Nail Biter

by Sarah Graves

  I turned to another subject. “Sam, do you know anyone—or anyone who might know anyone—who deals in oxycontins?”

  Sam paused in the act of feeding half a banana peel to Monday. The old Lab loved them, even scarfed up shriveled ones from the side of the road when she got the chance.

  Next he fed the other half to Prill, who didn't care for them, but if Monday had something, the big red Doberman had to have it, too. Finally his face turned toward me, grinning.

  “Yeah, actually I do. Why, d'you want some?” my son teased.

  I gathered that during the pause he'd been deciding what to say and how to say it. A recovering alcoholic as well as an ex–drug user, he'd had a bad slip the previous winter. He knew I was touchy on the topic.

  “No. There's a girl missing,” I said, and filled him in on Dibble's murder and Wanda's disappearance.

  Sam frowned thoughtfully, and in that moment he looked just like his father when his father was twenty. Right about then the whole world is a fellow's oyster if only he knows it.

  Victor had known. “There's someone,” Sam said carefully, “I used to hang out with. She might be able to tell you something.”

  Used to. I kept my face still, determined not to press him for details: when? how? and how well had he known this person?

  He waited until he was sure I wasn't about to come down on him like a ton of bricks, then went on.

  “Luanne Moretti. She lives here in Eastport. You want to make sure the missing girl isn't hooked into the drugs somehow? Is that it?”

  The name wasn't familiar, but there was no particular reason why it should be. “Mmm, not exactly,” I replied.

  I still couldn't believe Wanda was connected to the pills in the house. Something else Bob Arnold had said, though, was still bothering me: whether she might have seen something.

  “Mostly I'd just like to know who else was involved,” I told Sam, “in that stuff being there at all.”

  A lurker, I imagined, someone besides Gene Dibble hanging around the place, whom Wanda might have seen. Someone who'd seen her, too, and once Dibble was shot might've decided that a witness to his unexplained presence was too dangerous a loose end to leave untied.

  “If anyone was,” I amended hastily. “I'd just like to cover all the worst bases first; that way I can rule them out. Um, anything else I should know about Luanne?”

  He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper. “Like does she have a mean boyfriend you might have to deal with? No, Luanne's on her own.”

  Handing me the paper, he added, “She's kind of high-strung.” As if either one of us had ever met an addict who wasn't.

  “But just don't try to talk her into rehab and you'll be all right,” he said, aware I'd be tempted; he knew the spectacle of a young girl in trouble pushed my hot-buttons.

  Then, after agreeing to keep an eye open for Wanda himself, he grabbed another banana and left to go home to his own place on Liberty Street. He'd been there a few months now and except for me still drying and folding his laundry it was working out well, I reflected as I sat back down thoughtfully at the kitchen table.

  By now it was midmorning and from downstairs my dad's pickaxe went on chinking patiently at the mortar between the granite blocks of the old foundation, the sound forming a bright, sharp counterpoint to the low rumble-thump of the overstuffed washer.

  My dad always said you only got one chance to take a thing apart without destroying it. After that you'd never have another opportunity to understand how it had worked or what someone might have meant by putting it together just that way. And though he didn't quite know what, he did seem convinced now that something was hidden in the cellar.

  Just as I already felt there was some element of Wanda's missing-girl status that I hadn't quite tumbled onto.

  Yet.

  With Lee settled for the morning, I could've picked Ellie up and we could have taken a ride around the island, scouting for Wanda. But instead I kept seeing the bat the girl had cradled in her fingers the night before.

  Small, soft, and easy prey for anything bigger or stronger, the animal reminded me way too much of Wanda herself. So instead I took the address Sam had given me and headed out solo.

  “Yeah?” Luanne Moretti's place was a small battered house crowded in among a half-dozen similarly unfortunate frame dwellings on Patron Street. An old car with four flats hunkered in the driveway, a faded green air freshener shaped like a pine tree dangling from its rearview mirror.

  “I'm Jake Tiptree,” I said. The front door knob was loose, hanging out on its metal stem.

  Screwdriver, plastic wood-goo, electric drill, wood screws, I recited mentally; it was the opposite of the problem at the tenants' house. “I need some information and my son Sam said you might be able to help me,” I went on.

  Her bony face, haggard in the light of midmorning, looked low-level hostile and a little paranoid at first. But when she heard Sam's name a light went on behind her eyes, and she let me in.

  Though I got the sense she'd have eventually done the same for just about anyone who knocked. In her late teens or early twenties and rail-skinny under a thin blouse and dungarees, Luanne gave the impression that she thought everything was pretty much inevitable anyway, so why argue?

  She led me through a cramped living room whose plasterboard walls were scarred with evidence of parties that had gotten out of hand—

  Razor knife, patching compound, wallboard tape, latex paint, my mind listed stubbornly—

  —but whose thrift-store lamps and yard-sale furniture were primly arranged on a spotless though threadbare carpet.

  “In here,” she said, moving away from me. “I'm just having a cup of coffee. You want some?”

  I followed her into the kitchen, where she gave it to me in a chipped pottery mug. The faucet, I noticed at once, was dripping.

  “So how is he?” she asked.

  All it needed, probably, was a faucet washer. “Sam? He's good,” I replied. “He's doing really well.”

  The kitchen floor, old and badly worn in the traffic areas, glowed with fresh wax, and the countertops were militarily tidy. But Luanne's furious attempts at domestic order didn't fool me a bit.

  Back in the bad old days Sam used to get high, then go on a cleaning binge. Once I found him at midnight detailing the grout between the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush and a jug of bleach.

  “Sam's a nice kid. I hope he makes it,” Luanne said flatly, lighting a menthol cigarette. “So what do you want, anyway?”

  It was all I could do not to drag her home and force a glass of orange juice on her. In the light of the kitchen window her dark, wavy hair was bristly with split ends, her arms so thin you could see the tendons and her wrist bones jutting sharply out of her frayed cuffs.

  Behind her on the fake-wood-paneled wall hung a puppies-and-kittens calendar that hadn't been changed since August. Not with a bang but a whimper, I thought.

  Drip. Drip. Drip. “Just some facts,” I said.

  The faucet was already driving me crazy. And astonishingly I'd remembered to get washers for the tenants' place at the hardware store when I went there to get the lumber tarp.

  So they were in my bag. But no. That wasn't what I was here for.

  “Facts, huh?” Luanne chuckled tiredly, rubbing her bare feet together on the linoleum. “Most people I meet, facts're the last thing they want.”

  I could already see she was too far gone to be buying drugs in quantity; that is, dealing in them herself. She couldn't have raised the needed capital to go retail.

  “So what're these facts you want worth to you?”

  Drippety-drip. Water collecting in the trap under the sink began adding its own annoying contribution to the mix: a hollow, musical-sounding blurp-blurp.

  Ignore it. I took a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket and laid it on the table between us. She snatched it and it vanished into her pants pocket.

  “Okay, who d'you want the dirt on?” Her tone let me know the money'd p
ut her on board, not to waste her time with small talk.

  Drip-blurp. I'd read somewhere that in a couple of weeks a leaking faucet could fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool. With effort I managed to banish this fact from my consciousness.

  “I'm not sure,” I admitted. “That's what I'm hoping maybe I can find out from you.”

  She said nothing.

  “I need to know who might've been in on a deal with Eugene Dibble, for a whole lot of oxies. Somebody who might have been Eugene's partner,” I said.

  I didn't even know if there was anybody like that. But at my question, caution flickered again in Luanne's dark eyes.

  Big-time caution. She got up, filled her mug once more from the coffeemaker even though she'd hardly drunk any of what she had.

  Playing for time. “Why d'you want to know? The kind of thing you're asking, if it got around I was telling it . . .”

  So she did know something. Which was good for me, maybe not so good for Wanda Cathcart. “Right, somebody moving volume. Who isn't scared of it. Which means you should be scared of him.”

  Luanne looked down at the iridescent green nail polish on her fingertips. Around her the shabby kitchen gleamed dully like a stage set of poverty, all the cheap things rubbed spotless.

  “Yeah,” she said almost inaudibly.

  The faucet kept dripping. I clasped my hands together on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table. The texture on the tablecloth had little lines of solidified gray grime deeply embedded in it, the kind wiping doesn't remove; you need a scrub brush to get it out.

  “Yeah,” Luanne repeated, “I'm scared of him, all right.”

  The tablecloth was the first tiny chink in her denial-fueled armor. Near the end, Sam had quit brushing his teeth.

  Impatience seized me. “Luanne, I know I'm probably putting you in an uncomfortable situation—” I began.

  Her harsh laugh interrupted me. “Uncomfortable! That's a hot one. You come in here, start asking questions . . . you don't care what kind of trouble I could get in,” she accused, picking at a hangnail.

  Emotional seesawing being just another nifty part of the show. She wasn't getting high anymore on whatever she was using—God, I knew way more about this than I'd ever wanted to—merely keeping herself from getting sick.

  “I'm no hard-core junkie, you know,” she said resentfully when the silence got to be more than she could stand. “I'm just chipping a little now and then, it's under control. And don't get me wrong, I can take care of myself in case you're wondering.”

  Her glance strayed to her purse, a black fake-leather affair slouched on the counter. Plenty big enough for, say, one of those cheap little Korean-made .22s you can buy in a pawnshop.

  It wouldn't have surprised me; I didn't even disapprove. If I'd been Luanne I'd have carried every kind of protection I could get.

  But it was feather-smoothing time. “Luanne, I never said you were a junkie, and I surely didn't come here to heavy out on you about your personal life,” I told her.

  God, that faucet was like Chinese water torture. I got up and crossed to the sink, feeling her eyes follow me. The faucet handle was your standard cap-pressed-on-over-a-screw deal.

  And I had a Swiss Army knife in the bag with the washers. “But I need a name,” I said, crouching down.

  “What the hell are you doing?” she demanded when I opened the cabinet under the sink.

  Yep, there were the two shutoff valves, right where they belonged; one for hot, one for cold. Reaching in past a truly impressive collection of household cleaning agents I turned both valves off.

  “I'm fixing the damned drip,” I answered, pausing to find another twenty and fling it at her. “There, I'm paying you to let me do it, all right?”

  Bemusedly, she picked the money off the floor.

  “And . . . Ouch!” I'd bumped my head getting up out from under the sink. Rubbing it, I straightened grouchily.

  “And I'd appreciate it if while you're sucking up my twenties like a vacuum cleaner you could also try helping me out a little,” I snapped.

  Note to self: While getting out from under a kitchen sink, remember to wear all the appropriate safety gear. Like possibly a motorcycle helmet; I was going to have a nasty goose egg later.

  “Whatever you say to me, it didn't have to come from you and I won't ever tell anyone you told me,” I promised, leaning over the sink again.

  The leak had stopped. Popping the shiny round caps off the faucet-handle tops with the pry tool on the Army knife, I set them aside. In the recessed area beneath each cap was a slotted screw, and under each screw—I'd done this before—lay a small black utterly essential rubber washer.

  “When you turn off a water faucet what you're really doing is tightening this screw down onto the washer beneath,” I told Luanne conversationally. Just talking, trying to establish some rapport.

  As if. “Once the washer disintegrates you can't tighten it anymore. So you have to replace the washer,” I went on, “and to do that, you have to remove the screw.”

  And of course one of the screws was rusty. “Damn,” I said, trying and failing to de-rust it with the corkscrew on the knife; none of the blades would fit into the small round space. “You wouldn't happen to have something small and sharp around here, would you? Something with a little point on it?”

  Luanne got up and rummaged in a drawer, came up with a metal shish-kebab skewer and handed it wordlessly to me.

  “Perfect,” I said, digging rust out of the screw slots with the skewer's tip. After that I backed the screws out.

  “Anyway, I'm kind of up a creek, here,” I prattled on as I worked. Digging the washers out of the holes, I found that one of them had already crumbled to brittle pieces and the other was about to. “That's why I came to you.”

  Luanne snagged the hangnail, pulled till the bright blood welled up. Wincing, I turned back to the faucet assembly.

  “A girl is missing,” I said. “I'm trying to find her. Please.”

  When I looked back at her again a faint sheen of sweat had broken out on her brow. At first I thought maybe she was late for her dose of whatever, that I was keeping her from fixing.

  But then I saw the desperate expression in her eyes and knew she was really scared.

  “There's this guy . . .” she began reluctantly. “A local guy. I used to party with him.”

  I shook the rubber washers from their packet onto the sink's drainboard.

  “But not lately,” she added.

  “What's his name?” I turned back to my task. Two washers were required; only one of the proper size was in the packet. Typical.

  “I shouldn't even be talking to you.” She lit another cigarette. “This guy, he's not funny. You really don't want to mess around with him.” She dragged on the cigarette. “I'm sorry I let you in here,” she said, exhaling a stream of smoke.

  I was starting to be sorry also, but for a different reason. Probably only one of the faucets was actively leaking. But which? I should have checked before I took the handles apart.

  “Luanne, I'm not going to mess with him,” I began. “I just need to know . . .”

  She was turning out to be like every other addict I'd ever met. Just when you thought you'd gotten a little traction, they went passive-aggressive on you and slipped through your fingers.

  On top of that, I could only fix one faucet handle. Common sense said to replace the washer that had already disintegrated. But that wasn't the one whose screw had been rusty.

  And rust + metal = leak. Coming to a decision, I dropped the new washer into the cold-water handle receptacle, put the old-but-so-far-undisintegrated washer in the hot-water side, and tightened down both screws. Crawling back under the sink, I turned both valves on and straightened again, careful this time not to clobber myself on the way out.

  Bingo. No leak; I dusted my hands off. Then motion flashed suddenly in the corner of my eye and I jumped startledly. With it came a humming sound, loud in the quiet kitchen.

  �
��Christ!” Luanne uttered at my sudden movement, lurching up.

  But it was only a fish tank, half hidden by the refrigerator on a far corner of the kitchen counter. The tank, I now saw, was inhabited by a dozen or so of the cheaper kinds of tropical fish: neons, small angelfish, others I didn't recognize.

  “Sorry,” I said, sitting again. “I didn't notice the fish when I came in, that's all.”

  “Damn aerator's on the fritz.” She crossed the room to reach down into the tank and jostle the mechanism in it. “You don't know how to fix those, do you?”

  The hum faded as bubbles began rising; she dried her hand on a dishtowel. And no, I didn't know how.

  “My mom sends food and stuff for them,” Luanne said, watching the brightly colored fish for a moment before turning to me again. “She says I ought to have some kind of pet.”

  I pulled out another twenty, then a fourth, laid them on the kitchen table but kept my hand on them. “Last chance,” I said.

  Luanne stared at the money. Then: “Mac Rickert. Don't ask me for his places, though. I don't know any. He won't deal to me anymore for some reason, I don't know that either. And I've heard he moves around a lot.”

  Yeah, well, for eighty bucks you don't know much, do you? I thought sourly as the phone rang in the front room. But at least I had the name. Tearing herself from the twenty-dollar bills on the table, Luanne went to answer.

  “Yeah,” she said into the phone. “Sure, tonight. You want to come to my place, or . . . okay. But I can't talk now, so I'll see you later. No, I really can't talk. Sure, I remember you. I do, but . . . Okay, bye.”

  She returned, trying to appear nonchalant. “Friend coming by?” I asked mildly.

  This was what it came to when you had no skills and a habit as big as a house. “Yeah,” she said casually. But her hands shook as she lit yet another of the menthol cigarettes.

  Dragging on it, she snatched up the twenties. “So've you got what you wanted? Are we done?”

  Across the room the fish darted brightly among the plastic toys in the aquarium water, the tiny waterwheel rotating and the miniature frogman bobbing up and down as the aerator burbled.