The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1)

by William J. Reynolds

  “You’re very thorough,” I said casually, while mentally, hopping up onto my toes. “I’m sort of in the process of retiring from keyhole-peeping. However, I can recommend some fine investigators, if you like.”

  Her dark eyebrows drew down over her dark eyes. “I already have a private detective. Had, I mean. I thought maybe you were working with him. His name was Morris Copel.”

  I straightened myself in the armchair I occupied. “I wasn’t, and that he was working for you is news to me. Have you contacted the police?”

  Marcie Bell shook her head.

  “Why on earth not?”

  She sipped her beer before answering and it occurred to me, apropos of nothing, that it was cloddish of me not to have given her a glass. “I hired Copel the day before yesterday,” she said, “and he was supposed to call me today with a report. But I read in the paper that he was killed last night. You were quoted in the story, so I looked you up and found out you’re a detective, too. I thought maybe Copel had called you in as a consultant or whatever, and I was hoping you’d know if he had something to tell me. So I decided to talk to you before I talked to the police.” She made it sound on a par with deciding whether to have apple or cherry pie for dessert.

  “The police are going to be offended that you waited,” I said, amazed at her casual manner. Amazed and, I admit, a little impressed. You’d’ve thought she went through this sort of thing every other Tuesday. I thought she’d made a stupid decision, but I liked the go-to-hell attitude it seemed to imply.

  She might’ve sensed that. A little smile attached itself to her too-wide mouth. It was girlish or wicked, depending how you looked at it. “Well,” she said slowly, slyly, “maybe I take the evening paper, like you, so I won’t even find out about it for another three or four hours.” The little smile grew up and she showed me a lot of ivory teeth. I smiled right back, but behind mine all the familiar warning lights were going on, part of the alarm system you develop after years of dealing with “types.” Calculating-type, the lights flashed about Marcie Bell. Don’t put your hands through the bars.

  “I’m afraid Copel died before he could tell me anything,” I said. I didn’t mention the negatives; why should I? “Could I ask what he was investigating for you?”

  She toyed with a gold serpentine chain around her neck. A tiny gold crucifix dangled from it. “You can ask,” she said ambiguously. “But why? Are you interested in taking over the case?”

  “Not necessarily,” I hedged. What I was interested in, of course, was whether or how Adrian Mallory’s pictures added into the new equation that seemed to be forming before me. “I’m just curious,” I said. “It’s none of my business, of course, except,” I added significantly, “that Copel did seek me out before he cashed it in.”

  You could almost see her take the hook, and deep. With someone of a different “type” I might’ve felt bad about setting her up so blatantly. But turnabout’s fair play, they say. So out went my little piece of psychological bait, and Marcie snatched it before it even broke the surface. “You think he was coming to talk to you about my case?” she said, losing the fight to keep eagerness out of her eyes and voice.

  “He wasn’t coming to look at my scrap books.”

  She hesitated, but self-interest or selfishness had already goaded her into deciding to confide in me, even against her better judgement. “My brother’s disappeared. I hired Copel to look for him.” The words tumbled out of her like circus midgets spilling out of a Volkswagen.

  “Then tell me about it.” Unnecessary prodding; she could no more stop the wordflow than you can decide to stop your next heartbeat.

  Marcie Bell nodded. “Why not? I’ve been through it already with Copel; it’s still fresh in my mind.” She adjusted her denimed backside into a more comfortable story-telling position. “You kind of have to know Eddie,” she began. “He was never much of one to stay put. He no sooner hit the legal age than, bang! he was out of school and on the road. I don’t think he’s spent more than a year in any one spot since then. Had the wanderlust from the beginning, Daddy used to say.” I cringed. Come the revolution, anyone over the age of ten who uses the words daddy and mommy to refer to his parents will be incarcerated; anyone who uses mummy in reference to anything not in the Egyptology section of a museum will be shot.

  In any event, Eddie Bell, it seemed, was a drifter who could be expected to drop into your life with all the predictability of a lightning bolt—and stick around about as long each time. Almost six months ago his trail had taken him through Omaha again. “Usually he just takes over my couch,” Marcie told me, “but this time he found a place of his own after a week or so—just a little fleabag apartment house downtown. He seemed to be planning to stay a while. But a couple weeks ago he just up and vanished.”

  “From what you tell me, that’s not unusual for him.”

  “Not if he’s going to be gone a few days, or even a week. Any longer than that, though, he’ll always let me know. Eddie may roam, and we’re not really what you’d call all that close, but he’s never really out of touch with me. These last four years, we’re the only family each other has.”

  “Did you go to the police?” I asked her again.

  She looked past me and out the front door. “Not … exactly.”

  “It’s a yes-or-no question,” I said irritably. “You can’t ‘not exactly’ go to the police. I’ll assume you didn’t. How come?”

  She looked away from the door and back at me. “I can trust you, can’t I?”

  “Probably.” Ask an idiotic question …

  She took a breath. “Eddie’s no angel, as you may have guessed,” she said. “Fact is, he’s been in trouble with the police a few times. Never anything really serious—drunk driving, pot smoking, selling a little. That sort of thing. So—just in case—I didn’t want to go to the police.”

  “And that’s why you hired someone like Copel.”

  “You mean a private detective?”

  Very smooth. I shook my head and smiled in appreciation. “Guess again, Marcie. Let’s quit dancing around it, hmm? You’re a sharp woman—the city directory and all that—so you know that, legally, Copel was as much a private detective as I am a Miss America finalist. Why would you hire someone like that instead of a genuine P.I.? Because you know that a legit eye, even a slightly shady one, who had any interest in keeping his license and keeping out of the slammer—which is to say all of them—would call the cops right now if he went looking for your brother and found him in the middle of something illegal. I know that all the good TV shows are packed with contrary indications, but trust me: most private cops are fond of the habit of eating, and they find it difficult to support if their licenses are yanked.

  “But someone like Morris Copel—who not only had no license to lose in the first place but who was only infrequently on this side of the law—has no such moral compunction. As I’m sure you realized.” Marcie was frowning again, but thoughtfully, not angrily. “You stop me when I’ve told a fib,” I added.

  She seemed to become aware of her frowning and quit it. “Don’t worry,” she said. “I will.”

  “Good. So what have we got? Your brother, Eddie, disappears and you send Copel after him and Copel comes back with alterations. If I were to venture an uneducated guess, I’d say Eddie is for certain involved in something … unpleasant, at least.”

  Her rather boyish mouth set itself and she shook her dark head. “No,” she insisted with quiet firmness. “I told you, Eddie’s never been involved in anything serious—certainly nothing that anyone would get killed over. My God, we’re talking booze and dope—grass! That’s kid stuff.”

  I didn’t tell her that kid stuff like that can have long and sticky lines that end in unsavory places where people could and often did get hurt. Instead, I said, “What do you think he’s involved in now?”

  “I don’t know that he’
s involved in anything,” she repeated. You had to admire her loyalty. “But I don’t want to involve the police anyhow. Like I said, just in case.”

  “Very sisterly of you,” I said. “Unfortunately, Copel’s killing complicates it a mite. See, the police are kind of wondering why the man was worked over and finished off. What he was working on when he got it—that is, your brother’s disappearance—probably has a better-than-even chance of shedding some light on it. There’s a Lieutenant Oberon in the Walnut Hill station house, practically around the corner, who I can guarantee will give you and your story his undivided attention.”

  She made a clicking sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “Maybe I’d better talk to Lieutenant Oberon.”

  “Maybe you’d better, because he’s a good man and he’ll probably unravel this thing back to you anyway, at which time his feelings’ll be hurt because you wouldn’t come see him voluntarily. I’m being a wise-ass, but it’s true. Make it easy on yourself and go see Oberon before he comes after you.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said with certainty. “But what about you? Are you going to look for my brother?”

  “The cops’ll do that. For free.”

  “The cops have a lot to do, including solving at least one murder. And Daddy used to say, you get what you pay for.”

  “Daddy seems to have had something to say for every possible occasion. Was he with Hallmark?”

  She ignored it. “What do you have to say about this occasion?”

  I’d been stalling, mostly because, while I didn’t give two hoots for her brother’s disappearance or even Copel’s death, the two events were obviously linked, and the case looked to be entwined with Adrian Mallory’s—which I was interested in, though I can’t tell you why I should’ve been. Besides, though I’d hoped to spend some time on The Book, I was still a little short in the bucks department, and Marcie Bell could help out there.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll need a photograph of Eddie, an address and a retainer.” What the hell, I thought. The kid was probably shacked up with some cookie someplace. I’d track him down in a day, two at the outside, and plunge back into my major opus with a freer mind.

  “I could only find one picture of Eddie,” Marcie was saying as she rummaged through a purse bigger than some Sears stores, “and I gave it to Copel. I’m sure I have others, they’re just packed away somewhere. Should I look?”

  “It’d be a help,” I said, unhappy with the idea of looking for someone I didn’t even have a snapshot of. “Can you at least describe him to me?”

  “He looks a lot like me, only he’s taller and skinnier. Same coloring, though, and people say we look the same around the eyes and mouth.” She passed me a slip of pink notepaper on which she’d written Bell’s address in blue block letters.

  “Do you have a key to the place?”

  “I had one, but I gave that to Copel, too.”

  I didn’t much like that, either. It turned a simple look-see into breaking and entering, and Oberon would be unhappy enough that I was easing into the fringes of his investigation. If I crossed paths with him, a B&E would be about all he’d need to put me away until I had a long white beard down to the floor. I pushed that out of my head—Oberon had no knowledge of Bell’s existence, much less Copel’s involvement in the matter. Yet. Besides, I had every intention of steering clear of the lieutenant.

  Marcie peeled a leaf from a checkbook covered in yellow plastic that was supposed to resemble wicker weaving. “Is this enough? It’s what I gave Copel.”

  The check was drawn on an Omaha bank. The amount was enough to get started on. I said as much and added, “If it takes that long, I’ll need the same every other day, plus expenses.”

  She sucked some humid air through her teeth and made it sound sexy. “That’s a lot more than Copel needed.”

  “Yeah, and look what all you got from him. Like Daddy said, you about get what you pay for.”

  “Okay,” she finally, dubiously, said. “But that means I better see some results fast. When will you get started?”

  I folded her check away. “Just as soon as I get off the phone to your bank.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Actually, I was out the door and down the steel stairs as soon as I saw Marcie Bell’s green Le Car make the turn from Decatur onto the Radial, heading south. I hopped into the old Chevy and pointed it in the other direction, up the steep Decatur hill to Military Street, threading through neighborhoods that had seen better days many, many days ago. I ended up on Burt Street where it curves past the sand-colored edifices of Creighton University, standing as its own monument to alumni donations.

  Eventually I was downtown, on Fifteenth near the Missouri River, literally in the shade of the I–480 overpass. Eddie Bell’s address translated into a lonely old three-story brownstone that should’ve been razed decades ago. Maybe they were waiting for the wind to take care of it: the firetrap looked like the next stiff breeze would do it in. With the weather as it had been, though, there was no immediate worry.

  I parked across the street, near a Safeway that had been converted into a salvage operation. A mangy, scarred bulldog yapped at me from the other side of a chain link fence with double spikes at the top. From somewhere inside the ex-supermarket a black woman’s voice slashed through the incessant drone of traffic on the ramp overhead. She had plans for the dog if he didn’t shut up. The dog ignored her.

  I crossed the pockmarked street and mounted the brownstone’s crumbling steps. The elements had bleached the old wooden door to a faded roughness. Some optimist trying to convince a breeze to enter the place had propped the door open a foot or so with a chunk of asphalt from the street. I went in.

  Marijuana, cooking-grease and urine, in that order, hit me as I came through the door. To say the place was terrible is unfair to terrible places. The joint was dark and dingy, evil-smelling, run down to the point where it was practically a caricature of run-downness. I didn’t want to believe that people lived in such places. But the odors, the few names on the chipped and jimmied mailboxes in the first-floor hall, and the faraway, tinny sound of AM radio wouldn’t allow me the fiction.

  Eddie Bell’s room was on the top floor. I went up a couple flights of stairs that looked as if they might’ve been new when Roosevelt—Teddy—was president, skirting a large black char where the stairs and part of the wall had been marred in a long-ago fire, staying clear of the peeling walls and dusty, littered corners.

  The room I wanted was the last one along the hall. From another apartment on the floor came, loudly, the tinny music I had heard downstairs, the Commodores, oozing through the smudged gray walls like they weren’t even there.

  A long time ago the door to Eddie Bell’s apartment had been white; now it was a color there’s not even a name for. There was no number, only the ghostly after-image of one that had fallen off long since. I knocked sharply, authoritatively. No noise, except for the Commodores. I knocked again. The Commodores got a little louder. Back down the hall an emaciated blonde of sixteen or seventeen was standing in an opened door, one bikinied hip thrust aggressively, meager breasts prodding defiantly at a soiled T-shirt. Her parody of sexiness was more than a little depressing. Her hair, her hands, and her feet were filthy. I had the quick and suffocating impression that filth coated everything in this place—including me, eventually, if I stayed too long.

  I walked half the distance toward her.

  “I’m looking for the man who lives here,” I said.

  Her unpainted mouth parted in a sneer. “I figured.” The Commodores quit behind her and were replaced by a black man’s bass voice growling and buzzing against the radio’s cheap speaker.

  “Is he around?”

  “He didn’t answer his door, did he? Guess maybe you’ll have to come back later.” She was a tough little piece, she thought, with a chip the size of the Woodman Tower on
her shoulder.

  “Maybe I’ll just talk to you instead,” I said importantly, taking a few more steps her direction and reaching for my wallet. “I’m Sergeant Preston of OPD Narcotics—”

  I had the wallet out but before I could show her the badge that wasn’t there, she sputtered, “Hey, man, I don’t know nothin’ about that one. I don’t even know his name. Me and my old man, we mind our own business.” The door went shut like it was on a spring and I heard a chain rattle into place behind it.

  Before putting my wallet back I took out my Brandeis credit card. Then I went to Bell’s door and used the plastic strip in a way that the department store hadn’t intended. No feat; in that neighborhood any eight year old can do the same thing. Probably faster.

  The room—it was only one room, with a curtained-off semi-alcove for a kitchen—exhaled bottled-up heat as soon as I opened the door. I shut and locked the door behind me and took off my sport coat. No one would have his windows shut tight in heat like we’d been dragging ass through, but Bell’s were latched down until I opened them wide. The current heat wave had begun over a week ago. No one had been here since then. Lived here, I corrected myself. I had to keep in mind that Copel had likely been here before me. I threw my coat on the unmade sofabed and started poking around.

  The kitchen contained a sink of dirty dishes resting like sunken ships in cold gray water; a gas range; a clattering fridge; a mouse that beat it under the stove when I parted the faded flower-print curtains; a loaf of moldy bread the mouse had been lunching on; a bottle of milk that had gone beyond sour in the icebox. Sherlock Holmes would have known how long that took; I had no idea. An empty rye bottle and the bag it came in were in the grocery sack that served as a wastebasket.

  In the living room was the bed that you were supposed to fold into a couch by day, a sad-looking green armchair with a crooked antimacassar, a flimsy coffee table and a floor lamp. In the chair a newspaper, folded to the Ak-Sar-Ben racing results, had gone stiff and was yellowed on the side facing the nearest window. It was the July sixth morning edition of the World-Herald. Today was the seventeenth.