The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1)

by William J. Reynolds

  The old red beast was parked at the curb. I went back to it and got the jack handle from the trunk, wrapped it in a piece of newspaper and strolled nonchalantly back to the house. I didn’t need the crowbar to get into Marcie’s apartment; her door gave easily to my charge card. I carefully locked the door behind me and quickly, cautiously searched the place, trying to leave no clues but not really all that concerned. I didn’t find anything noteworthy.

  After twenty minutes I quit, closed up the place and went down the stairs. Next to the staircase was a short dead-end corridor that provided access to the space below the stairs. That space was walled in, paneled in dark wood that contained one of those hidden doors like you used to see in people’s rec rooms, the kind where you push on a section of the panel and the door pops back, open. This particular secret door was betrayed by the presence of a padlock, a good strong lock that was more than a match for the jack handle. Unfortunately the hasp through which it passed wasn’t.

  The space under the stairs, as I expected, was used as a storage room, musty, dusty and blacker than a total eclipse. I batted blindly and found the string to the lightbulb overhead. It was a dimmer bulb than even I am, but it sufficiently illuminated the room’s few contents: several small boxes crammed into the tapered end where the stairs met the floor, some suitcases just inside the door, a bike, and a man-sized wardrobe trunk standing on its right side under the bulb.

  The trunk was roomy enough to hold a pygmy family. It was also locked, a state that was coming to mean less and less to me.

  I broke into it. It contained everything that was conspicuous by its absence at Eddie Bell’s place: the equipment, the chemicals, the printing paper, the little clock and trays, even the red bulb. I didn’t know much about photography, but it looked to me like everything you’d need to develop film and print pictures. It would be done in a bathroom—Marcie’s bathroom, Marcie who didn’t know of, couldn’t conceive of, her brother’s pornographic endeavors.

  Angrily I went through the half-dozen cardboard drawers in the wardrobe. Scores of photos, many of them the same type as Eddie’s shots of Adrian, the photos I had found in Bell’s room, the photos I expected to be on the film I had given to Pat Costello to develop.

  Adrian appeared in none of these.

  Some of the other photos were different. They were instant photos, Polaroids, and they lacked the clothed man who appeared with his back to the camera in all of Eddie’s pictures. In these shots only women appeared. Sometimes singly, sometimes with another woman.

  Marcie appeared in many of them. She appeared in all of them that featured two women. And six or seven of those starred Marcie and Adrian Mallory.

  The sky was the color of gunmetal and an insistent, hot wind now came from the west. I smelled rain on that wind as it pushed the humidity from the atmosphere and sent a shiver through me. On second thought, perhaps it wasn’t the wind at all that made me shivery.

  I had it in mind that it was now time to have that little talk with Adrian. Not that I had the slightest idea how to begin—or proceed—or wrap up. Somehow she had to be made to realize that her sexual preferences were hardly heinous—hell, lesbian dalliances are the stuff of best-selling novels and made-for-television movies. I knew that Adrian had taken a calculated risk—the risk that someone might recognize her in Bell’s photos versus the certainty that her father would learn about her tastes if she didn’t agree to pose—and that she couldn’t have foreseen the mess that followed. I knew she wanted only to protect her father and her father’s opinion of her. But now she would have to be honest with him, and with herself. That would be hard for both of them, but how else could Mallory prepare himself for what he would soon face?

  Worse still, I had to make her realize that by making the whole story public she might—just might—be able to save her father. Otherwise …

  By the time I reached Adrian’s I needed the headlights, though it was only a little past eight. I buttoned up the car and fought the wind up to the sand-colored building. I was breathless by the time I got there, the wind literally snatched out of me.

  I leaned a little while on the white button next to Adrian’s name, with no response, before I noticed that someone had propped open the security door with an old mover’s trick: a dime stood on edge in the upper corner above the hinge. The coin bit into the soft wood and was all but buried, leaving the door open only a quarter of an inch or less, but that was plenty. I was grateful enough to be in, but I wondered why people thought they had security doors in the first place.

  At Adrian’s door I got as much response as I’d had downstairs. Bruised knuckles is all I got as I tried to straddle the line between rousing her if she was in there and rousing the neighbors if she wasn’t. As it was, I roused no one. Dejectedly went back down the hall on the thick, quiet carpet. Rang for the elevator. Waited. Looked out the window at the nascent storm. Stepped into the elevator car. Hit the door open button. Went back up the hall to Adrian’s.

  I rattled the knob. I’d read enough detective novels to know that it’s the door the hero spends the most time agonizing over that’s the door that isn’t locked.

  Naturally, it was locked. And bolted from within, no doubt. And chained, too, if she was home and simply not answering the door for whatever legitimate reason she might have.

  Nonetheless, I fiddled with it and sprang the knob lock.

  And the door opened.

  I didn’t expect that and I didn’t like it either. If nothing else, the dead bolt should’ve been set, whether Adrian was in or out. Any jerk with a piece of flexible plastic can spring most doorknob locks—I’d just proved that—which is what they make dead bolts for. But I didn’t waste time thinking about it in the hallway, waiting to be discovered. I ducked into the apartment and shut the door silently.

  Motionless, I waited, listened. Nothing, no sound but the noises that simply exist in a home. Subliminal sounds from elsewhere in the building. The refrigerator. The air conditioning. The pendulum clock in the living room. Outside, the wind.

  “Adrian …” It echoed back on me. No one home. And yet the hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention while the little alarms in my brain went off like it was a stickup at Fort Knox. I moved through the place, expecting at every instant to encounter its irate tenant. What if she and a friend were taking a little … nap in the bedroom? Then I would leave. Quickly.

  I breathed again when I reached the bedroom. Empty. The room was a mess—clothes everywhere, bed unmade, drawers half-open and spilling over—but that didn’t mean anything; so was my room.

  The bathroom was across the hall. As big as my bedroom, too, I noted enviously. I won’t even say how big her bedroom was. The bath was designed by someone who had some understanding of what the room was used for: it was actually two small parallel rooms. First you entered a carpeted chamber containing linen closet, vanity with sink and mirrored cabinet, and a full-length three-sided mirror like in a department store. To the left was a door, behind which, I figured, were the toilet and tub. Thus could one member of the family bathe while another shaved in an unsteamed mirror. Positive genius.

  I tried the inside door. It was locked. I rapped on it and called Adrian’s name. I heard nothing from the other side but the slow, regular drip of water into water. When I turned off the lights in my half of the room and looked under the door, I saw no light from the other side. I put my weight against the door very suddenly and the lock popped easily. The light switch was where you’d expect it to be.

  Adrian was in the bathtub and the water was a dark, dark pink, running to red.

  I don’t know how long it was before I could move. A minute, perhaps two. Seemed like forever, though, as I stood and looked at her. She was very beautiful and very pale. She looked asleep. Her eyes were closed and the look in her face was restful, even beatific. Entering the room was like entering a shrine.

  There was no pulse
in her neck. I knew there would be none; the water was too red for that. I reached into it—it was still warm—and lifted one slender arm. She knew what she was doing. The slashes, which started at her wrists where they met the hands, were long and deep and with, not across, the veins. Beyond the sharp pain of a half-dozen razor lacerations, death was painless for her.

  If I had talked to her after seeing Mallory …

  Who could say? I didn’t know then and I don’t know now what I’d’ve said to her that would’ve made anything different. I’ll never know.

  A brown towel lay near her on the floor. I wiped my hands on it and put it back where it had been, near an almost empty glass. Scotch. Maybe it had helped deaden the pain of the slashes. And the other pain, the one that made the slashes seem less painful by comparison.

  I forced myself to look at her again, her naked limbs, white turning to blue, the discolored bath water. There was nothing else to see, because the razor blade was in the other room, on the sink. It was rinsed clean. That’s something suicides don’t often worry about. Even if they’ve figured out how to cut their wrists, wash off the blade and hop into a tub six feet away in another room—without spilling a drop of blood in between.

  I shut off the lights and left the bathroom.

  For the sake of completeness I checked out the kitchen. It looked like a page out of a magazine. A single glass stood in the stainless steel sink. It smelled faintly of bourbon. I didn’t touch it.

  On my way back to the front door, something glinting in the deep pile carpet caught my eye. I bent over and retrieved it. Then I left, setting the doorknob lock—the only one that could be set from outside without a key—and twisting my hand on it to ruin the fingerprints. Mine and anyone else’s.

  The wind continued to rise, though the rain delayed its appearance. The night went prematurely black; no moon, no stars. Branches swayed and whispered harshly at the wind. Panes rattled and whistled in their frames.

  I sat in the dark and listened. It seemed to be building to a climax, a crescendo, like a Rossini overture. In the meantime an odd and rather disturbing calm seemed to have settled over me. For no good reason, no good apparent reason, at least. It bothered me a little. Not enough to see what I could do about it, though.

  Marcie Bell returned to her place at 9:09. I know, because I was there, in the blackness, waiting.

  I heard, above the wind, her car door slam dully. I heard her at the downstairs door. I heard her struggle up the stairs, evidently carrying something large and unwieldy if not terribly heavy. I heard her key scrape metallically in the lock, which conscientious me had reset for her. I heard her enter the apartment. And I heard her gasp a little shriek when she threw the room into light and saw me sitting in the center of the couch. She dropped her burden, a beat-up brown suitcase I recognized as the one in Eddie Bell’s closet, and put a hand to her breast dramatically. “My God, what’s the matter with you—you get your kicks scaring me to death?”

  “Sorry,” I said unapologetically.

  She shoved the suitcase out of the way with her foot, slammed the door and locked it. “And just what the hell are you doing here anyway?”

  “Waiting for you.”

  “Uh-huh. And how’d you get in here—as if I didn’t already know.”

  “Nobody’s a saint, Marcie,” I reminded her. I couldn’t read the look that came into her eyes. Probably she didn’t want me to. At any rate, she abruptly broke eye contact and stormed into the little kitchen, to the phone on the wall.

  “You can just tell that to the cops, buddy. I don’t think they’ll care much for your habit of breaking into anyplace you want to—or for your wit, either.”

  She lifted the receiver and dialed the first digit.

  “Put down the phone.” I said it quietly.

  She could hear the sound but not the words. It made her step back into the living room, stretching the coiled cord to its limit. “What?”

  “I said put down the phone. Or I’ll use it to hammer out your teeth.”

  “You’ve gone crazy,” she said in a kind of awestruck voice. But she cradled the receiver, then came halfway back into the living room, between, I noticed, me and the door. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “As you say, I’ve gone crazy, at least a little. That’s not so bad. What’s worse, I think, is that I’m coming back from it.”

  She was shaking her head. I wasn’t looking at her, but peripherally I could see the motion of her dark head wagging sadly. “You’re not even making sense.”

  I said, “I tried phoning you at work today.”

  “Is that it? Oh, honey … I decided not to go in after all. I was halfway there and I got to thinking about what you’d said—you know, about how they’d give me the day off if I asked—and then I realized that I really didn’t feel up to it. That I wanted to be alone—which is why I didn’t call you—and that I had plenty of things to do, Eddie’s stuff to take care of …”

  “The sum total of Eddie’s worldly possessions wouldn’t take you more than twenty minutes to assemble and cart away.”

  “Well, I didn’t approach it like a timed test. You know, the place was kind of a mess; I straightened up a little, did the dishes, packed them—that kind of thing. Organized what precious little he had.”

  “That’s still hardly five hours’ worth.”

  Her eyes congealed into shiny bits of ebony. “I had some other things to do, too, all right? Some shopping. Some thinking. Mostly I just wanted some time to be alone.”

  “Alone with Adrian Mallory.”

  She frowned. “Is that a name that’s supposed to mean something to me?”

  “Unless you’re having severe short-term memory problems. You were at her apartment on Seventy-second Street today, sometime between, oh, four-thirty and six-thirty, seven.”

  “I don’t know any Adrian—Mallory?—and I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I resent your questions and your attitude and your being here. And I’d appreciate it if you’d just get out—now.”

  Instead I produced the shiny artifact I’d snatched from Adrian’s carpet on my way out. Marcie’s eye caught it, the way a cat catches something moving quickly, and her hand went to her throat, where no necklace rested.

  “I told you to get the clasp fixed,” I said.

  She stared at the serpentine chain as if it were in fact a snake. The gold cross rotated slowly and deflected light rays from the room’s only lamp.

  “It took me a while to get a handle on it,” I admitted while she stared. “Too long a while, which only goes to show that I’ve been out of the game too long and probably never should have been in it, at least not this kind of deadly game. I had little glimmers, little fitful stirrings, but I didn’t even begin to awaken until this afternoon.” And only through sheer dumb chance, I could have added, but why spoil the myth that detectives solve everything through pure sterling reasoning, when in fact ninety-nine percent of “detective” work consists of little more than bumbling around until you trip over something valuable?

  “Even then, I was none too swift on the uptake. I still couldn’t figure how to connect a senator’s daughter to a two-bit pornographer like Eddie Bell. That came later.”

  I expected another impassioned defense of the brother, but none was forthcoming. The blood did go out of her face until she was white, though not as white as Adrian in her bathtub. She stood there dumbly, as if I’d struck her between the eyes with a club. Her arms hung loose at her sides, which made me think of Alice the Goon from the Popeye cartoons. Most people are always doing something with their arms—folding them, putting their hands on their hips, fiddling with their hair. Something. But Marcie just stood, as if she’d forgotten about her arms.

  Then I became aware of a low moaning in the room, a sound I originally took to be a change in the pitch of the howling wind but which was in fact comin
g from Marcie, whose face now reddened and twisted into a tearful pattern, though no tears came, just that eerie, unsettling moan. It ended, finally, on a little sigh of air. “I never wanted to see her hurt,” Marcie whined in a voice laced with anguish. “I never wanted to see her cry. I loved her.”

  I waited. Sooner or later the story would come. And it did: Adrian and Marcie had met a few months earlier; I didn’t quite catch how or where but it didn’t seem an important enough point to ask after it. They became friends, as will happen, and started doing things together—going out for a drink, taking in a flick. Eventually, but, Marcie seemed to believe, inevitably the relationship “heightened,” to use her word. They became lovers, she and Adrian. It was a new experience for them both, and, naturally, they spent a good deal of time exploring it. “I’m not a lesbian,” Marcie told me, “though I did love Adrian dearly. I was just … curious, I guess. To see what it’d be like. And it was marvelous, it really was. But I couldn’t see it as a way of life, you know? I like men too much—as you possibly have noticed.” This last was delivered with a heavy-lidded look that I ignored. She went on:

  “But Adrian really got into it. I mean, she jumped in headfirst and never came up for air. She wanted to do everything, try everything at least once. It was as if,” Marcie said with a bittersweet nostalgic smile, “she was making up for lost time.”

  It was a fairly deep thought. If I were a good psychologist or Lew Archer, I probably could’ve made something pithy out of it. I’m no psychologist, though, and I’m certainly not Archer. I couldn’t make anything out of it except to wonder if Adrian was not in fact compensating for lost time, for years lost looking for something, some kind of love, some kind of caring she felt she had missed. Dan Mallory loved her, I knew, but perhaps it wasn’t enough, or the right kind. I’d never know the answer to that one, either. But I hoped very hard that maybe she found a little of it, that maybe for a brief instant she had, or even just thought she had, whatever it was she wanted so badly.