Emily stood, relying on the back of the chair for support. She looked at us as if expecting suggestions. None of us had any, and silence hung in that rustic room like crepe, unrelieved by so much as the tick of a clock.
Through the small frost-painted panes of the front window I saw the last of the cops, still at it. It was like watching television: How could the scene out there have anything to do with the scene in here? Except in that Jack Castelar was not the only victim here, merely the most obvious.
My eyes were drawn, as if magnetically, back to the girl. We might as well have been dust motes dancing in the sun that spilled in from the dining room for all the attention she paid us, and yet in that moment she was undeniably the center of all our individual universes.
It meant nothing to her. She gazed into that dead fireplace as if it were a crystal ball, as if she were staring down her future.
The future, I could have told her, never blinks first.
CHAPTER FIVE
The sun was blinding and the sky was blue and Kate’s maroon Cutlass was still in the lot of the restaurant on Grover near Seventy-second.
I sat behind the wheel of my car and swore unenthusiastically. There was no way in hell the car could have been anyplace else but where it was—but I can dream, can’t I? If the car had by some miracle gone missing, it might have meant that Kennerly’s pipe dream had come true, that Kate simply and coincidentally had disappeared on her own. That it was where she had left it yesterday meant only one thing: She had left with someone else.
And Kim Banner was right: Walt Jennings topped the list.
Narrowing the field to a mere hundred questions or so. Had Kate gone willingly? Before or after the murder? If after, did she know her father was dead? If before, where was she when it happened? Where did they go after the murder? And, most important, was Kate alive or dead?
This was fun.
I threw the Chevy into gear, drove out onto Grover and into the lot of the hotel next door.
The management had already been softened up by Kennerly, who had, of course, called hours earlier trying to find Kate, so I didn’t have to do much ice-breaking. In fact, the assistant manager, a tall, good-looking black woman, was as helpful as could be—which, unfortunately, wasn’t very. She could tell me when Kate Castelar checked in, which I already knew. She could tell me that no calls were placed from the room, which still left the pay phones in the lobby, lounge, and restaurants. She could tell me that nothing had been sent up from room service, which was useless trivia.
She could not tell me whether anyone had been to see Kate, although no one had asked for her at the desk. She could not tell me whether Kate had received any telephone calls in her room, but none had gone through the switchboard. She could not tell me when Kate had left, but the bed had not been slept in.
Mainly because it seemed to be the thing to do, I asked to see the room. It was, of course, a waste of time, since the room had long since been made up, the management having had no reason not to. But I took the key and went up and tried to look detectively.
The room was like any modern hotel room anywhere in the world. I think they’re all stamped from a single die. It was as tidy as a church social, and if any Clews had been waiting to jump out at me from behind a door, they were long gone now. Still, I looked through the dresser and the night tables and the closet, and even tossed a glance under the double bed. Zip.
I wandered down a narrow corridor until I found the housekeeper, a short, skinny Laotian woman with a stolid face but lively eyes. We went through the routine; she had already been quizzed by the assistant manager, so the answers were fresh in her mind. As far as she could remember, the bedspread was mussed like someone had sat on it but it had not been turned down. A bar of soap, a washcloth, and a face towel had been used in the bathroom, but no bath towel; and the wastebaskets were empty except for the soap wrapper. Since Kate’s having scrawled a cryptic message on the wrapper was about as likely as my being named Miss Teenage America, I did not ask to see where they dumped the garbage.
I gave the woman five bucks, took the room key back to the front desk, and left the hotel.
Business was good over at Perkins, and I realized with some surprise that it was getting on toward nine-thirty. Breakfast. I hadn’t had any. That didn’t bother me much; what did were the first dull throbs of caffeine withdrawal.
I climbed into the car to get out of the wind, took off my hat, and rubbed my forehead. That never helps, but it gives a guy something to do.
Well, what next? Kate’s mother and brother had provided the names of a couple of her college friends. I could toddle over to the campus, nose around, ask a few questions, and hope for divine intervention. A distressing amount of detective work is like that—groping around for a light switch—but the assignment was daunting enough already without my leaping headlong into it before laying a little mental groundwork first. That meant making some preliminary assumptions; they would determine the course of the investigation.
First assumption: Kate was alive. If she wasn’t, the endeavor was really pointless. But my second assumption was that Jennings had taken her with him, and it would make no sense for him to do so only to kill her. If he was going to kill her—for whatever reason—he’d have let her lie where she dropped, as he did Castelar. No, he had taken her with him to be his good-luck charm if the cops cornered him.
The third assumption was that they were still in the environs. Our typically horrendous winter weather made that one easy to swallow.
All right, so they had had to go to ground. Where? Four possibilities suggested themselves: a place known to Jennings; a place known to Kate; a place known to them both; or the first likely-looking place they encountered. The first of these, I figured, would be a hideout Jennings had established for just such an emergency. The second was more likely a place of solitude, a private thinking post where Kate was in the habit of going to be alone. The third could have been a spot where the two met in secret to plight their troth, whatever the hell a troth is. The fourth—well, if they’d simply jumped down the first available hole, there was no way I could try to get a trace on it, so it wasn’t even worth considering.
That left me three perfectly good, logical angles to follow, provided me a place to get started, and gave me a rough idea how to organize my time. I didn’t know if it would come to anything, but at least my client was going to get something for his money: legwork.
The Jennings place didn’t look much better in today’s cold sunlight than it had under yesterday’s ominous overcast. Or maybe it was just my having gotten up on the wrong side of the bed and at the wrong hour of the day. I parked where I had yesterday; where Kate’s car had been there was now another dark late-model sedan. It had no markings on it, but it might as well have had police in chartreuse neon lettering in the back window. You can almost always pick out an unmarked police car, just as you can almost always spot a cop in mufti. The aura, I guess.
I knew OPD had been to see the Jennings woman, of course, but I didn’t figure they’d still be going at her—or going at her again so soon. This threw a spanner into the works of my carefully thought-out approach, since cops are not notoriously fond of civilian audiences breathing down their necks while they’re trying to work. Hell. I got out of the car and crossed the street. Odds were, they’d just toss me out of there, what with the beard and everything, but nothing ventured …
The door was opened by a short, broad plainclothesman with colorless eyes and hair so blond as to be almost white. He stood there like a statue, filling the door frame, but the house was so tiny that I could see pretty much everything in it even so. The door opened into a small square living room with threadbare powder-blue carpeting, smudged walls, and water-stained ceiling tiles. Straight back was an even smaller kitchen, in which Kim Banner sat at a Formica-topped table, talking to someone I couldn’t see. Against the south wall of the living room were two closed doors; I assumed the nearer was the bedroom, the farther the bathr
oom.
I asked the white-haired cop if Detective Banner was there, knowing full well she was.
He looked back over his right shoulder. “Banner.”
She looked up, saw me, and turned down the corners of her mouth. She said something I couldn’t hear to the person I couldn’t see, got up, and came over.
“Okay, Swanson,” she said to the other cop. “Go look after the baby.” He went. Then she said to me, “You don’t waste any time, do you?”
“Neither do you.”
“This?” She laughed humorlessly. “This is an exercise in futility. The detectives we sent over earlier didn’t get anything useful out of her, but I thought maybe I’d have better luck myself.”
“Have you?”
Banner shook her head. “Neither will you,” she said cagily.
I shrugged. “I guess I’m like you. I have to find out for myself.”
She considered it. I said, “Now or later. You can’t shut me out indefinitely.” Banner thought about it some more, then moved aside. I took a single step into the room and she grabbed my arm.
“My show.” Soft but sincere. “You’re an innocent bystander. Right?”
“Right.”
“You want to know anything, you ask me, okay?”
“Okay. Can I have a cup of coffee?”
She looked to see if I was being a wiseacre again, but for once I wasn’t. “What with everything, I haven’t had my usual hundred and twelve cups yet today, and I feel like I’m wearing a tam-o’-shanter made of concrete.”
This time there was a little something in her laugh. “I know the feeling. We’ll get you fixed up.”
The other cop, Swanson, was leaning against a narrow range crammed into one corner of the kitchen. Seated at the cheap plastic-topped table on a cheap plastic-backed chair, her hands wrapped around a coffee mug, was a thin and hard-looking woman with hair the color of copper wire and, by the look of it, the same consistency. She wore old and comfortable-looking blue pajamas under a well-worn tartan robe tied sloppily at the waist, and sat with one bare foot tucked under her.
“More company,” Banner said as we entered the room. The woman shrugged. “This,” Banner told me, “is apparently Jennings’s wife, Christina.”
“What’cha mean, ‘apparently’?” the woman demanded in a voice that went with the hair. “I’m his wife. I’ve been telling you that all morning.”
“So you have,” Banner said pleasantly. “It’s just that our records don’t show Jennings as having a wife; neither do the county’s.”
“Well, is that my fault? Things get lost, you know.”
“They always give the happy couple a copy, too.”
Christina Jennings, or whatever, looked back at her coffee mug. “I told you already, I can’t find it right now,” she said lamely.
Banner looked at me. I looked back. We were thinking the same thing: How many women in North America can’t lay hands on their marriage certificates, given about five minutes’ lead time?
“Well, never mind that,” Banner said, handing me a mug from the drainboard on the counter next to the sink. I poured myself a cup. Four people in that room were about three and a half too many, so I tucked myself as best I could into a corner where the icebox partly blocked a narrow, streaked window that overlooked the back yard, and gulped hot, sludgy coffee. “That’s not important right now,” Banner was saying. “What is important is where your husband was between about midnight and two this morning.” She left enough of a gap between “your” and “husband” to make the implication unmistakable, but beyond an if-looks-could-kill look, Christina refused to rise to the bait.
“I told you that, too, and the guys who were here before,” she said, a trifle animatedly. “He was here, with me, all night.”
“What were you doing?”
“We weren’t doing anything. We were just at home, you know?”
“You must have been doing something.” This from the other cop, Swanson.
“Well, of course we were doing something,” Christina said exasperatedly. “You know, we were just, like, watching TV and stuff.”
“What sort of stuff?” Banner.
The woman sighed deeply. “I don’t know. The sort of stuff you do around the house at night. I did the dishes, swept the kitchen floor, called my mom …”
“Did you take out the garbage?” I asked.
She looked at me like I had just dropped from the heavens. Banner looked at me, too, but with a somewhat different expression.
“Can it, Nebraska,” she said, so I canned it and poured another cup of whatever this was we were calling coffee while she went at Christina again. “You don’t know where your marriage license is, you don’t know where your husband is, you don’t even know what you did last night. What do you know, Christina?”
“I know I’m getting pretty damn tired of you people not believing me—”
“Try telling us the truth and we’ll try believing you.” Swanson.
“I am telling you the truth.”
“Then you must be some kind of stupid.”
She went up like a bottle rocket. “I’m not stupid, you dirty motherfu—”
“Hey!” Banner yelled. “Knock it off. Sit down.” Christina sat, sullenly, and rested her head against her folded arms. “This is no good; we aren’t getting anywhere.” Banner’s hoarse voice was gentle. “Now, I know you’re upset, and I’m sorry, but we need answers, Christina, and I don’t think you’re being straight with us. I don’t want to have to take you downtown, but if you—”
She stopped because we had all simultaneously become aware of the heaving of Christina’s slender shoulders and the soft, almost inaudible sound of her cry.
Banner looked at Swanson. He shrugged with Scandinavian impassivity. She looked back at Christina, who raised her head from the table to show us her red, streaming eyes. “He killed that man,” she said, sobbing.
The cops traded looks again. Banner sat in the only other chair at the table. “Tell me about it,” she urged softly. “From the beginning.”
Christina took a minute or two to compose herself, then told it.
Walt Jennings had been home in the early evening, working on his favorite hobby: drinking cheap rye. And, as was typical when he drank cheap rye, he got increasingly unpleasant the more he drank. “He’d get mad at that banker, that Castelar,” Christina told us. “Just furious. He’d say the man was responsible for everything that had gone wrong in his life since he came up here from Oklahoma, that Castelar had taken away his farm, what he’d worked and saved all his life to own, and that he was gonna—gonna kill him someday.”
It was an old story, to Christina as much as to the rest of us, and she hadn’t really paid that much attention to him, having heard it all before. Eventually Jennings ran out of booze, and that made him even madder. “At about eleven he put on his coat and I asked him where he was going at that hour, with the weather so crummy.”
“What did he say?” Banner asked.
“He didn’t say nothing, he just pushed me out of the way and went out.”
“And that’s the last you’ve seen of him?”
“I—I think maybe I should have a lawyer.”
Swanson rolled his eyes and Banner sighed lightly. “Mrs. Jennings,” she said, switching to the formal form of address and ridding her tone of any trace of sarcasm, “you can get one if you want one, but it’s not you who’s in trouble here. We’re just trying to get an idea where your husband might have gone.”
Christina narrowed her eyes and sniffed. “Isn’t there some law about a wife not having to talk against her husband?”
Banner rubbed her temples. “That’s right, but we’re not in court.”
“And you already told us he killed Castelar,” Swanson reminded her.
“I was upset,” Christina said haughtily, straightening in her chair and facing him. But then she slouched again, put her elbow on the table and her chin in her hand. “Aw, what the fuck, I’ve pr
obably said too much already.
“No, I saw Walt after that. For about two minutes. He came back here a few hours later. I don’t know what time it was—I’d already gone to bed—but it was late, real late, ’cause I was up till almost one. I’m a pretty heavy sleeper, but Walt was tearing around here like to wake the dead.”
“What was he doing?”
“Packing. He had this old green duffel from the army, and he was throwing stuff in it like there was no tomorrow—shirts and pants and underwear, and not folding them, either, just stuffing them in there like they were rags. And then—this is crazy—he came in here and started rummaging through the cupboards.”
“He took food?”
She nodded. “Canned stuff, mostly, plus some candy bars and a box of Cheerios.”
Jennings gave no explanation for his behavior, or any indication where he was heading. Christina asked him, but he ignored her. When she tried to get him to sit down and talk to her, he swung at her again, but missed. “He wasn’t even looking, like the way you’d swing at a fly buzzing around you when you’re trying to do something.” She estimated he was here and gone within ten minutes at the most.
“And you have no idea what time this was?”
“Not really. When he left I sat down on the couch”—she nodded toward the living room—“and tried to figure out what was going on. I guess I fell asleep, ’cause that’s where I was when the police—the other police—came this morning.”
There was a brief intermission while Christina visited the bathroom, then Banner and Swanson backed her up and took her over the same ground again, looking for holes. I’d heard all I needed to hear, so I finished my cup, pulled on my parka, and stepped out the back door. No one protested. I stood on the ice-crusted cement stoop and looked at the footprints in the snow running from the door to two battered garbage cans in the far corner of the yard, and back.
Moving Targets Page 5
