Unknown Man #89 jr-3

by Elmore Leonard

  “If you file in Oakland County…”

  He didn’t know what he was starting to say. She hadn’t asked a question that required an answer; he could duck around it. But he was sitting three feet away from her across the counter, looking at her face, her eyes…

  “I do some work out here,” Ryan said, “and in Detroit, Wayne County. I like to move around.”

  “Do you ever get into any weird situations,” she asked him, “where the people don’t want to be served?”

  You bet he did, like serving a rock and roll band in front of thousands of screaming fans, walking right out on the stage…

  There, they were off of it.

  They talked about Ryan for a while, about serving papers and how he got into it, and about working in the cucumber fields north of Bad Axe. They talked about Denise’s new job at the A&P and almost got into it again.

  She told him she was using her maiden name, Denise Watson, because it was on her social security card. Trying to steer away, Ryan said, You like it, huh, the job? She said it was a new experience. It was funny to hear people calling her by her first name again, Denise. She hadn’t been called that in years. Ryan said he thought it was a nice name. And hoped that would end it.

  She told him, then, she had done something dumb: applied for a driver’s license in Pontiac and put down the Pancake House as her address. She hadn’t found the apartment yet, she was staying at a motel, didn’t have a permanent address; and going to the Pancake House after meetings she had felt good there, comfortable.

  “Have you gotten the license yet?”

  “I’m afraid to ask if it came.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, why did I use their address? I’d have to explain all that. They might think I’m doing something, you know, illegal.”

  “You are.”

  “Not intentionally. I think the best thing, I’ll apply for another one and do it right.”

  “Let’s see what I can do first,” Ryan said, now protective, wanting to help her, wanting to tell her, right now, who he was, but still holding back.

  What was he doing? Playing with her, drawing out information, then ducking when his poor sensitive guilty awareness felt she might tell him too much. Then playing safe with a little how’s-work chitchat. Then feeling sorry for her-no, not sorry-feeling close to her and wanting to touch her because she was a winner, a good-looking winner with nice clean-looking hair and eyes that held his while he sat there hiding everything, afraid to tell her. A soft, smiling expression in her eyes…

  Afraid of what? Well, afraid she might not understand, get the wrong idea and start drinking again. Trusting somebody and seeing it blow up. Afraid of what she’d think of him, sneaking around, playing games. She’d ask why, and the wrong answer would be there before he could explain it.

  For the money.

  That’s what she’d naturally think, that he’d slipped in snug and close so he’d be here when the money came in.

  Picture it, when she found out he knew all the time. Her eyes holding his…

  Try convincing her eyes the money didn’t have anything to do with it. He’d been looking for her, yes, he’d admit that. But he hadn’t gone to the meeting to find her. That was an accident. She could be someone else, he’d still be here…

  But why go into all that if he didn’t have to? At least not yet. He’d tell her sooner or later, naturally, but not just yet, okay?

  The manager of the Pancake House didn’t remember Ryan. He said, “Yeah, it came yesterday as a matter of fact. I called the Pontiac Police, and they said call the Sheriff’s Department. I called them and they said they’d send somebody over.”

  “Oh, here,” Ryan said. He took out his wallet and showed the manager his official Oakland County Constable star.

  “I thought you’d be here yesterday,” the manager said. He lifted the change drawer in the cash register and handed Ryan the Department of State window envelope addressed to Denise Watson.

  “Thanks a lot,” Ryan said.

  16

  “I’M TICKLED TO death I’m talking to you,” Mr. Perez said. He was hunched over the papers and folders that covered the desk, smiling into the telephone.

  Ryan, on the couch, was trying to listen while Raymond Gidre was telling him how he got along with niggers, how he didn’t bother them and they didn’t bother him.

  “I know it must be a surprise, yes indeed.” He was giving it his Nice Mr. Perez tone. “I’m just happy I was able to locate you… No, I’m pretty sure. Miz Robert Leary, Jr., is that correct?”

  “Matter of fact I had a good friend was a nigger,” Raymond Gidre said to Ryan, across the coffee table. “Boy name of Old Jim, we called him. Me and Old Jim’d go crabbin’ down to Grand Isle.”

  “No, I’m afraid, Miz Leary, I can’t tell you much more than I have on the telephone. What I’d like to do is come out and see you, explain this in detail… No, it’s a property… No, not necessarily, Miz Leary. Tell me something. When would be convenient for you?”

  “You ever go crabbin’?”

  Ryan said yes, to shut him up. Raymond told him about it anyway, how you put the meat in the crab net, rotten meat if you had some, and how the sides of the net collapsed when it was laying on the bottom, then, see, the sides raised up again when you lifted out the net.

  “Yes, ma’am, I can come out this evening, or I can meet you somewhere if you’d rather. Whatever’s convenient.”

  “Drop them suckers in the boiling water, watch ’em turn red. First, though, you want to put in your bay leaf and your Tabasco, also some thyme.”

  “That’d be fine, Miz Leary. It was nice talking to you and I’m looking forward to seeing you… Yes, ma’am, five o’clock. Bye-bye.”

  “I generally eat five, six. Shit, they go down good.”

  “What’s that, Raymond?” Mr. Perez was off the phone.

  “Gulf crabs.”

  “What’d she say?” Ryan asked.

  Mr. Perez was grinning at Raymond. “Now you talking. Leave this meat and potato country and get back to cooking.”

  “How’d she sound?” Ryan said.

  “Surprised… though not too excited.” Mr. Perez got up and walked around to his bookcase bar next to the window. He began making himself a drink. “She seemed vague, like she just woke up.”

  “Well, I doubt she’d be expecting anybody even to call her,” Ryan said. “You think?”

  Mr. Perez came over with his drink. Raymond got up quickly and Mr. Perez sat down in his deep chair.

  “You talked to her, did you?”

  “I had to. Find out where she lives.”

  “How’d she sound? I’m wondering if the booze has made her soft in the head any.”

  “She’s not drinking,” Ryan said. “She quit.”

  “She tell you that?”

  “She was sober. You could see she hadn’t had anything in a while.”

  “How do you tell that?”

  “Her appearance. She looks like a different person now,” Ryan said. “It couldn’t have just happened overnight.”

  Mr. Perez nodded, accepting that, but still curious. “You say you hung around this place, Uncle Ben’s. She came in to get her driver’s license and you started talking to her. How’d you go about that?”

  “I went up to her, I asked her if she remembered me. She said no. I said, Aren’t you Denise Watson? I told her I met her in a bar one time. We had a cup of coffee and talked a little.”

  “You tell her who you are?”

  “I told her my name, I told her what I did. She seemed nervous then; but I didn’t pull out any papers, so she relaxed.”

  “How’d you find out where she lives?”

  “I asked her. Well, first I asked her if she’d like to go out sometime. She wouldn’t say yes right away, but before I left she gave me her phone number and told me where she lives.”

  “In Pontiac?”

  “No, it’s in Rochester.”

  “Rochester doe
sn’t mean shit to me.”

  “It’s east of Pontiac,” Ryan said. “The address is on the piece of paper I gave you. With the phone number.”

  “You go to her place?”

  Ryan paused. “Yeah, I did, to check. Make sure it wasn’t a phony address.”

  “But you didn’t go in, huh, and visit?”

  “No.” Ryan shook his head. “I was wondering,” he said then, “when you see her you don’t have to mention my name, do you?”

  “Why?”

  “I mean, if she asks how you found out where she lives. Since she isn’t in the book or anything.”

  “I ask you why,” Mr. Perez said, “but you won’t tell me.”

  “I just wondered, that’s all. In case I ever see her again.”

  “I don’t see any reason to bring you into it,” Mr. Perez said. “Your part’s done. ‘Less she gets drunk and runs away again.”

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Ryan said. “Once she finds out her husband’s dead, I think she’s gonna be more relieved than anything else.”

  “Feel you know her pretty well, huh?” Mr. Perez gave Ryan a little smile to show he understood. “How many cups of coffee you have with her?”

  “A couple,” Ryan said. He was being honest and literal and gave Mr. Perez a nice boyish grin in return.

  “You interested in her?”

  “Well, I got to admit she’s a good-looking girl,” Ryan said. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Another week or so, when she gets her money,” Mr. Perez said, “she’s gonna be even better-looking, isn’t she?”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” Ryan said.

  Raymond was grinning now. “Wants to fuck him a rich lady for a change. Shit, I don’t blame him.”

  “They’re no worse or no better,” Mr. Perez said, and looked at Ryan again. “I don’t blame you, either. It’s none of my business what you got in mind for Miz Leary, once we’re done. As long as it’s her you intend to fuck and not me.”

  “I hope I’m not offending you,” said boyish Jack Ryan, “but I think if I had a choice…”

  Mr. Perez smiled and Raymond Gidre laughed out loud and Ryan said he’d keep in touch and left. In the silence, then, Mr. Perez sipped his drink.

  He said to Raymond, “You feel it?”

  “Feel what?”

  “That boy’s gonna try and run with it,” Mr. Perez said. “I don’t think he knows it yet, but he’s gonna try.”

  Mr. Perez visited Denise Leary on Tuesday, after she got home from work. He spent forty minutes with her while Raymond Gidre waited outside in the rented car. Raymond watched people coming and going in and out of the apartment complex and studied some of them very closely, but he did not see any niggers.

  At seven-thirty Ryan called Mr. Perez at the hotel.

  Mr. Perez told him it went about the way he’d expected. He’d left the agreement with her and would call in a day or two. There was nothing to do now but wait. Ryan tried to ask questions. How did she react? What’d she say? But Mr. Perez told him to save it, he was going out for his supper.

  Ryan had decided not to bother Denise this evening, so he didn’t call her until the next morning at eight. He’d ask her if he could pick her up after work, get something to eat and go to a meeting.

  There was no answer.

  At noon he drove out to the A&P in Rochester and found out Denise wasn’t working today. She’d called in sick.

  He called her several more times that afternoon and evening. On what he had decided was his last try, at ten o’clock, Denise answered the phone.

  “Where’ve you been? I’ve been trying to get hold of you all day.”

  “Why?” She sounded all right. Calm.

  He had to settle down. For all he was supposed to know, she could have been anywhere. “I was worried about you.”

  “Were you, really?”

  “I stopped by the grocery store, they said you were home sick. I kept calling and there was no answer.”

  “That was nice of you,” Denise said. “Can you come over?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, if you can. I’ve got an awful lot to tell you.”

  17

  THE WHALES WERE down from the wall, the sketches of the grays and humpbacks off California. In their place, in flowing black sumi, were the words No More…

  “Then what?” Ryan said.

  He was in one of the director’s chairs. Denise came out of the kitchen with two glasses of red pop and found room for them on the low table with all the paint tubes and ceramic pots.

  “I identified the body,” she said. “Driving down, I was pretty nervous, I didn’t know what it would be like. But the way they do it-they showed just his face on a television screen-it wasn’t bad at all.” She picked up the pottery ashtray heaped with cigarette butts and went back to the kitchen with it.

  “The police were there?”

  “A detective, we went to his office. No, first I called a mortuary and took care of that, then I went to the police station.”

  “Do you have money? I mean for the burial?”

  “He’s going to be cremated,” Denise said. She came back in with the ashtray, her eyes moving briefly to the wall. “I’m still working on my new motto.”

  “I see that. How were the police?”

  “Polite, official,” Denise said, sitting down in the other chair. “They asked questions-when I’d seen him last, that kind of thing. I can’t believe it. I mean, the way I found out, a man I don’t know. I didn’t read a thing about it, I guess I didn’t see the papers at all for about a week. Mr. Perez had a picture of me he’d cut out, an old one from when I was at State they must’ve got from my mother. I don’t know where else.”

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Fine.” She was lighting a cigarette. “You mean nervous? I just can’t believe he’s dead. It’s over and I don’t have to do anything about it. I must live right, huh?”

  “What did this Mr. Perez say?”

  “He said something about a property or assets I’m entitled to, if I’ll sign an agreement. But Bobby didn’t own property, anything of real value.”

  “Maybe,” Ryan said, “it isn’t property the way you think of property, real estate. You said assets. It could be stock, something like that.”

  “He didn’t own stock. I doubt if he even knew what it was.”

  “Somebody could’ve left it to him.” Ryan was edging in. “His dad or somebody?”

  Denise was staring at him, making up her mind about something.

  “We’re not talking about a normal, ordinary person,” she said. “As far as I know, he didn’t have a dad, or a mother. He was a street hustler, he was an addict, an armed robber. He was… he killed people.”

  “You knew that?” Ryan asked.

  “I don’t know, I suppose. I didn’t want to know and I didn’t ask about much. I drank. He was arrested, he was always being arrested, and if he was convicted they’d send him to a state hospital. He had a history of mental illness. He’d come out, I wouldn’t see much of him. I guess he lost interest. Usually I’d hear he was living with somebody.”

  Ryan shook his head. He didn’t know what to say. Denise was still looking at him.

  “Did you read anything about him in the paper, that you remember? Bobby Leary?”

  Ryan hesitated. “I don’t know, I may have.”

  “The best way to describe him,” Denise said, “picture a black heroin addict who killed people. But the reason we didn’t hit it off, he was shorter than I am.”

  Ryan smiled. “Come a long way from Bad Axe, haven’t you?”

  “Almost full circle,” Denise said. “But I’m sure as hell not going back.”

  “I heard a minister one time at a meeting,” Ryan said. “He’d lost his congregation, they found out he was drinking and kicked him out, after about twenty years. He said if it hadn’t happened he could have gone another twenty years being a minister, preachin
g, giving the sermons, and never look at himself and find out who he really is.”

  Denise said, “Is that me?”

  “It’s where you are,” Ryan said. “You’re not Mom’s little girl anymore, or a drunk, or married to an addict who kills people. You’re you, without a label.”

  “None of the other shows?”

  “I don’t see anything,” Ryan said. “You could’ve been a nun before. What difference does it make?” He took a sip of red pop and let her think about it.

  “Sometime, if you want,” Denise said, “I’ll tell you about him.”

  “Who?”

  “Bobby.”

  “Sometime tell me about you,” Ryan said. “If you want to. Right now, aren’t you curious about this property, or whatever it is? What else did the guy say?”

  “That’s all. I’m entitled to something and he’ll tell me what it is if I’ll sign the agreement. It’s in the kitchen. You want to see it?”

  “That’s all right. What does he take, a percentage?”

  “He gets half.”

  “Half? For giving you something you own?”

  “Well, he said I wouldn’t know about it if it weren’t for him and he went to a lot of trouble, but he said there wouldn’t be any other charges or expenses taken out.”

  “He’s generous with your money, isn’t he? Did he say what the value of this asset is?”

  “He said a considerable amount.”

  “Aren’t you curious?”

  “I think it’s a come-on. I asked him if he was trying to sell me something.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said no. What else would he say?” She drew on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke quickly, to say something. “I don’t know what to do with Bobby’s ashes. I have to decide.”