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Death Bed

Page 15

by Stephen Greenleaf


  She swept the pill bottles off the table and jammed them into her pocket and slithered out of sight toward the bedroom. I let myself out of the house, hoping I was leaving more than that behind me.

  TWENTY

  The Saab was several years old, the color of sand on a dusky day, dented and scratched and corroded from more than a half-decade of jousting in the city’s lists. I walked around it once. The rear bumper hung loose and a taillight was cracked and a windshield wiper was missing. When I opened the door it groaned the way a girl I once knew groaned just before she fell asleep.

  A layer of dust had settled over everything inside. I set to work among the treasures in the tomb, fumbling first with the litter on top of the dashboard. I disturbed some sunglasses, some bank deposit receipts, a pen, a book of matches and a stick of gum. Chewed. In the glove compartment several maps, more matches, a first aid kit, a tire gauge, a briar pipe and a partially consumed roll of Life Savers coexisted peaceably if not neatly.

  Elsewhere was only trash: empty hamburger bags and pop cans and candy wrappers, artifacts of the twentieth century. When I found a baseball glove tucked under the front seat I began to like Covington a little better.

  What I was looking for was something that would lead me to the piece that was missing from the puzzle of Mark Covington, the piece that showed where he worked, where he thought, where he dreamed. I took a deep breath and tried again, opening the door and checking the service sticker on the end plate. It had been stuck there by the Saab dealer on Van Ness. Predictable, thus not helpful. I got back in the car and pulled up the floor mats and peered in the ash trays and folded the seat backs forward. Only dross.

  I thought about asking Mrs. Covington for the keys to the trunk. I thought about it twice. But I didn’t want to see her again, to get into the trunk or to get anything else. Then I remembered you could fold down the rear seat of a Saab and create a flatbed that extends directly into the trunk, so I crawled in the back seat and fumbled with some levers and knobs and finally figured it out in four times the time it would have taken anyone under the age of twenty.

  The seat pulled down like the lid of a coffin. Just before I struck a match to see what was back there I had a vision of a body, a dead body, folded neatly and packed tightly in a mobile crypt. I found a body in a trunk once, but not this time. There was nothing there but a half-inch of dirt and a case of empty wine bottles and a dirty feather pillow.

  I shook out the match and pulled my head out of the trunk and got out of the car. It had started to rain again, the weather turning as inclement as my case. I leaned on the car door and let the rain besmirch my sport coat and my professional reputation.

  I was about to close the door and go on to the next order of business, which was lunch, when I noticed something white sticking out from beneath the armrest on the opposite door. I leaned over and looked.

  The Saab people had put a little pocket under there, a six-inch deep pouch that ran the length of the door just under the arm rest. At some time or other Covington had stuffed an oily rag inside it, which was what I’d seen. There were also some tools—pliers, Crescent wrench, Phillips screwdriver.

  I looked in the other pocket. It was stuffed full of customer copies of credit-card receipts, all crumpled and rolled and wrinkled and soft from the moisture in the air, the consistency of crepes. I pulled them out by the handful.

  They made a large pile on the passenger’s seat. It took me awhile to straighten them out, one by one. Most were oil company receipts for gasoline credit-card purchases, several more than two years old. Almost the whole batch was from the same place—a Texaco station at Thirty-third and Noriega, four blocks away. But five of them were different, from another place, a place that didn’t seem to relate to either Covington’s house or to the newspaper, a place on Pierce just below Union, a place in an area of the city where many a cocksman before Covington had established his digs. Absent another alternative I hopped in my Buick and headed that way, stopping only for lunch at Zim’s.

  This one was an Arco station, owned by a guy named Bud, or so the sign said. I didn’t see anyone who looked like a Bud, but the bay doors were open and there was a kid in the back doing something to the universal joint on a two-year-old Ford. A radio was blasting away. Disco. I went back anyway.

  The kid’s name was Larry. He’d been working for Bud for about a year, ever since he’d dropped out of Balboa High after being suspended for taking a swing at the assistant basketball coach. No, he couldn’t ever remember it raining this much before Christmas, yes, the gas situation was still a bummer what with Iran and all, and yes, he sure liked cars, worked on them all his life.

  Under the pretext of waiting for Bud to come back I moved him from Indy cars to Formula One to NASCAR stocks to the super modifieds they ran down at Watsonville. As soon as I could I worked in foreign cars—German, Japanese, then Swedish. Volvo, then Saab. They were pretty good cars, in fact I had a friend who owned one, a beige one. All kinds of things wrong with it—bumper, taillights, wipers. As a matter of fact, my friend lived right around here. Tall, thin, dark hair, good-looking. A newsman. Maybe Larry knew him.

  And Larry did. Larry filled his tank every other week or so. Larry also knew exactly where my friend lived, because he’d seen him go in there one day last summer with a foxy-looking chick on his arm who had a set of bazooms that wouldn’t quit. Two blocks up, then left toward Steiner. The apartment building with the little tree out front. That was it, wasn’t it?

  I hoped so.

  I thanked Larry and told him I couldn’t wait for Bud any longer. On impulse I pulled out a five and gave it to the kid. Ever since they took the cop off the beat the gas station attendants are the only people in town who know what’s going on.

  I was out of the service bay and halfway to my car when something coming over the radio yanked my attention to it. I don’t know how the news report began, but the way it ended was that the body of a man named Howard Renn had been found early that morning by some joggers in the Portals of the Past area of Golden Gate Park, dead of a gunshot wound to the head. He’d been dead at least forty-eight hours. Investigation was continuing.

  And so the city had one less poet and one more mystery. For the second time in as many days the radio had told me about death, had told me that people I had seen and talked to no longer existed. Max Kottle and Howard Renn. Father and friend to a boy named Karl. Father and friend: what a man needs most till he gets past puberty. And maybe even then.

  As I walked along the sidewalk the weeds of the Kottle case grew higher and thicker around me, threatening to block my view of anything else. I pushed them back, though, out of my way and out of my mind.

  For the time being.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The apartment house with the little tree out front was called the Parkway Arms. The name was written in golden cursive on the glass panels in the double-door, one word per side. An iron grate protected the glass, but not enough to keep some local wags from reaching through and adding a yellow “F” as a prefix to the second word.

  The tree out front was a bottlebrush and the building was one of those financed with a lot of leverage, which is to say with a lot of other people’s money. The walls would be as thin as eardrums and beneath the veneers on the cabinets and tabletops would be planks of pressed sawdust. Over the years I’d lived in a lot of places just like it.

  After making sure no one was interested in what I was doing I crossed the street and walked up to the entrance. To the right of the door was a bank of tin mailboxes, each with a white name-tag on the top and a tiny round button on the bottom. Above them all was the wire mesh of the speaker that hooked into the buzzers and the lock system. I read the names quickly. There were twelve of them, but none was Covington or anything like it.

  So I went over the names again, more slowly. Four were single women, or at least were surnames preceded by a single initial. Five were couples, and three of the five were unmarried. Which left three single men: Wi
nkles, Briley and Zenger. Apartments 2, 7 and 10, respectively.

  I pushed the button under number 2. The speaker hissed and crackled and almost immediately a man’s voice asked me who I was. I told him I was from the Census Bureau, making a preliminary survey to determine whether we needed to revise any of our canvassing procedures before beginning the 1980 census.

  The voice was doubtful. I added that, because this preliminary canvass was so vital, and because participation was voluntary, we were empowered by an Act of Congress to pay twenty-five dollars to those people who agreed to talk with us. The voice told me to come on up, and the buzzer squawked.

  Apartment 2 was halfway to the back of the building. The hallway was dark and smelled of cheap paint and burned food and medicines applied externally. I knocked once and the door opened immediately behind my fist.

  The man who looked up at me might have been five feet tall if he’d stood on a brick. He was sandy-haired and stooped but his flesh was as smooth as an eggshell and his eyes were bright. He might have been fifty and he might have been seventy. I stuck out my hand and he took it in a surprisingly strong grip.

  “Smarts a little, huh?” the man said happily as he studied my reaction.

  I admitted it.

  “Used to be a jock,” he said. “Thirty years. Santa Anita. Hollywood. Bay Meadows. You name it. Got to have good finger strength to race a horse, you know. Haven’t been up since sixty-two, but I’ve still got the grip. Rubber balls, that’s the secret.”

  “Feels like you could handle Shoemaker or Cauthen any day of the week.”

  He shook his head. “I wasn’t that good. Never even made the Derby. The Flamingo, once. Clam Digger, the horse was. Sixth. Second at the clubhouse turn, but died in the stretch.” He paused, clearly reliving the run for the wire. I didn’t disturb him. “But what the hell,” he continued finally. “I’m still walking. A lot of the boys aren’t. People don’t realize how dangerous the sport is.”

  I tried to show I understood, and tried to figure how I was going to get out of there in a hurry.

  “Come on in,” he urged. “What do you want to know?”

  “Now let me see.” I pulled out my notebook, careful not to show the little man that the pages were blank. “You’re Jacob Nestor, is that right?”

  He smiled. “No, that’s not right.”

  “It’s not?”

  The smile stretched into a grin. “Not by ten lengths. I’m Eddie Winkles.”

  “Winkles. Are you sure? Just let me check.” I flipped some pages. “No, you’re Jacob Nestor. It says so right here.”

  Eddie Winkles giggled and put a hand on my wrist and tugged me further inside the apartment. “Come over here,” he said. “Now look.” He pointed to the wall to my left.

  I looked. On the wall was a giant photograph, life-sized or better, of a young jockey dressed in blue-and-white silks, gripping a crop with his left hand, a black number 3 pinned to his chest. He stood in the sun, his face round with a half-grin that said he had had a lot of luck a lot of times and was planning on having a lot more. The name Eddie Winkles was printed below the picture in white block letters.

  I shook my head helplessly. “There’s evidently been a terrible mistake at the Computer Center. No use asking you anything more, I guess. I’d better check with the office.” I put my notebook away. “Wow. I’ll probably have to check the whole block this afternoon.” I shook my head with the oppression of a bureaucrat faced with extra work. “Well, I guess that’s why we make these preliminary checks. Someone’s head will roll for this one.”

  “If they’re smart,” Winkles said, “they’ll let the heads stay on and chop the cord to the computer instead. Those damned things are going to kill us all.”

  “Computers? How?” I thought I knew, but Eddie clearly wanted to tell me.

  “Nuclear war.” Eddie’s gaiety had vanished like sheets at a white sale. “Two of those babies are going to get mad at each other one of these days, one of ours and one of theirs, and before they’re through we’ll all be dead.”

  “I never thought of it that way before.”

  “Well, you better start. I didn’t bring two hundred nags to the winner’s circle by being dumb. We’ll be living on borrowed time till they invent a computer that says ouch when you kick it. I’ve got some pamphlets on it right here. Put out by a guy in El Paso. You ought to read one.”

  I told Eddie I had to get back to the office and bid a hasty good-bye, then took the stairs to Apartment 10, the apartment whose occupant had the same name as John Peter Zenger, the first man in America to go to jail in defense of the freedom of the press.

  This time my knock went unanswered. I waited three minutes, checked to see that no doors had cracked open in front of eyes that had nothing better to do than see what I was up to, then knocked again. In the resultant silence I pulled out a credit card and ran it up the crease. No dice. I pulled out my picks. The second one got me in.

  One room and a bath. Hot plate and ice chest. Typewriter and desk. Bed and chair. Lamp and rug. Phone and radio. And enough file cabinets to have stored every piece of mail I’ve ever received. It wasn’t the Ritz, but it wasn’t the Motel Marvelous, either.

  I took a quick survey. The closet contained a few colorless clothes that had been bought off a pile instead of a rack and something repulsive that turned out to be a fake beard and hairpiece. The bed was small and soft, the sheets rumpled and discolored by dirt and semen and whatever it is women secrete during sex besides tears. Various items were tacked to the walls with straightened paper clips—articles about a tire company that sold tires that disintegrated and a car company that sold cars that blew up and others of that thrust, some of Covington’s own pieces clipped from the Investigator, posters of television women in bikinis, the famous Wirephoto of Vice President Rockefeller flipping the bird to a heckler, an aerial view of the city, a green-and-black National Geographic Photomosaic of the contiguous states and a technically precise but emotionally sterile nude drawing of a woman who was definitely not Mrs. Covington.

  The desk was just as useless. On its top were the standard references—Bartlett’s, Brewer’s, Fowler’s, Webster’s—and its single drawer contained only writing materials and a roll of stamps. I began pawing through the file cabinets.

  It would have taken me a week to inspect every paper in the files so I began by checking the folders themselves. The file labels were a bibliography of Covington’s career, a list of the exposés that had made him the most respected and most feared reporter in town. El Gordo Fire Department. Stanlock Development Corporation. South Bay Transport. Carl Putney. On and on, names that had been obscure until Covington exposed their corruption the way dentists expose nerves. And there were other names, names that had been famous in San Francisco for a century, names whose files bulged with indecipherable commercial data or pitifully pornographic photos, names that brought to mind news headlines and society page layouts and television closeups of wide-eyed, sweating faces and promises of reform and denials of responsibility and affirmations of change. Names and more names, and beneath them, in manilla wrappers, the flotsam and jetsam of psychological truth.

  I kept rummaging, learning a lot of things I didn’t know and a few I didn’t want to. But after a half hour I hadn’t found anything more pertinent than a reminder of how many people there were who would enjoy seeing Mark Covington assume another form of existence. Then I moved to the fourth cabinet. There, in between the folders for the January Club and the Lake Tahoe Gamesmanship Preservation Society, was a folder bearing a single name—Kottle.

  I took out the file and opened it up. There were a lot of things about Max in it, mostly old news clippings, and I didn’t learn anything from reading them. But there was also one other thing, a volume of poems, slim and thick-paged, with uneven edges and a stiff blue cover. The title of the volume was War Baby. It was published by the Sunflower Press. The author was Howard Renn. The dedication page read simply, “to Karl.”

 
I thumbed through the volume. The poems were short, not the Ginsbergian soliloquies I’d expected but terse, bitter epithets of formal rigidity. One poem in particular caught my eye. Zarathustra:

  Corsair

  Condor

  You who soared

  Above us all

  On wings of words

  And led a thousand

  Breathing dreams

  Through streets

  Of blood and bondage,

  Is there now

  A nest for you,

  Or must you fly

  Again aloft

  To meet a fate

  So certain, so elite?

  I tucked the file back in the cabinet and turned out the lights and left. On the way out I remembered I’d forgotten to give Eddie Winkles the money I’d promised, so I slipped three bills into his mailbox, feeling more a felon than a Samaritan.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I settled into my apartment the way aspic settles into a mold and called my answering service for the first time that week. All the messages were irrelevant annoyances except one. Two days ago, while I was still in Carmel, Howard Renn had called and left a message that he wanted to see me. Now he was dead. If I hadn’t gone out of town he might be alive. It could be that simple, if I let it be, or it could be more complicated, the way it really was.

  The spaghetti in my stomach began to burn, a cinder of displaced remorse. After two more drinks I let myself think again. After one more I called LaVerne Blanc.

  LaVerne used to be a reporter, then a columnist, but he got next to the bourbon a little too frequently and now he publishes a gossip sheet that prints more fiction than fact and makes the National Enquirer look like the National Geographic. Oddly enough, despite its intellectually bereft contents and its déclassé layout, LaVerne’s paper still manages to find its way into most of the Pacific Heights mansions and Marin County split-levels through one door or another. I almost always make a pass at LaVerne in a missing persons case. He doesn’t always come up with something helpful, but he always comes up with something.

 

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