The Twenty-Year Death

by Ariel S. Winter

  The storefront next door was an all-night liquor store without any customers. I skipped that because Greg Taylor had not looked like the kind of man who ever bought his own liquor, and because when you go out at night to get back at your lover, you don’t do it with a bottle bought at a liquor store.

  The next bar was Choices. It was more of a dance hall than the other places. A five-piece band was playing fast numbers in a corner under a palm tree in a pot. The dance floor took up the center of the room, lit with spotlights recessed into the ceiling that made white shiny spots on the wooden boards. There were several couples dancing and I wondered how they knew who should lead. The tables nearest the dance floor were filled, but the ones further out were empty. The bar was a classy thing with a gilt framed mirror along the back and lights under the glass shelves where the liquor was kept so that the various bottles shone and were reflected and shone some more. I didn’t bother to try my line on the bartender over the sound of the band. Instead, I waited at the bar and watched the dancers. They could really dance.

  After a minute or two, the junky streetwalker came in through the front door. He saw me looking at him and I smiled and he immediately looked away. A man at a nearby table called to him and he went over and let the man hold his hand, all the while looking at a spot on the table that was a thousand miles away. I watched them for a moment, the seated man pulling on the junky’s arm, waving at the chair across the table from him, the junky just standing there with his head bowed and no expression on his face. I didn’t want to watch anymore. There was no reason I had to. I turned my back and drank my drink all the way down. The liquor spread out in my body, reminding me that life was just life and it wasn’t good or bad. I turned around again and the junky was now sitting at the table. He wouldn’t stay long. I needed some fresh air. It was getting stuffy in there.

  Outside, I smoked a cigarette, and when I’d finished with that one I lit another. Down at the end of the block, only the man dressed in pants and the unbuttoned shirt was standing under the streetlight. Maybe the getup with the kimono was good for business. I had started my third cigarette when the junky came out of the club. He stopped short when he saw me standing there. “You can follow me around all night and not get anywhere or we can just talk now,” I said.

  He looked down the block where his companion was standing watching him back.

  “We can go somewhere else,” I said.

  “Meet me on Seaside at Sixth,” he said without looking at me.

  “You’ve got something to tell me?”

  He didn’t answer, already walking back down towards his street corner.

  I turned in the other direction, making it quick to get to the end of the block and turned right on Sixth towards the ocean.

  TWENTY

  He came up on Seaside walking along the closed-up shops, well out of the glow of the streetlamps. He kept his head down, shooting occasional glances behind him as though he were afraid of being followed. When he was three feet away, he stopped, glanced up at me once, and then back down at the sidewalk. He was even younger than I had first thought, probably no more than eighteen. He looked sickly and every half a minute he would shiver as though it wasn’t seventy-five degrees out. He was a real nervous one. I wondered how he got any business.

  “You have something to tell me?” I said, trying to make him look me in the eye.

  “Where’s the money?”

  I got out my wallet and took out the five-dollar bill I had shown them on the street corner, or one exactly like it. “This isn’t for nothing,” I said, not yet holding out the bill. “You’ve got to have something to tell me.”

  “I’ve got something. Now give me the money.”

  “What’s your name?”

  His expression turned suspicious. “Why?”

  “So I have something to call you by. Just a name. Your street name.”

  “Rusty,” he said, the name foreign on his tongue.

  “Okey, Rusty.” I held the bill out to him and he snatched it away faster than I thought he could move. It disappeared. “How long did it take you to learn to get the money first?” I said.

  He looked up at me with his eyes without moving his head. He didn’t like me very much. Even if I had given him the money. His eyes went back to the street. “I know Greg from a while back,” he said.

  I waited for him to say more. When he didn’t, I said, “And?”

  “We had the same dealer. A guy named Renaldo who works on the boardwalk. I can take you to him.”

  “When was the last time you saw him? Taylor, I mean.”

  He shrugged and tilted his head. “Six months. Maybe eight.”

  “But you can take me to the guy he used to get his junk from maybe eight months ago?”

  He bobbed his head emphatically. “Yeah.”

  “That doesn’t sound like five dollars to me.”

  The eyes flicked again. “Look, man. If anyone’s gonna know anything about Greg, it’s going to be Renaldo. Anyone who’s gonna tell you anything anyway.”

  Junkies will scam you any way they can to get a buck. But I didn’t have a better lead. “Well. Let’s go meet Renaldo.”

  He bobbed his head again, rocking on his feet as well, and then stepped off the sidewalk into the street. It was only after he stepped off that he looked both ways. Seaside was deserted at that time of night anyway. You would never know that just around the corner was a burgeoning nightlife.

  We stayed on Sixth, going the half a block that ended at the boardwalk in a sandy cul-de-sac. A wooden lattice blocked off the black space under the boardwalk. There were stairs on either side of the street, each step with a bar of sand on its back edge. I could hear the ocean now and the salty smell was stronger. We took the stairs on the south side of the street and as soon as we stepped out onto the boards, we were met by a cool, steady wind. There were no lights on the boardwalk or stores or concessions here. It was just a raised set of boards with a railing on either side and steps down to the beach. At regular intervals were wooden park benches. There were silhouetted figures on most of the benches, standing out against the darkness that was the ocean and the sky.

  Rusty turned north and I followed alongside him. Neither of us spoke. He seemed less nervous, less jumpy, but it could just have been that it wasn’t as obvious when he was walking. The wind blew my tie, making it flutter up against me and over my shoulder. My coat rippled and I had to put my hand on my hat a couple of times. As we walked, the sounds of couples on the benches came as a soft murmur, and then there were the occasional loud voices lost in the darkness of the beach. In the distance, the nighttime lights of Harbor City’s commercial boardwalk shone like a mirage for the night traveler, the rides stretching away from the land almost all the way down to the water, a flashing neon peninsula. There was a lot of darkness between The Market and the lights of the tourists’ playland.

  We had gone maybe five blocks when Rusty made a move for a street-side stairwell. We were still at least ten blocks away from the carnival lights, a good walk, but not an impossible one. This location would allow Renaldo to service customers from either community. We clopped down the stairs, grains of sand crunching under our heels. In the darkness of the corner made by the staircase and the wooden lattice stood a man in a sharp blue suit with a purple shirt and a purple tie. He wasn’t Mexican, as his name had suggested, but rather a pale and doughy-faced man with deep-set eyes and a cocky smirk that looked like a permanent fixture. The clothes were expensive and unnecessarily flamboyant, an affectation like the name, but maybe good for business, like the whore’s kimono.

  “Hey, Renaldo,” Rusty said as we came up to him.

  Renaldo’s eyes ignored Rusty and held my own. “Can I help you?” he said. His voice left no doubt that he was in charge or at least thought he was. He probably had a piece tucked under his arm. That made him invincible.

  “Yeah, five dollars,” Rusty said, the bill magically reappearing in his hand. His voice was wrought with eag
erness.

  “Can I help you?” Renaldo said again, his eyes still on mine.

  “Oh, yeah,” Rusty said, half turning towards me. “This guy’s a dick. He’s looking for Greg.”

  “Why would you come to me?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” Rusty said. “But I’ve got five dollars. That’s enough for plenty.”

  I decided it was time I spoke for myself. “I was hired by Greg Taylor’s family to make sure he’s all right. He doesn’t even have to go home. I just need to talk to him.”

  “Again, why would you come to me?”

  “Once a junky always a junky,” I said.

  He laughed, one short bark. He liked that. It was amusing to him. He liked me now. “All right, peeper. That’s rich.”

  “I don’t care what you’re doing here. I just need a line on Mr. Taylor.”

  “You’ve got nothing?” His eyes were lights in the shadows.

  I held out my hands to show just how empty they were.

  He thought about it. Then he gave a half-shrug. “Greg came by last night, as a matter of fact. He was with some guy. Tall, good-looking guy. I don’t know him.”

  “Did you hear a name?”

  “John, or Tim, or Tom. Something simple like that.”

  I nodded to show I was listening. “What time was this?”

  “Late. Maybe three in the A.M. They bought some stuff, and went up on the boards.”

  “Did they say where they were going?”

  “Didn’t have to say. I could hear them under the boardwalk. Must have gone there to get high and get cozy. Certainly sounded like it.”

  “Sounded like what?”

  He just smiled. “Sounded like it, shamus.” He unleashed his bark again. Rusty was almost hopping from one foot to the other now. “That’s all I know.”

  “They didn’t come back out?”

  “Not that I saw, but that doesn’t mean anything. They could have come off of the boardwalk at any of these streets.”

  I nodded.

  “Who’d you say you were working for? Greg doesn’t have any family.”

  “My client would prefer to stay anonymous.”

  That warranted a bark as well. I was a funny man. I was really cracking him up. “I like you, dick.”

  “Renaldo,” Rusty said. “Come on.”

  Renaldo continued to ignore him. “I hope you know this isn’t all free,” Renaldo said.

  “It’s not much. You’re going to get my five in a moment.”

  “That’s his five. And five doesn’t sound like a lot right now.”

  “What makes you think it’s worth more?”

  “You had nothing and now you have something. You gave this junky five bucks just to bring you to me.”

  The man had a point. And anyway John Stark was footing the bill. I brought out my wallet and dug out a ten. He took it from me and then turned to Rusty to conduct his business. I was dismissed. I wasn’t anywhere. I had nowhere to go. I had let an innocent woman get turned into a murder suspect and now I was letting my one remaining client down. I wouldn’t hire me. I took the stairs back up to the boardwalk and then the ones across the way down to the beach. I don’t know why. It was something to do.

  TWENTY-ONE

  From the beach, the carnival lights took on a sad, hopeless appearance. They were insignificant when compared with the dark surging body of water churning and crashing and whispering some forty yards away. There was just enough light to make out the water’s movement but little else. The spot at which the ocean ended and the sky began was lost to the darkness.

  My shoes slid on the sand and sank, and I could feel wet grains pour in around the sides of my feet. I hobbled awkwardly around the stairs with the grit weighing me down. The wind from the shore chilled me.

  On the beach side, there was no wooden lattice blocking entry to the black space under the boardwalk. I got my penlight out and used it to paint the space between two support beams right in front of me. It allowed me to see only about six inches ahead. But the ground was more even there, and there was enough room to stand up without crouching. I walked forward slowly, my light pointed down with an occasional sweep upwards to be sure I wasn’t about to knock my head against a support. I didn’t know what I expected to find. The sand was littered with empty cans, crumpled newsprint, and candy bar wrappers, along with shells, rocks, and some scrub brush. There were also empty paper envelopes, discarded needles, and plenty of cigarette butts, showing that the spot under the boardwalk where Renaldo sold was a popular place for those of his customers who couldn’t wait to get indoors for their fix.

  I walked straight back until I was at the lattice that separated me from the street. Renaldo was standing on the other side, leaning against the stairwell, smoking a cigarette. The syrupy flavor of the smoke told me it wasn’t tobacco he was smoking. I played my flash on the ground in either direction, but there was nothing to see. I was searching just to be doing something, to convince myself that I wasn’t entirely useless. I’d do better at home in bed. My head hadn’t touched a pillow in nearly forty-eight hours. My little nap courtesy of Mitch hardly counted.

  I picked my way back towards the beach. The debris crackled under my feet and my shoes now felt as though they weighed an extra two pounds each. I had veered off to the right in the dark, and was coming out under the stairs. I started to correct my path when the edge of my penlight beam caught the scuffed sole of a man’s shoe. That didn’t surprise me. It was just one more thing that might get discarded under the boardwalk. But then I traced my flash up a little more and saw that the shoe was still attached to a leg. It was attached to a leg wearing familiar pale blue suit pants. I crouched as the stairs came down above me and my penlight lit up the pile that was wedged under them. A man could have decided it was an out of the way place to spend the night. He probably wouldn’t sleep face down though.

  I knew who it was but I had to make sure. I lifted his head by the hair enough to see his face. It was a pretty face, a strange, half-grown, boyish face. Mr. Greg Taylor was never going to fight with Stark again. He was never going to fight with anybody.

  I let his head drop, hiding the face back in the sand, and I felt my way along his body, training the flash on my hand. There was nothing in his pants pockets and he didn’t have any others. He could have been robbed, but it was just as likely that he had had nothing in his pockets in the first place. His was a nameless body and would have remained such if found by someone who didn’t know him. That would have set the police back days and whoever did it would have plenty of time to distance himself from the crime. Assuming there was a crime, and he hadn’t died of a self-inflicted overdose. Even then, his companion, John or Tim or Tom, would want to have been somewhere else when it happened. Especially if “John” was John Stark and this whole case was a preemptive ruse.

  I came out from under the boardwalk and stretched in the open air. I made my way back up the stairs, pushing away the idea of what was underneath, and then crossed the deserted boardwalk and came down the other set of stairs to the street. At the bottom, I leaned against the railing and emptied first one shoe and then the other, adding my share to a little mound of sand where other people had done the same. I walked back around to Renaldo. Rusty was long gone.

  “You have anything else to add to the noises you heard last night?”

  “Just noises, peeper,” Renaldo said and let out a laugh filled with smoke.

  I looked back along the street to Seaside and the block beyond. This was a commercial district. It probably closed up at six o’clock just when the boardwalk was starting to draw business away for the night. “There a phone nearby?” I said.

  “At the end of the block. Who do you need to call?”

  I looked at him. “Let’s just say you might not want to hang around here to find out.”

  He straightened up. “Why do you want to do that?”

  “Take a peek under those stairs on the other side of the boardwalk and you’ll see.�
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  He spat a word that conveyed the full range of his feelings.

  “I’ll leave you out of it by name,” I said, “but I can’t promise to leave you out completely. I guess the police will still know who I mean.”

  He spat the word again, and then said, “I hate junkies,” only he included the adjectival version of his new favorite word there too.

  “Don’t worry too much. The police won’t be too happy to see me again either.”

  He nodded ruefully. “You too, huh? You too.”

  We turned to go then, and walked the half-block together without speaking. At the corner, Renaldo pointed out the phone in silence, and then turned north on Seaside and walked briskly away.

  The phone booth was wood without a door. The inside surface had been carved with any number of names, initials, suggestions, and complaints. I picked up the receiver and dialed a number. I ran my hand over the booth’s wall, feeling the scrape of the cut words.

  A voice came on the line. I was surprised that it didn’t sound sleepy. In this deserted part of town it felt like the dead of night.

  “Mr. Stark, please,” I said.

  “Mr. Stark is no longer receiving calls this evening,” the voice said. It was the butler who had opened the door that morning, a lifetime ago.

  “Tell him it’s Dennis Foster about Greg Taylor,” I said.

  There was a moment’s hesitation, and then the voice said, “Please hold the wire.”