Moving Targets

by William J. Reynolds

  I didn’t expect my business with Banner—to ask whether the farmhouse that Tom Black had told me about had in fact been checked out—would take more than a few minutes, so I got back the dial tone and called down to her station. I was right, it didn’t take more than a minute. Banner wasn’t in.

  I left a message, set down the phone, lifted the World-Herald into a thin sliver of light from the street, and gave the front page the once-over.

  The murder was the big story. No surprise there, though I always find it a little strange when the alleged lead story is overshadowed by a gigantic AP Wirephoto of kids playing in the snow in Bedford, Massachusetts, or some other real-life drama. To even things up, however, the Castelar piece was adorned with two photographs, one a standard personnel-file portrait of Castelar, the type of picture they run on the business page when someone gets promoted, the other a full-face mug shot of Walt Jennings. I realized with a kind of jolt that I hadn’t even known what Jennings looked like. My job had been to find Kate, and although she was probably with Jennings, I had never thought to wonder about his appearance. He was good-looking enough, I suppose, in a slick kind of way. Or maybe that was the fault of the police photographer, whose handiwork it was on display. He had longish dark hair combed back—this is Jennings, not the photographer—close-trimmed long sideburns, and a smug look, as if he had won a lottery instead of a trip to the pokey.

  I was too lazy to turn on a light and properly read the story, but I gathered that nothing had broken since noon. The paper said police indicated satisfaction with the investigation so far. It said law-enforcement agents throughout the five-state area were on alert, although local police felt that snowstorms in the surrounding territory—and moving into eastern Nebraska—had probably prevented Jennings’s getting too far. It gave the number and description of Jennings’s truck. It mentioned that the murder weapon had been recovered, but that the suspect should still be considered armed and dangerous.

  There was no mention of a certain brilliant and dashingly handsome private investigator having turned up the gun.

  The phone rang, and without preamble four names tumbled into my ear. I scribbled them into my notebook alongside the appropriate license numbers: Martin J. and Donna R. Avery; Janice A. Pinkowski; Charles B. Castelar; and the Greater Omaha Vending and Amusements Corporation, Inc.

  The receiver went dead in my ear and I set the thing down, throwing the notebook next to it on the coffee table. That was that; Castelar’s pal was someone who wanted a loan in order to keep a jukebox business afloat. Another mystery solved. On to the next job.

  Which, I realized as I stood and the room made a sudden counterclockwise turn, had better be to break the fast I’d been keeping since last night’s dinner.

  Back in the kitchen, I filled the kettle and set it on a medium flame, then started butter melting in a skillet over very low heat. I stuck a cassette in my Kmart Blue Light Special stereo, which I feared was getting ready to head for that big electronics store in the sky, entered the bathroom, stripped, and got under a shower as hot as I could tolerate. For a time I simply stood, face directed toward the spray, eyes closed tight, and let the water warm me, relax me, soothe me. Then I found shampoo, soap, razor, and took comfort in the mindlessly familiar activities of washing, rinsing, and shaving. The razor felt clean and good on my throat as I close-shaved slowly up to just below my jaw, feeling with the fingertips of my left hand where the new beard began, suppressing once again the impulse to keep going and get rid of the scruffy thing. But I’d let it go this long, and in a few days maybe it would be filled in enough that I could shape it up a bit around the mustache and make it look like a real beard. So I left it, shaved my throat, made a couple of passes across the back of my neck for good measure, rinsed off, and got out.

  The kettle was at its pre-boil rumble and the butter was sizzling quietly when I came back from the bedroom in clean sweatshirt, jeans, and gym socks. I filled the infusion pot with hot water from the tap and set it aside; then I broke three eggs into a bowl, added milk and pepper, and whipped them into a froth with a table fork. I turned up the heat under the frying pan and dumped in the mixture.

  When the kettle lid began rattling I emptied the coffeepot, spooned a generic “all-purpose grind” into it, and added boiling water. Then I slipped the plunger dingus over the top of the glass beaker, shoved it down to the bottom, and drew it slowly upward again to suspend the grounds and let the brew steep.

  The eggs were kicking up a fuss. I punched holes in a couple of bubbles and let the unset goop run into the bottom of the pan. I don’t know if Paul Bocuse would approve, but what the hell, it’s fun. When it was about half-cooked I dropped three great blobs of peanut butter onto one end and folded the other over them.

  The coffee was ready. I lowered the plunger again and it dragged the grounds to the bottom of the beaker.

  I threw two slices of wheat bread into the toaster.

  The omelette wanted to be flipped.

  Spenser, eat your heart out.

  The six o’clock newscasts were underway, but I guessed that the Castelar business had led off all three so I skipped them, turned down the stereo, and sat at the coffee table, eating by what light ricocheted in from the kitchen to augment the street lamps. Local news programs give me indigestion anyhow. One of my great unproven theories is that a television station could make a million bucks if it dropped out of this Action News/Eyewitness News/Big News/Newswatch/News-Center nonsense and simply called the news what everyone calls the news—the news—but it was another of those things no one sought my opinion on. In any event, I doubted that even the combined might of KETV, KMTV, and WOWT had turned up anything new and exciting on the Castelar case since the newspaper had come off the press. And since none of them had interviewed me about my role in finding the murder weapon, screw ’em.

  Actually, I was having second thoughts about that accomplishment. Or fifty-second thoughts. I don’t like to make the mistake of thinking that anything that comes simply should be suspect—but damn, that had been simple. Even simple-minded. Sure, bad guys do lots of stupid things. It’s not that they have the market cornered, it’s just that their stupid things count more than ours usually do. However, the more I thought about this particular stupid thing, the unhappier I got. I’ve never had to get rid of a murder weapon, mainly because I’ve never murdered anyone except in my imagination, but I like to think I could come up with something better than throwing it away. In my own trash can, no less. I’d drop it down a sewer drain, toss it in a snowy ditch along the highway, hide it in somebody else’s garbage—but not my own back yard with big fat footprints leading right up to it. Unless I hoped someone would find it.

  Why would I hope that?

  I wouldn’t.

  I took a sip of the coffee, congratulating myself on the fine brew I make, while part of my brain took the question I’d phrased, turned it around, looked at it this way and that, shook it up like a Lucite-encased snowstorm, and eventually set it aside.

  Jennifer would have enjoyed this. She had more than once accused me of having a positive fetish for finding totals, for trying to get life to balance out on both sides like a chemical equation. She would have felt obliged to assert that I liked this kind of activity, despite my protestations to the contrary, that I truly enjoyed looking for X and figuring out where it fit into the mathematical sentence.

  She was probably right. It was the connecting thread—the common denominator, if we haven’t already overworked the arithmetic jargon—in my sundry vocational experiments. And this particular equation held enough anonymous Xs and Ys and Zs floating around to keep a physicist happy for a year. I don’t suppose I’d’ve collected many worry lines if I didn’t get values assigned to all of them—unlike mathematicians, private detectives don’t necessarily have to find all the answers, just the important ones—but one or two would be nice. Like, who had doctored my car, and why? Why was I being tailed, and by whom? And where, oh where were Walt Jennings
and Kate Castelar hiding?

  So that’s three things; so sue me.

  The latter question was still the most important, naturally; the others would probably fall into place once the big one was answered. I felt I had exhausted the Castelar angle, but that still left me Plan B, the Jennings approach. Perhaps he had some sort of private retreat or someplace he secretly rendezvoused with women or, not to put too fine a point on it, a hideout prepared for just such an exigency. If I frequented Jennings’s haunts, maybe someone could provide me a lead. (That’s detective talk.)

  It would give me a whole new set of people to tell me to mind my own business.

  And it was a good excuse to avoid the typewriter.

  I went back to change clothes again. My bed, a couch that folds into a bed or a bed that folds into a couch (I haven’t decided which), looked positively seductive, but the internal slave-driver told me there was no time for that now. We’ll be together again someday, old friend, I thought as I freed up some floor space by turning it back into a couch. I had bought the thing a few months earlier because, when folded up, it left enough space in the room for a steel office desk (secretarial model) in addition to dresser and nightstand and other bedroom accoutrements, and that in turn gave me back my kitchen table. When folded down, it left so much carpeting showing that you’d need two, maybe three green stamps to cover it, but since I usually had my eyes closed then, I didn’t mind.

  I sat down and laced my boots. Then I stood and weighted my pockets with all the sundry impedimenta you just can’t get along without, and paused momentarily at the desk.

  The surface was largely covered with precise stacks of query packets—article proposals, photocopies of some of my work, two large gray envelopes (one for sending out, one for getting back), mailing and return-address labels—all neatly clipped together and waiting for one or two of their brothers to get ready so they could all go to the post office together. But at the far left corner was another pile, anchored by a dictionary: two manila folders, a fat one crammed with notes—some typed, most scribbled—and a thinner one holding forty or fifty sheets of cheap yellow paper, the uninspired beginnings of The Next Book.

  I glanced at the notes. Yep, that was my handwriting, all right, but it felt like the words had been written by someone else. I recognized the plot, the characters, the scenes, but it was like reading the TV Guide recap of a movie you only dimly recall ever having seen. I hadn’t touched the thing in more than a month now. I had been busy “conceptualizing,” “brainstorming,” “percolating”—which is to say, procrastinating. Why? Because writing is hard work—anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to fool you or himself—and the writer, like anyone involved in a creative pursuit, lives with the constant subliminal fear that this is it, that he’s going to wake up tomorrow and find that the muse has up and moved to Taos, New Mexico, the creative juices have evaporated forever, and the literary license has been irrevocably revoked.

  All those ideas, all those images, all those stories floating around in that gray void of the imagination—how to snare them, identify them, put them down on paper in some kind of intelligible, literate, entertaining fashion? And having done it once, how do you do it again? When I was writing The Book, I heard intermittent voices telling me that it was not as good as I thought, that it was in fact no good at all, that I would never complete a manuscript nearly ten times longer than my longest nonfiction piece, that even if I did I’d never place it, because I didn’t have an agent or a track record or an uncle in the publishing business. (Actually, the voices telling me that last part were real voices, belonging to self-styled experts.) But that was okay. Demoralizing, yes, but okay. Because I had nothing to lose but my time and sleep. I had no reputation on the line; I had no reputation, period. I was just another slob who thought he could write a novel.

  Now I was a slob who had written a novel, had had editors say complimentary things about it (while rejecting it, however), and had found a house willing to publish it. Now I had a reputation—albeit unfledged, and known to only the tiniest handful of people—and however insignificant it might be, it was what put its scrawny neck on the block now. If The Book had been stillborn, who would have known but me and a few anonymous editors in far-off New York? But now people in my little circle knew of my small literary triumph, and expected more. If The Next Book crashed and burned …

  “Shit,” I said to the desk as I threw the folder onto the stacks of queries. Was this tough? Was this heroic? Was this hard-boiled? Hammett was no quitter. Neither was Chandler or Macdonald. Was I?

  Yes.

  Or rather, I had been, for too long. I had already decided that I had to hang tough, stick to my guns, stand my ground, be true to my school, and like that. Which meant more than keeping the same old address. It meant I had to quit farting around and start actually doing what I was supposed to be doing, what I said I was doing. “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action,” wrote the bard; he ought to know.

  But it was probably also Shakespeare who coined the phrase “Easier said than done.”

  I put out the light and and left.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Christina Jennings might have been waiting for me. She had tidied the place up, put on soft music and softer lighting, and answered the door wearing a green dress and an expectant look. The look melted as soon as she saw me, so I guess I wasn’t her Mystery Date. I wondered who was. A picture flashed through my brain, the picture of Jennings walking into the house and me wrestling him to the ground and forcing him to tell me where Kate was and finding her and being a big hero. I didn’t see where I could get rich in the bargain, but it was a nice dream even if it vanished as quickly as it appeared. To be hanging around the house, Jennings would have had to be an even bigger fool than current events made him out to be. And Christina’s dress was not of the honey-I’m-home variety. It showed a lot of her left leg and all of her back, and left little of the rest of her to the imagination. The shade of green was almost right for her penny-colored hair, and the net effect was pretty stunning, in a blowsy sort of way. I decided Walt wasn’t the only one in the family who occasionally worked the midnight shift.

  Christina pulled a sour face and turned away as soon as she recognized me, but she didn’t slam the door on my foot, so I followed her into the tiny house.

  “Guys like you never let up, do they.” She snared a pack of Winstons and a throwaway lighter from a low, square coffee table.

  I closed the door on the cold. “You mean there are other guys like me?”

  She lighted the cigarette, threw the pack and the lighter on the table, and turned back to me. “What do you want now? I told the cops everything I know—about three times already.”

  “Yeah, but which version? Seems to me the story changed once or twice when I was here before.” I wondered how she knew I wasn’t a cop; I didn’t think Banner had introduced me that morning.

  “I already told the cops that, too. I was trying to cover up for Walt, you know, but I could see I was making a mess of it, so I gave it up and told the truth.” Her look was direct. “I guess I’m not a very good liar.” She made it sound like a challenge. What was I supposed to say? Aw, don’t be so hard on yourself. I bet you’re not a bad liar at all?

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  “Then screw you,” she said heatedly. “You don’t like it, talk to the cops. They believe me.”

  “They told you that?”

  She said nothing. She walked back toward me—the tired little room was so small that this required only a couple of steps—and I thought maybe she planned to scratch out my eyes or something equally dramatic, but she was heading for the narrow window next to the door. She parted the faded old curtains, raised the yellowed roller shade behind them, and opened the window several inches. “Stuffy in here,” she said, blowing smoke at me.

  It wasn’t particularly. I moved away from the window and leaned against the door in the stance they teach you at hard-boiled school. “I’ll be
gone in a minute,” I assured her. “I can see you’re expecting company.”

  If I had anticipated a profound response to this display of detective skill—an impassioned denial, a bawling confession—I didn’t get it. One tottered on the brink, I think, when Christina parted her pale-painted lips as if to gainsay my assertion; but she caught it, and herself, turned her unpronounced words into an absent, meaningless smile, and drew once more on the cigarette. The gesture, as it finally emerged, was neutral, implying neither admission nor denial. She exhaled the smoke and let the smile expand. “Don’t worry about it,” she said calmly.

  Christina moved away from me again, slowly. She straightened an electric clock on top of a television on a cart, turned off the record player—the music had already stopped—then clicked the three-way floor lamp up to its highest setting. That brought her over to a well-worn armchair. She dropped herself into it and crossed her legs. The green material slid back a good distance and showed a lot of skin. What the books call showgirl’s legs, I thought idly, though I wasn’t exactly sure how they were different from anyone else’s legs. I guess it depends on whether sequined nylons would feel at home on them. They would have on those legs. Or gams; do we hard-boiled types say gams anymore?

  I glanced up and felt stupid when I saw her looking at me looking at her legs. Smooth move. She smiled again and sent smoke toward the ceiling, and somehow caused her dress to fall away even more. When she looked at me her eyes were steady and amused. “Is that what you came for,” she scoffed, “to stare at my legs?”