sixteen
* * *
MY RENTAL FORD was parked in the lot at the rear right corner of the hotel. I went out the front door and headed for it. The guy in the Buick could see me. And he had positioned himself so that if I drove off he could follow. Tailing somebody is much easier if you don’t mind them knowing.
As I started up the Ford, I could see a little puff of heat come from the tailpipe of the Buick. I pulled out of the driveway of the hotel parking lot, swung around the corner, and parked directly behind the Buick with my engine idling. Nothing happened. I couldn’t see the interior of the Buick because of the darkly tinted glass. I sat. Across the street the Blue Tick hound mooched around the corner of the hotel and sat on the top step of the veranda with his forefeet on the next step down. Sedale came out after a while and gave the dog something to eat. It kept its position, its jaw working on the scrap. Sedale picked up a broom and began to sweep the veranda. The place looked clean, but I suspected it was something Sedale did when things were slow, to keep from hanging in the lobby and chatting with the desk clerk.
The Buick sat. There was a slight tremor to its back end and a faint hint of heat shimmering from its tailpipe. I thought about whether Brooks Robinson or Mike Schmidt should be third baseman on Spenser’s all-time all-star team. I was leaning toward Schmidt. Of course Billy Cox could pick it with anybody, but Schmidt had the power numbers. On the other hand, so did Eddie Matthews. In front of me the Buick slid into gear and pulled away from the curb. I followed. The Buick turned left at the end of the short street, then a sharp right, slowed at a green light, and then floored it as the light turned. I ran the red light behind him, and stayed with him as he went down an alley behind a Kroger’s supermarket, and kept him in sight as he exceeded the speed limit heading out the County Road.
When we hit Route 20, he headed east, toward Columbia, going around eighty-five. The rental Ford bucked a little, but it hung with him. After ten miles of this, the Buick U-turned in an Official Vehicles Only turnaround, and headed back west, toward Augusta. I did the same. We slowed after a few minutes at a long upgrade. There was a ten-wheeler in the right-hand lane, and a white Cadillac in the left lane, traveling at the same speed as the tractor. They stayed in tandem, at about forty miles an hour. We were stuck behind them. We chased along at that rate for maybe five minutes. The Buick kept honking its horn, but the Cadillac never budged. There was no sign, in the Caddy, of the driver’s head above the front seat. This is not usually a good omen.
At the next exit the Buick turned off, roared down the ramp, turned right toward Eureka. I followed and almost rolled past him. He had pulled in off the highway onto a gravel service road. I actually passed it before I got a flash of blue through a screen of scrubby pine trees. I stopped, backed up, and pulled in behind him. Again we sat.
There was a blue jay flying around from scrub pine to scrub pine, looking at us, and looking, also, at everything else. He would sit for a moment, his head moving, looking in all directions, then, precipitously, for no reason that I could see, he would fly to another tree, or sometimes merely flutter to another branch, and look in all directions again. Semper paratus.
Ahead of us the gravel road wound up toward some power lines that ran at right angles to the highway through a cut in the woods. Behind us, and above, the highway traffic swooshed by, unaware that a little ways ahead was a slow-moving roadblock.
Shortstop on my all-time team had to be Ozzie Smith. I’d seen Marty Marion, but he didn’t hit like Ozzie. Pee Wee Reese, on the other hand, was one of the greatest clutch players I’d ever seen. That was the qualifying rule. This was an all-seen, all-time, all-star team. And Ozzie did things I’d never seen anyone do on a ball field. It had to be Ozzie.
The driver of the Buick came to a decision. The door opened and he got out and started back toward me. He had on a light beige suit and a maroon blouse with a bow at the neck, and medium high heels. He carried a black shoulder bag and he was female. Maybe forty, well built, with a firm jaw and a wide mouth. Her eyes were oval and set wide apart. Her eye makeup emphasized both the ovalness and the spacing in ways I didn’t fully understand. I rolled down my window. Her heels crunched forcefully into the gravel as she walked toward me. She seemed angry.
As she came alongside the car I said, “You ever see Ozzie Smith play?”
“Okay, pal,” she said, “what’s your problem?”
“Well, I’m trying to decide between Ozzie Smith and Pee Wee Reese for my all-time, all-seen team . . .”
“Never mind the bullshit,” she said. “I asked you a question, I want an answer.”
I smiled at her. She saw the smile, and ignored it. She did not disrobe.
“You wouldn’t want to go dancing or anything, would you?” I said.
She frowned, reached in her pocket, and pulled out a leather folder. She flipped it open.
“Police officer,” she said.
The shield was blue and gold and had Alton County Sheriff on it, around the outside.
“That probably means no dancing, huh?”
She shook her head angrily.
“Look, Buster,” she said. “I am not going to fuck around with you. You answer my questions right now, or we go in.”
“For what, following an officer?”
“Why you following me?”
“Because you were following me. And your license plate was classified. And I figured that if I stuck behind you, either you’d have to confront me, or I’d follow you home.”
She stared at me. It was a standard cop hard look.
“You decided to confront me,” I said. “Now I know you’re with the Sheriff’s Department. Who put you on me?”
“I’ll ask the questions, Bud.”
“No you won’t. You don’t know what to ask.”
“Whether I do or not,” she said, “I can tell you something. I can tell you that you are in over your head, and you’d be smart to go home and find another case before this thing gets pulled up over your ears.”
“You were showing me an open tail,” I said. “Somebody tossed my room, and let me know it. I figured that I was being scared off. What I want to know is, why? Who wants to discourage me? What can you tell me about Olivia Nelson? Who does your hair?” I smiled at her again.
She gave me her hard cop look again, which was surprisingly effective, considering that she looked sort of like Audrey Hepburn. Then she shook her head once, sharply. And her eyes glinted oddly.
“Rosetta’s,” she said, “in Batesburg.”
Then she turned on her medium high heels and walked back to her car, got in, U-turned, and drove past me out onto the Eureka Road.
seventeen
* * *
I WAS IN my room at the Alton Arms, lying on the bed with my shoes off and three pillows propped, talking to Susan on the phone. There was a bottle of scotch and some soda and a bucket of ice on the bureau. My shirt was hung in the closet on a hanger, which had been covered with pink quilted padding. My gun was on the bedside table, barrel pointed away for good range safety. I was sipping a drink from one of the squat glasses they had sent up with the scotch. It had a crest engraved on the side with an A worked into it. Padded coat hangers and monogrammed glasses. First class.
“How’s the baby?” I said.
“She’s fine,” Susan said. “I took her for a walk after work and got her a new bone and she’s on the bed now, looking at me and chewing it. And getting bone juice on the spread.”
“How adorable,” I said. “Does she miss me?”
“Do you miss Daddy, Pearl?” Susan said off the phone.
I waited.
“No,” Susan said into the phone, “apparently not. Maybe after her bone is gone.”
“How much crueler than the adder’s sting,” I said.
“I miss you,”
Susan said.
“That helps,” I said. “But it’s not the same.”
“Why not?”
“You might just be driven by lust.”
“Whereas Pearl’s love is the stuff of Provençal poetry,” Susan said.
“Exactly,” I said.
She laughed. I always loved the sound of her laughter. And to have caused it was worth the west side of heaven.
“Are you having any fun down there?” Susan said.
“No. The local Sheriff’s Department is attempting to frighten me to death.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I had a recent confrontation with a tough Sheriff’s detective who gets her hair done at Rosetta’s in Batesburg.”
“Tell me,” Susan said.
I did, starting with the part about the room being searched, including my conversation with Ferguson.
“So why would the Sheriff’s police do that?” Susan said.
“Someone asked them to, I would guess. I can’t see why the Alton County, South Carolina, Sheriff’s Department would otherwise know I existed.”
“Hard to imagine,” Susan said. “But probably true. So who might ask them to?”
“Somebody who doesn’t want me looking into Olivia Nelson’s past,” I said.
“I sort of figured that out myself,” Susan said. “The real question is who doesn’t want you to and why not.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And to that question you have no answer.”
“None,” I said.
“Another approach might be to think who has the clout to get the Sheriff’s office to do it,” Susan said.
“Good thought, Della,” I said.
“Della?”
“Della Street . . . Perry Mason? I guess I’m too subtle for you.”
“Subtlety is not usually the difficulty,” Susan said.
“Anyway,” I said, “there’s too much I don’t know to do too much guessing. The only name that’s come up, that might have the clout, is Senator Stratton.”
“Why would he want to discourage you?”
“Maybe he doesn’t,” I said. “He knows Tripp. I met him when Tripp and I had lunch at the Harvard Club. He’s inquired about me to the cops in Boston. But that may be, probably is, just a routine constituent service to a big campaign contributor, real or potential.”
“But he’s the only one you can think of.”
“Right.”
“I would think that a liberal Senator from Massachusetts wouldn’t have much clout in rural South Carolina,” Susan said.
“Politics make strange bedfellows,” I said.
“Maybe Olivia’s father who isn’t dead might have had something to do with it,” Susan said.
I drank some more of my scotch and soda.
“Possibly,” I said.
“What are you going to do next?”
“I’m going to have a couple or three drinks,” I said, “order up some sandwiches, go to bed, and sleep on it all. In the morning I’m going to the track kitchen for breakfast. Sedale, the bellhop, who is my closest personal South Carolina friend, says it’s a don’t-miss place where everyone eats. Authentic Southern cooking, he says.”
“And I’m missing it,” Susan said. “What happens after breakfast?”
“I’m going to go out and see if I can talk with Jumper Jack Nelson,” I said.
“That might be interesting,” Susan said.
“Not as interesting as you are,” I said.
“Of course not,” Susan said. “But maybe you’ll find out why the police were led to believe he was dead.”
“I wish you were going to be dining with me at the track kitchen tomorrow,” I said. “A cup of coffee, a plate of grits, some redeye gravy, and thou.”
“Assuming I could restrain my carnality,” she said.
“Assuming you couldn’t, we’d never be welcome at the track kitchen again.”
“Take care of yourself,” Susan said.
“Yes,” I said. “I love you.”
“I love you too,” she said, “and the baby probably misses you more than she knows.”
We hung up. I lay on the bed with my drink for a while looking at the little square-toothed dentil molding that went all the way around the ceiling of the room. Then I got up to freshen my drink and looked out the window. Alton was dark and silent under a dark sky. There was no moon. And no stars were visible. The wind moved the trees some, and made enough of a sound for me to hear it through the closed window. Across the street, in the yellow glare of the street lamp, there was merely an empty stretch of grass-spattered gravel. No sign of the blue Buick. No car at all. Maybe they’d given up trying to scare me. Maybe they’d just decided on a different approach. I drank my drink thoughtfully, and shrugged the bunchy muscles in my back and shoulders, and looked at the Browning lying on the nightstand.
I raised my glass slightly toward the gun.
“Here’s looking at you, kid,” I said.
Then I picked up the room service menu and began to consider my choices.
eighteen
* * *
THE TRACK KITCHEN was off maybe a quarter of a mile from the Alton training track, a low, sort of white, cinder-block building with a badly defined gravel parking area in front, where there were three pickup trucks and a green Jaguar sedan. An old metal Coca-Cola sign hung over the screen door. The door hung less square than rhomboidal. The cinder block had shifted a little and everything was slightly out of plumb. Long cracks, following the right-angled joinings of the cinder block, jagged across the building front. The rich smell of lard undulated from the open windows.
I went in. The building was divided front to back into two rooms. One of the rooms contained two pool tables and a jukebox. There were three or four exercise riders, in tee shirts and jeans, shooting pool and drinking Coca-Cola, and listening to Waylon Jennings. On my side of the archway, the dining area was filled with long plastic laminate tables. Across the back was the kitchen. A well-dressed man and woman were eating ham and eggs, grits, and toast at one of the tables. Three ample women in large hats and frilly dresses were at the table next to theirs. I walked back to the kitchen where two women were cooking. One of them was black and gray-haired and overweight. The other was white and gray-haired and overweight. Both had sweat beaded on their foreheads. The white woman wore blue jeans more commodious than Delaware. The black woman had on a flowered dress. Both wore aprons. Without looking up from the grill, where she was scrambling some eggs, the black woman said, “Whatchu want?”
I ordered grits, toast, and coffee.
“That it?” she said.
“That’s all I dare,” I said. “The smell is already clogging my arteries.”
Still without looking up, she tossed her head toward the formica tables. The white woman placed a large white china mug on the counter in front of me and nodded at the coffee in its warming pot.
“Have a seat,” the black woman said. “We’ll bring it.”
I poured myself coffee, added cream and sugar, and took it with me to an empty seat. The white woman came around the counter with a startling number of plates and put them down in front of the ample women. I could see how they got ample.
I sipped some coffee. It was too hot. I swallowed the small sip with difficulty and blew on the cup for a while. Around the room there were pictures pasted up on the cinder-block wall, most of them horse racing pictures, jockeys and owners in winning circles with horses. The horses were always the least excited. They were old pictures, black-and-white blowups that had faded, the corners bent and torn from being repeatedly Scotch-taped to the uncooperative cinder block. The only thing recent was a big calendar for the current year, decorated with pictures of dogs playing poker. There was a picture, not recen
t, of Olivia Nelson, a cheap head shot in color that looked like the kind of school picture they take every year and send home in a cardboard frame and the parents buy it and put it on the mantel. I got up and went to the wall and looked more closely. Clearly it was Olivia Nelson. She looked like her yearbook picture, and she looked not too different from the picture of her at forty-two that I’d seen in her living room on Beacon Hill. My coffee had cooled a little and I drank some while I looked at her picture. The white woman came out of the kitchen and lumbered toward me with breakfast.
“Where you sitting?” she said.
I nodded at the table and she went ahead of me and set the tray down.
“Excuse me,” I said. “May I ask you why you have a picture of Olivia Nelson on the wall.”
The woman’s gray hair was badly done up and had unraveled over her forehead like a frayed sock. She tightened her chin and her lower lip pushed out a little.
“Got no pictures of Olivia Nelson.”
“Then who is this young woman?” I said, pointing to the girl in the school photo.
Her jaw got tighter and her lower lip came out a little further.
“That’s Cheryl Anne Rankin,” the woman said.
“She looks remarkably like Olivia Nelson. You sure it’s not?”
“Guess I ought to know my own daughter,” she said. Her voice was barely audible and she spoke straight down as if she were talking to her feet.
“Your daughter? Cheryl Anne Rankin, who looks just like Olivia Nelson, is your daughter?”
“She don’t look like Olivia Nelson,” the woman said to her feet.
I nodded and smiled engagingly. It was hard to be charming to someone who was staring at the ground.
“Do you know Olivia Nelson?”
“Used to.”
“Could you tell me about her?”
“No.”
“Where is your daughter now?” I said.
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