I asked Farnsworth to let me know if he heard from Mrs. Blair and he promised he would. He also promised to have the bank call him if Mrs. Blair wrote a check on the store account. He also promised to call if he remembered anything that might be helpful.
I was halfway down the steps from the loft, giving some thought to my next move, when Farnsworth called me back. “There’s one thing,” he said when I got back to his office.
“My shame is bottomless,” he began apologetically. “But I suppose I must tell you this. I hope you understand.” He took a deep breath. “For a period of several weeks, back when my infatuation was at its peak, I used to follow Tessa when she left work at the end of the day. Just to watch her, to see what she did with the rest of her life. To make her just a little more mine, I suppose. Can you believe it?”
“Sure. I make a living doing the same thing.”
Farnsworth smiled. “Thank you for that, but it’s not the same and you know it. Anyhow, a few weeks after I started my little espionage, Tessa saw me. I knew if she discovered me again she’d realize what I was doing and most likely leave the store for good, so I stopped.”
“What kinds of things did she do?”
“The usual, mostly. But one time she did do something rather strange.”
“What?”
“She went to a completely disgusting place down on Tenth and Oswego, off El Camino. You know where that is?”
I shook my head. It was the third time Oswego Street had been mentioned, though each time by a different person. I began to get interested in the neighborhood.
“Well, it’s a rough area. Perfectly filthy. Warehouses, a few slums, some tacky stores.”
“What did she do down there?”
“She parked outside a decrepit old warehouse and went inside and stayed for almost an hour.”
“Which warehouse was it?”
“There was a sign on it, something like El Gordo Industries, I think, but I couldn’t tell what kind of business it was. Frankly, it looked abandoned. Quarantined, even.”
“Anything else happen?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact. After Tessa was inside the warehouse, this rather seedy-looking family—husband, wife, and child—drove up in a truck of all things, and they all piled out and went inside the same building. That is, the woman and the child did. The man stayed in the truck and smoked. Then finally Tessa came back out and left, so I did, too.”
“Was she still by herself?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ask her about it?”
“Of course not. She’d have known I was following her.”
“When was this?”
“About a year ago. Maybe longer.”
“Ever see any of the people again?”
“No.”
“Did you get the license number of the truck?”
“No. Why would I?”
“Anything else you can tell me about it?”
“Not really. It just seemed strange, is all.”
I thought so, too.
I thanked Farnsworth and trotted down the loft steps. As I passed her along the way, Fawn Forest waved and smiled and tickled my ears with the sound of her bells.
7
I reentered the acquisitive swirl of the mall and headed back to where I’d parked—aisle 6, row 13 of Tulip Lot, between Hyacinth and Gardenia lots—but when I saw a pay phone rising like a periscope out of a bed of azaleas, I sat down on the bench across from it and waited for a girl in clear plastic slacks and a crocheted bikini halter to finish her call. From the look on her face, the party on the other end was her lover or her savior or her pusher. I had a feeling that for her they each performed the same function.
For the next several minutes I watched people shop, watched them glide from store to store with movements more feline than human, acquiring merchandise that would have made their grandparents quail and consult the Bible for both an explanation and an admonition. We already have too much but we want still more. It’s a disease that no one wants to cure.
Without meaning to, I began thinking over what I knew about the Blair case. A few seconds later I did something more productive—I thought about what I didn’t know about the case. That was the surprise, of course, how little anyone knew about Teresa Blair, and what different aspects she presented to the various people who thought they knew her well. To her husband she was the perfect if somewhat distant spouse; to Tancy Verritt she was a fellow swinger who used sex like a dueling pistol; to Fawn Forest she was a motherly confidante; to Elliott Farnsworth, an irresistible siren; to Kathryn Martin, a psychological prop. It seemed possible that, like most people who try to be all things to all people, the real Teresa Blair might not in fact exist at all. Luckily, I hadn’t been hired to find out what she was. Only where.
The girl in the plastic pants moved away and I put in a call to my answering service. Both Kathryn Martin and James Blair had called. I tried Mrs. Martin at home but got no answer. James Blair was in his office; his voice sounded weary and wary. He wanted to know if I’d come up with anything. I told him I hadn’t.
“I’ve trained myself not to express emotion,” Blair said slowly. “You should not assume from this that I have none, Mr. Tanner. I want Teresa back. Very badly.”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said, then waited for him to go on. When he didn’t, I replaced the receiver, looked up the Lane Starr Agency in the Yellow Pages and jotted the address in my notebook, dodged three girls on roller skates and one man on muscatel, and found the Tulip Lot. I pointed my Buick south. By the time I’d gone a mile, I’d spotted the green car that had tailed me the day before. I let it tag along.
Oswego Street east of El Camino ran along the extreme south edge of the city. The area was mostly industrial and mostly decayed, a jumble of buildings that had lost both color and utility over the years. On the north side of town were the new industries—the microcircuit plants, the software manufacturers, the solar engineers—but on the south side were the businesses that time had left bruised and orphaned—the foundries, the asphalt contractors, the steel fabricators, the rail yards. And in the middle of the warehouses and the freight depots and storage tanks and mounds of rock and sand were the people that time had left adrift as well—the old and the sick and the poor—wedged into bungalows and apartments that crumbled minute by doleful minute, from a lack of hope as much as from a lack of funds.
The intersection of Ninth and Oswego was nothing special, its chief features a pothole the size of Nebraska and an abandoned Texaco station that was sprayed with enough graffiti to fill the Egyptian Book of the Dead. The buildings were flush with the streets—no set-back zoning for this part of town—and the lines for the crosswalks has been obliterated by decades of commercial traffic. Even an alert driver would have had trouble avoiding a man who staggered from between two buildings and into his path. For someone driving as fast as Fluto had been, it would be virtually impossible.
The warehouse Elliott Farnsworth had seen Teresa Blair enter was just one block down. It was old, naturally, its shell a scaly, dusty brick. Tar had leaked over the flat roof and streaked the face of the building with black, perpetual tears. The windows high in the walls had all been targets for neighborhood sharpshooters. We did the same thing when I was young, but with rocks. I didn’t even want to guess what kind of weaponry the current crop of kids had used.
I walked around the place, fear gradually becoming a tangible presence in the pit of my stomach. There was a lake of filth on the ground, as though it had recently rained garbage. Beneath the filth was dirt the color of dawn, baked bone-hard. Against the back fence was a ramshackle structure built from discarded shipping crates, oil drums, and sheets of corrugated tin. A sound came from inside it, a rustling sound. I made no effort to learn if it was a rat or a man or something worse than either.
The bay doors on the side of the building were locked, their fittings rusted, unused for years. The wooden freight dock listed above rotten pilings. A dolly with on
e wheel missing leaned against the wall, crippled and abandoned. An engine block lay in the middle of the freight yard, valve covers and pistons missing, its cylinders as black as mortars. I went back around to the front.
There was nothing elaborate about the main entrance. A single small door was cut into the wall at the right corner. The sign over it read El Gordo Industrial Services—Contractors Use Rear Entrance. I tried the knob, but it was frozen. The fit between the door and jamb was loose, however, the wood soft and yielding as I scratched at it with my knife. The dead bolt was loose as well, and would almost certainly break clear if I applied enough pressure. I glanced up and down the deserted block, then walked back to my car and climbed inside and debated whether to commit a felony.
I turned the key and flipped on the radio and closed my eyes and leaned back and thought about breaking and entering for a while. The girl singing through the radio was called Blondie, but she didn’t sound like anyone Dagwood ever knew. When the song ended I shook my head and opened my eyes.
There were nine of them, as young and vivid as dreams, sauntering down the street to the pulse of some rhythm and blues that spurted like blood from a tape deck the size of a tire that one of them balanced on his shoulder and pressed to his ear. They were different shapes and sizes, even different sexes, but they were a monolith all the same, a many-footed, hydra-headed juggernaut that owned the world or this part of it.
While I struggled to become fully awake the gang spotted me and began to approach my car, moving surely and silently, as though specifically assigned to nullify me. Their shirts, even the girls’, were cut off at the shoulders and the sternum, revealing rolling arms and sculpted bellies and the lower arc of breasts. From half a block away they had seen everything about me that was relevant—I was white and I was alone and I was on their turf and I wasn’t a cop. By the time I decided I’d be better off outside the car it was too late to get there.
They swarmed over the Buick, leaning on the doors and fenders, sitting on the hood and trunk. I was a corpse in a glass coffin. One girl and a bullet-headed boy I decided was the leader watched the action from a distance, alert for a new and thrilling variation on the theme. Words came at me like bats. Bristly spheres of hair bobbed beyond the windows, as menacing as brandished maces. I was fully awake and fully afraid, the fear was as real as it was irrational. When one of them backed away from the door for an instant, I opened it and clambered outside, fleeing my carriage to the grave.
“Hey, pops.”
“What’s shakin’, motherfucker?”
“You lost, Jack?”
“You dealing, man?”
The leader took a step forward, his eyes ablaze with atavistic cunning. The rest of them fell silent. “Only two reasons a white man come down here, friend,” he said mildly, his voice accented and slurred. “To pick up the rent or to pick up some pussy. Which you after?” He smiled with lethal friendliness. He had played this game before.
I didn’t say anything. The leader turned toward the girl. “Hey, Wanda. I think the dude here is after some of that Rutland Avenue pussy. You figure his dick will reach thar far?”
“Ain’t no white man’s dick gonna reach that far.”
“You the one that knows, Wanda.”
And with the girl’s low laugh and the leader’s false grin the gibing and strutting, the smiles and sneers and curses, began again, and what it all came down to was that they weren’t sure just yet whether they were looking for fun or for blood, or whether there was any longer a reason to choose one over the other. For long minutes I could think of no response that wouldn’t increase my risk.
“Do you live around here?” I asked, looking at the leader.
His lips were strangely soft and feminine, but the eyes above them were from the center of the earth. For a long time nothing above his neck had moved. “What’s it to you, man?” he asked finally.
“I’m interested in that building over there,” I said and pointed. “Any idea who owns it?”
“You gonna move in, man? Bust the block? Ruin the fucking property values?” His smile was sarcastic, almost sadly so.
“The man gonna put in a disco. Gonna bring Sister fucking Sledge down here to sing to the blood.”
“Naw, he gonna put in one of them community action centers, to get the brothers thinking more about the white man’s politics than about his own black self.”
“I bet it be one of them condofuckingminiums. With a view of the ghetto for the man.”
The leader held up his hand and the jesting stopped. “We interested in you, pops,” he said softly. “You got any money to pay for learning the shit about that building?”
“A little.”
“How little?”
“Twenty.”
“Shit.”
“Twenty-five, if it’s good.”
“Get it out.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I said get the bread out, man.”
“It’s bad business to pay before receiving the merchandise. You tell me about the building; I hand you the money.”
“You do your business down here, pops, I the one say what’s good business and what ain’t. Now get it out.” He held out his hand, palm up. The ivory fingers seemed to accuse me of something, perhaps two hundred years of abominations.
I shook my head.
The leader snapped his fingers. I heard a whir and a click, the sound of a blade snapping out of a sheath and locking. They moved in close around me in the next few seconds, driving me back against the car door.
Time was dead. The one with the knife moved to where I could see him and began waving it with the grace of Stokowski. I looked to see if Grinder’s men in their green car were anywhere around, and when I didn’t spot them, I spent some time planning what I would do when the knife made its move. The plan wasn’t worth a damn.
“The dude drives a Buick, Leon.”
The voice came from somewhere behind me. It sounded like the girl Wanda but I couldn’t be sure and couldn’t afford to look. “He gotta be a pig. I say we leave him be.”
“You remember what Buck say about that building, Leon. He say don’t mess with it.”
“Yeah, Leon. Besides, Sly’s holding some China White over on Wabash. He won’t wait, man. Leave the motherfucker be.”
I didn’t see who they were, my saviors because I still had my eye on the kid with the knife. The only sound was the scrape of shoes on the street.
Leon thought it over. Although I did nothing but live and breathe, he finally backed off. Moving as slow as Sunday, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a black leather pouch, then dipped his little finger in it and extracted some powder in the crescent of his half-inch fingernail. With a face that showed neither pleasure nor pain he snorted the powder up a nostril then turned and walked on down the street. Wanda snuggled quickly to his side. The others fell into place behind them and ambled off, as full of life as tiger cubs, as beautiful and as deadly and as branded from the day of birth.
Leon and his friends had exhausted my ration of courage. I had no desire to prowl in empty buildings, peek in dark huts, challenge hidden rooms. I got back in my car and drove two blocks and parked again.
The Moran Building was the centerpiece of an Oswego Street commercial oasis that, like its surroundings, had seen better days, though not recently. Still, the area had a cosmopolitan air to it, with an Italian market and an Irish saloon sharing the block with a taco stand and an S. S. Kresge and a soul food café. The Moran Building itself sheltered Mimi’s House of Beauty and a cigar store at the street level. Directly above, the words “Notary Public,” and “Income Tax” were printed on a third-story window in yellow enamel. I went inside.
There was no building directory but there were stairs and I took them. My shoes caused the grit on the steps to crackle.
On the second floor Marilyn Montegna, Public Stenographer, shared the fetid dimness with a real estate broker and a credit dentist. The two other offices had For
Rent signs taped to their doors. I kept climbing.
The third floor had even fewer attractions. A used-clothing store and a rare-coin dealer faced each other at one end of the hall, and a collection agency and a tax preparer did likewise at the other. In between was the office of Lane Starr Commercial Modeling Agency. I started to laugh, and then didn’t. If I’d lived in El Gordo, my office would have been on the next flight up.
The door to Starr’s office was open. The office was a single room, drab and sparely furnished except for the walls, which blazed with the color of magazine photos, carefully clipped from their original bindings and covered with sheets of acetate and pinned in place with colored thumbtacks, four per picture. At one time there had been a whole row of them, circling the room like a high-fashion equator, but there were gaps in the ring now, places where the pictures had fallen or been removed, possibly by the desperate fingers of those who aspired to displace their subjects professionally.
I looked away from the decor. A man was sitting behind a battered metal desk at the back of the room, feet up, head back, mouth open: asleep. A small crater had formed in the sole of his right shoe and a brown scorch mark lay like a slug on his shirt front. He smelled like socks and wet cigars. I called his name twice, then pounded on the desk till it rattled enough to wake him.
“What the hell? Who the fuck?”
Starr righted himself and brushed the ashes off his shirt and got his feet on the floor beneath the desk. “Late night,” he apologized. “Contract negotiations.”
There are all kinds of contracts. Ordering a drink at a bar is a contract, and from the blue veins that crawled up the flanks of Starr’s nose I guessed those were the contracts with which he was most conversant.
“Well, where is she?” Starr asked. “Down the hall? Jesus, that’s a sewer, not a toilet. You should have asked, I’d have sent you to the second floor. Oh, well.”
State’s Evidence Page 8
