I’m best at.” She began to touch herself, her small, high breasts, as if her hands belonged to another, an intimate lover. The caresses strayed downward, lower.

  But it was a sham, and suddenly it came apart and the sun danced from her body as she rolled onto her side and curled into a ball and cried.

  I gathered her robe, knelt near her head, stroked her yellow hair, witlessly mouthing encouraging things to her. I got her to her feet, got her into the robe, got the robe zipped. She was through sobbing; now she was apologetic: she didn’t know what was wrong, she’d be all right in a minute, she needed to have a drink. I told her to shut up, took her to a couch that dozed like a great cat in the sun under the tall windows, sat her down and went looking for something other than liquor to pour into her.

  I came back from the kitchen with a cup of tea from a kettle I’d found on the stove. I sat opposite her, on a heavy block of wood that was probably a coffee table, since home altars were out that season. “Drink that,” I said, “then we’ll talk.”

  “Talk.” Sneeringly.

  “It’s been known to happen.”

  “You’re being awfully nice to me,” she snuffled suspiciously. “How come?”

  “I’m working on a merit badge. Drink your tea.”

  She sipped some dutifully. “I still don’t get your game.”

  “I gathered that.” I took the battered brown envelope from my coat pocket and passed it over to her. Adrian took it and peeked inside, but didn’t remove the contents.

  “Aren’t you interested in what’s in there?”

  “I know what’s in there. So?”

  “So? So I think you’re a lady who’s in some trouble, maybe more trouble than she knows what to do with. So I think you could use a little help, which is why I’m here.”

  Adrian leaned her head against the back of the couch and studied me through red, slitted eyes. “A little help,” she echoed. “That’s an original approach.”

  “I thought you’d like it.” My fuse was inching short, playing these cat-and-mouse games. I dug out of my wallet the famous laminated photostat that always appears along about page twenty in the private-eye stories. “Look,” I snapped, “I’m a private investigator. The mutual friend I mentioned is the man I got the pictures from, a man named Morris Copel. I assume you know him?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Nothing like an honest reproach to slow down a great, righteously indignant speech. “Big guy? Sort of clumsy? Face like someone from Mr. Potato-Head’s world?”

  She kept gently shaking her head negatively, which thoroughly cooled my jets. Either she was a great little kidder, or she really didn’t know Copel—opening the door to some complicated questions I didn’t feel like asking myself yet. I doggedly pursued the original course, reading her the Cliff Notes on last night’s escapades. “Morris Copel, a sort of second-rate citizen, came busting into my place last night. He had been beaten up, shot, and was dying. But first he gave me that envelope. He tried to tell me something about it but in true detective-story fashion he died with the words on his lips. However, I recognized you in the photographs and I figured they meant either you were in some kind of trouble or soon would be. Like I said, that’s why I’m here.”

  Adrian glanced down at the envelope. Looked up at me. Nibbled her lower lip. Sipped some tea. “I see,” she finally said. “Well—I certainly do appreciate it.”

  “Appreciate it?”

  “Your bringing me the, you know, the pictures. I really appreciate that.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “Well, no. I mean, I’m sorry for the way I acted and everything. I just—well, jeez, I just didn’t have any idea who you were or what you were or what you came for, you know?”

  “I don’t know. Who, or what, did you think I was?”

  She flushed pink to the roots of her pale hair.

  “Exactly. That was a heck of a little show you put on for me, Adrian, and I didn’t even ask for it. Think what I could’ve gotten for the asking. You were willing to do any damn thing I told you to. Why? Because you thought that someone had told me I could tell you to do anything. Morris Copel, I thought, but now I don’t think so. You want to tell me?”

  She shook her head, violently now, which was all she managed before the waterworks opened again and she ran from the room.

  I ran a hand through my hair, feeling dirty, foul. Me, not the hair. The great humanitarian. Here to help. For my next act I’ll help little old ladies through intersections they don’t want to cross. I stood up and went around the couch to the windows.

  Cars slithered like ponderous prehistoric animals on Seventy-second Street. A lot of them rested in the hot glare on the Crossroads shopping mall parking lot. I reminded myself I needed coffee and wondered if I should visit the gourmet department in Brandeis there for something other than whatever was on sale at the supermarket. Meanwhile, the part of my brain that eschewed dealing with such mundanities was wondering furiously about Morris Copel and Adrian Mallory and a set of dirty pictures Adrian seemed only barely willing to acknowledge, even while they were occupying the cushion next to her. Where had Copel gotten the pictures? Who, if not Copel, had taken them? How did whoever persuade Adrian to pose for them? What power over her did he have that made her willing to prostitute herself to me because she thought—merely thought—he had given his okay? Why was Copel killed, and by whom? To what use were the pictures being put? And most important, how could I get Adrian to let me—rather, to pay me to—help her?

  The answer to that question came first. Adrian reappeared, looking much better except for her eyes, which were surrounded by pillows that you could have had a pretty good fight with. She had loosened her hair and it now hung shimmeringly to her shoulders. Most of the liquor was cried away; a touch of makeup hid what was left, and the sleeplessness.

  I opened my mouth but she spoke first.

  “I really do appreciate what you’ve done, and your concern, but I’d like you to go now.” She held out a twenty. I must’ve stared at it. “Don’t be offended, please,” she said seriously. “You’re a professional, you’re entitled to be paid for your efforts.”

  “It wasn’t much of an effort. I’d like to do more.”

  “There’s nothing more you can do.”

  “No, not if you won’t let me.”

  “Listen, I don’t need any help, really. Okay, if it’ll make you happy I’ll admit that things were kind of … out of control for a while. Okay? But not anymore. Everything’s been really cool for the last couple of weeks, and that’s just how I want it to stay. I don’t want to stir up anything. I don’t want you to stir up anything.”

  It wasn’t making any sense. I shook my head and looked back toward the Dodge Street intersection. “It may be out of your hands. A man is dead—”

  “Christ, I don’t even know who the guy is.”

  I swiveled back toward her. “He had your pictures.”

  “So did you, and I didn’t know you.”

  She had a point there.

  Time for Plan B. “Look, what about your father? Those photos would be pretty deadly to him if—”

  “All right, goddammit,” she yelled, “that’s it! You get the hell out of here, mister, and I mean right now.” Wrong tack. She went pink again, this time from raw anger.

  I shrugged and headed for the door. “I guess I can’t force you to let me help you.”

  “You got that right, at least.” She beat me to the door and held it for me. I paused there. It seemed to me I should say something; it also seemed
there was nothing to say. Adrian must’ve felt the same. Her stone look softened a tad and she said, “Hey, don’t you think I know it’d kill my father if these pictures got out? And I don’t even mean politically. He had a lot of trouble with me when I was a kid, trouble that he didn’t deserve. Okay. So now I’m trying. And he’s helping me. Despite everything, he never turned his back on me, he never stopped caring, he never stopped loving me. Jeez, this is getting sappy. But it’s the truth. Okay? That means it’s more important to me than ever to do right by him. I don’t know what I’d do if he ever found out about these pictures. Kill myself, maybe. I hope I don’t ever have to find out. Well, right now everything’s under control, and I don’t want it getting screwed up, okay? I’m sure you’re a decent guy—you just want to help, right?”

  I said, “Yes, but I’m no altruist. I’m in it for the money.”

  She waved the twenty. “Uh-huh. That’s why you jumped at this.” She tucked it away in a pocket of her robe. “There’s nothing wrong with being a nice guy, Nebraska. God knows, the world can use more of them.” She almost smiled. “I know it too. But, look, if you really want to help, help by staying the hell out of it, okay? Just leave it alone.”

  I spread my hands in acquiescence. Nothing I could say would convince her to let me in, let me do what I could to help her through whatever locked her in bondage more cruel than any chains, let me help her take back her own life. In the end I could only comply with her wish: I left her alone. Very much so.

  Case closed.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My eyeballs glazed over when I left the refrigerated foyer of the building. Dew appeared on my face. I pushed limp hair back from my forehead and rubbed my eyes. Big improvement. Squinting against the grayish glare, I made toward the old red Chevy. I folded my sportcoat and tossed it into the back seat, then slid in behind the wheel, wincing as hot vinyl stung my back and legs. Without much relish I pointed the wheezing machine toward the Crossroads.

  If I subscribed to the same code as the fictional detectives, I’d now be merrily setting off to investigate Adrian Mallory’s case, such as it was, on my own, for its own sake. There was plenty to investigate: pornographic pictures of a senator’s daughter; the murder of a small-time operator; the daughter’s reluctance—hell, refusal—to allow anyone to even try to help; the unknown taker of those photographs; and, less specifically, just what in blazes was going on? All the necessary ingredients of a top-notch little murder mystery. Even your basic handsome, witty detective. In fact, only one element was lacking: the catalyst, that long green stuff with the short life.

  Consequently, I was only headed home—too frustrated by the morning’s work to wrestle with the crowds at the shopping mall, which I happily sailed past, my mind half-occupied by the tangled swell of traffic, half by Adrian and the matter she wouldn’t have me investigate. Arguments I should have made to her flitted belatedly across my steamed-over brain. But I wasn’t fooling myself. None would have worked.

  Eventually traffic claimed the whole of my attention.

  I got tired of a stringy haired, bare-chested high-school parolee and his stringy haired, nearly bare-chested girlfriend insisting that the rest of the world be treated to an unrequested stereo-cassette blast of the B-12s or B52s or whatever that summer’s sensation was. I cut them off at the pass, left Dodge Street at the base of the hill where the University of Nebraska at Omaha sprawls, and took the wide, rambling lope along Happy Hollow Boulevard (believe it or not). Its decorative border of big green lawns, big brick houses and big leafy trees gave the illusion of coolness, breeziness. The boulevard deposited me, in time, on the Radial, across from my apartment house. Quite a comedown.

  I collected the mail. One of my story payments had finally arrived, along with a group-life offer from a football player, a letter from a computer that was “frankly puzzled” because I had passed up the chance of a lifetime by not entering its sweepstakes the week before, and a picture postcard of the Athens Hilton. It was from Jennifer. I read it on my way up the steel stairs.

  She was in Greece, of course, and having a wonderful time. Again, of course. My wife firmly believed that she was planted on this green earth for no other purpose than to have wonderful times, and she applied herself to this end with truly admirable dedication. Wonderful times, at least by her standards, were scarce in Omaha, however, and I was surely no fun. Jen had left almost six years ago—only a few weeks before Copel and the office furnishings mysteriously vanished. It was quite a couple of months.

  Occasionally she came back, presumably to see if I’d come to my senses yet, if the next time she left for some cosmopolitan capital it’d be with me instead of yet another of her interchangeable, well-tanned young men. We had nothing against one another, you understand—part of the reason, I supposed, neither of us had pursued the option of divorce—we just each had problems that we had come to work on, ultimately, apart.

  Ironically, our problems were similar: we were each running from something—or toward something. Who can tell the difference? I ran by changing jobs and careers; Jen ran by changing addresses and men. After a lot of years I had come to realize that what I was fleeing was within me, and with that realization the need to run evaporated. Jen, apparently, had not yet reached such a conclusion in her case. I read in her card that she was seeing Macedonia with someone called Stephan. It was a new name to me.

  Ah, Jen, who could blame you? Not I. The card went on the bulletin board, along with all the others.

  The apartment was as hospitable as the Spanish Inquisition. I flung open all the windows—even the patio doors, to the immediate and obvious delight of every winged insect within one hundred miles, who swarmed through the wrecked screens. An ancient electric fan was pressed into whining service.

  I opened a bottle of beer. Thought about Jenny. Didn’t like that. Thought about Adrian. Didn’t like that. Thought about The Book. The check that had just come, and the one that was allegedly on its way, meant that I could eke by, though hardly in lavish comfort, a little longer. I certainly could have used the fee I’d hoped for from Adrian, but if I skimped on luxuries like groceries I could pay the rent and still have a week, maybe two, to devote exclusively to The Book before I had to get cracking on a magazine assignment due the end of August. Large blocks of time like that are about as common as charitable collection agencies. When you freelance for a living, you come to accept what sacrifices you have to make in order to grab at them.

  Eagerly, I found my rough notes on the novel, looked them over quickly—I need at least a general idea of where things are headed, even if they ultimately wind up somewhere else—then rummaged for a pen and yellow pad with which to begin blocking out the next sequences.

  Two hours later I looked up. It was 2:30 and the sun had crawled over to the other side of the building, leaving the room considerably dimmer. But no cooler. I remembered reading somewhere that the Chinese advise drinking something hot in order to cool off, so I made a fresh half pot of coffee. The Chinese have the right idea, of course: hot drink makes you perspire, evaporation of perspiration cools. What I forgot was that the air was already supersaturated with moisture, and sweat had no place to evaporate to.

  I dumped the coffee and took another Falstaff from the fridge. The heck with the Chinese.

  Just about then footfalls clanged up the stairs outside. They tap-tap-tapped toward my door and were followed in due course by a sharp rap on the aluminum frame.

  Behind the rap was a young woman, perhaps twenty-eight, with long, curly dark hair and an attractive face—as near as I could tell, because half her face was hidden by goggly opaque sunglasses that made her look like some kind of insect woman from Mars. She was dressed casually in sandals, denim skirt and a T-shirt decorated with the Electric Light Orchestra spaceship in faded reds and blues and yellows. She was small and trim, and held herself in a fashion that suggested total self-assurance.

 
I ambled over.

  “Mr. Nebraska?” she asked in a voice that had a grain to it, like fine wood. “My name is Marcie Bell.”

  It sounded like something out of Disney, but I didn’t comment; I should make fun of people’s names? She wasn’t dressed for door-to-door sales so I owned up to my identity and asked what I could do for her.

  “I need to talk to you about what happened here last night.”

  “Oh?” Innocently.

  “May I please come in?”

  I let her in. She took off the goggle glasses and I saw I was right: she was attractive. Not pretty, however. You had to take in the whole picture. If you studied her too closely, you realized that her nose was a little too big, her mouth a little too masculine, her face a little too broad—and so on. Taken together, it worked. Though Marcie Bell would never be described as “beautiful” in the classic sense, she seemed to charge the very atmosphere with sexiness. I offered her a beer, which she accepted, and we eventually settled in the tiny cluttered living room that I hilariously refer to as my office.

  “Now,” I said, “what about ‘what happened here last night?’ ”

  It didn’t seem to be the opener she expected. “Didn’t—Well, I read it in the morning paper.”

  I’d forgotten the nightside World-Herald reporter. “I take the evening paper,” I said. “I tend to forget there is a morning paper.”

  “There practically isn’t,” she said, which sparked a laugh that put us over the awkwardness.

  “Okay, so what can I do for you?”

  “The paper called you a writer, but the city directory has you listed as a private detective,” she answered a trifle obliquely.