by S. J. Rozan
I parked on the nearly empty street a block up from the courthouse. I fed the parking meter—six minutes for a penny, half an hour for a nickel—because the sheriff’s office was half a block away and Brinkman knew my car.
I crossed in the middle of the block, creating a two-car traffic jam, and stepped onto the cracked and uneven concrete sidewalk. There was no grass verge here. Beyond Main Street’s half mile there wasn’t even a sidewalk.
The Park View luncheonette was at the end of a block of two-and three-story brick buildings with their dates set in stone at their cornices. The luncheonette’s storefront windows were clouded, the way they always were on a cold day. Beads of water streaked them from inside; dish towels lined the low Formica sills, catching the condensation before puddles formed and dripped onto the checkerboard linoleum.
The chrome-legged tables at the front were empty except for two old men with plaid wool jackets and rheumy eyes. I walked past them, sat at the counter on a stool whose green vinyl cover was bandaged with silver tape.
At one of the rear tables a giggling group of adolescent girls who should have been in school were drinking Cokes and puffing on cigarettes without inhaling. At another a young woman ate a sandwich while a baby in a high chair rubbed his hands in his apple sauce. A man and a woman with a city look about them were spread out at the back table drinking coffee and reading the Mountain Eagle. There were people who said that people like them—yuppies with money to spend—would be the salvation of the county. A class above weekenders like me, they would buy the shabby farms, hire locals to repair the buildings and tend their gardens and look after their horses while they were back in the city making money. A few of the local cafes had put in cappuccino machines, and the A & P in Cobleskill was starting to stock arugula and endive, for the ones who’d come already. But the drive from New York is long, and summers are short up here in the hills. There’s no cachet to a place in this county, nowhere to wine and dine your weekend guests, no one to see or be seen by. People with an eye for beauty and a need for quiet would come here, but they always had. And the moneyed crowds would continue to go elsewhere, as they always had.
Ellie Warren stepped from behind the counter to refill coffee cups and chat. She turned when she saw me sit; her thin face lit in a big gap-toothed grin.
“Well, hi there, stranger!” She came to the counter, plunked the coffeepot down, gave me a peck on the cheek. “I haven’t seen you since before Thanksgiving! Where have you been?”
“I haven’t been up, Ellie.”
She nodded, her eyes glowing conspiratorially. “Making yourself scarce?”
“You think I needed to?”
She laughed. “Probably didn’t hurt.” She pushed a string of faded red hair back from her face. “Hey, hon, what happened?” Her long thin fingers touched the cheek she hadn’t kissed.
I winced. “Nothing; it’s okay. But I’m starving. What’s good?”
She smiled wickedly. “Nothing here. Come by my place later, I’ll fry you some chicken that’ll make you cry.”
“How about a sandwich to hold me till then?”
“If you have to.”
“A BLT on toast. And coffee.”
Ellie waltzed down the counter, stuck my order on a spindle at the kitchen opening. She came back, poured my coffee, leaned her elbows on the counter.
“How’ve you been, Ellie?” I asked through the coffee.
She spread her skinny arms, grinned again. “As you see. Not getting older, getting better.”
“You couldn’t get any better, Ellie. How’s Chuck doing?”
Ellie’s son Chuck was twenty-one, a loud, wild boy. He and Jimmy Antonelli had been inseparable troublemakers for years. Brinkman had arrested them more times than anyone could count on drunk-and-disorderlies, as public nuisances, for property damage, willful endangerment, trespassing, and once, after they’d stolen a car, for grand theft. The car turned out to belong to a cousin of Ellie’s, who refused to press charges.
Until the boys were seventeen, all Brinkman could do was grit his teeth while the family court judge sent for Tony and Ellie. He’d lecture them, let them pay the boys’ fines, and send them home. But finally even the judge got disgusted. As soon as they were old enough by state law to serve time as adults, he started sentencing them to weeks at a time in the jail behind the sheriff’s office.
Brinkman had enjoyed that.
Ellie laughed. “He’s doing great. Basic training is over and he’s been at sea a couple of weeks now. I’ve got a picture. You want to see?”
“A picture? I thought you’d be good for a dozen, Ellie.”
“He only sent me the one, so far. It’s only been three months.”
She reached under the counter for her purse, rummaged through it. She flipped her wallet open, smiled as she looked at the photograph, passed it to me.
Chuck Warren had Ellie’s smile, with more teeth. His eyes were as challenging as ever, but his mustache was gone, and his thick blond hair was cropped close and largely hidden under a seaman’s cap.
“Christ,” I said. “He must have been really scared, to go and do that.”
“He thought Jimmy was going to end up doing fifteen years in Greenhaven. We all did. He knew it could have been him. It made him think.” She laughed again. “Sometimes, you have to hit them over the head with a frying pan to get their attention.”
The bell in the kitchen rang. Ellie went down the counter, brought back my sandwich, along with coleslaw and fries I hadn’t ordered. “A big guy like you needs some real food,” she explained, eyes twinkling.
I salted the fries. “Ellie, I need to find Jimmy. Tony says he’s been living with a girl. That mean anything to you?”
She frowned, folded her hands together under her chin. “I haven’t seen him since Chucky left.”
“This would be from before that. Tony says he moved out around Christmas.”
The door opened, letting in cold air and two men who sat at the end of the counter. Ellie winked at me, went over and took their orders. She poured them coffee, came back, and refilled my cup. “You know, I think he did have a girl. I never met her, but Chucky told me. Oh, what was her name?” Her face furrowed into lines of concentrated thought, then melted. “Alice. Alice something.”
“Alice what?”
“Come on, hon, what do you want from an old lady?”
“If I knew an old lady I’d tell you. Do you know what she looks like?”
She thought again. “You know, I do. Chucky said she was pretty; dark and sweet; but heavy-set. That sort of surprised him; I guess that’s why he mentioned it. He said Jimmy’d always gone for the skinny ones, the little lost-looking ones. Alice was real different from Jimmy’s other girls. She’s not part of that crowd, you know, Jimmy and Chucky’s crowd. I don’t think Jimmy was hanging around with them either so much anymore, since he met her.”
“Well, thanks, Ellie. That’ll help.” I reached for my check; only the sandwich was on it.
I paid her, finished my coffee as she made change from the ornate cash register. As I zipped my jacket she put her hand on my arm. “Wait,” she said. “I think I did see Jimmy. I’m not sure, but I think it was him. Chucky told me Jimmy’d bought a truck—one of those stupid things with the big wheels and the light bar on the cab?”
“What about his old van, that he worked on so hard?”
“Oh, he still has that, I think. Anyhow, a truck like Chucky told me about tore through here about two weeks ago as I was coming in. Ran the stoplight, had to drive onto the curb to miss the mail truck coming from Spring Street. I think it was Jimmy’s, but he wasn’t driving. Some girl was.”
“Alice?”
“I don’t think so, not if Chucky was right. This one was small, with lots of blond hair. And laughing, as though tearing around town on two wheels was funnier than anything.”
I kissed her skinny hand. She pulled it back, laughing. Then her face got serious. “Is Jimmy in trouble, hon?”
<
br /> “I don’t know. But Brinkman’s looking for him, and the state troopers. Just to ask him some questions, for now. But I don’t want Jimmy to do anything stupid if Brinkman finds him.”
“Oh, lord. Sheriff Brinkman would love that, wouldn’t he?”
“Yeah, he would. Keep an eye out for him, will you, Ellie? I’ll see you later.”
I stepped out into the afternoon. Lighting a cigarette, I looked up and down the street. A yellow dog wandered, sniffing, along the sidewalk opposite. The stoplight at Main and Spring changed. No one was at it.
It was a big county. Finding a dark, heavy-set girl named Alice, if that was all I had to go on, could take weeks.
And there was another problem. I had a client. I’d taken Eve Colgate’s money to follow a trail that was already four days old and getting colder by the minute.
I reached in my pocket, found the list of antique shops I’d made a century ago, this morning at Antonelli’s. I looked at my watch. Two o’clock. If I was smart about it, I could get to the places I’d targeted and be back at Antonelli’s by six-thirty or seven. If the place was open—and if I knew Tony, as soon as MacGregor was through with him and MacGregor’s boys were through with his cellar, he’d be open—maybe Tony would talk to me.
If he wouldn’t, maybe the Navy would let Chuck Warren talk to me.
Either way, at least I’d get a drink.
6
ONE OF THE antique shops on my list was in Schoharie, down Main Street from the Park View. A wooden sign in the shape of a sheep hung over the sidewalk. The proprietress, a thin, quick woman, was very nice, but as far as Eve Colgate’s silver, I came up dry. I gave her the number at Antonelli’s, asked her to call me if anything like what I’d described turned up, and left.
I decided to hit the farthest of the other shops first and then work my way back across the county. I U-turned in the middle of Main Street, went south where Main turns into 30 and 30 turns into a four-lane highway. Down here in the valley there was nothing dramatic about this road, but it was fast. Even where it was only two lanes, it had been widened and straightened, something they did to the old roads around here when they didn’t build new ones to bypass them entirely. Now 30 cut right through some of the farms that had looked so timeless and sure from the hills. Not a few farmers had retired to Florida on what the state had paid for the fields I was driving through. Asphalt was a cash crop, up here.
I turned off 30 onto a narrow road that lead up into the hills past Breakabeen. The shop I was headed for was a few miles outside town. Town was a post office, a bar, a grocery, a Mr. Softee, and a dozen houses strung out along a crossroads.
Just beyond the point where the last of the houses disappeared behind me there was a road leading up to the right—probably a driveway masquerading as a road, like mine. Faded script letters on an arrow-shaped sign told anyone who cared to know that The Antiques Barn was a half mile up.
The first hundred yards was respectable, but after that the road was badly kept, full of potholes and mud. The Acura had good suspension—the old ones did—but I wouldn’t cut a diamond in it, even on the highway. I was glad to get out of the car onto ground that wasn’t moving.
The Antiques Barn was a real barn, big, with flaking red paint and double square doors wide enough to drive a combine through. Those doors weren’t open. Neither was the person-sized door cut into one of them, but it gave when I turned the knob. As it opened, it rang a set of sleigh bells hung on the jamb.
I stepped over the high wooden threshold into a dusky, dank room where plates and pitchers, candlesticks and jewelry, walking canes, hats, boots, and thousands of books lay in piles on wooden furniture of every description. The piles had an air of having been undisturbed since time began. Each piece, including the furniture, bore a square ivory-colored tag with a number written on it in a spidery hand.
The room went on forever, disappearing into the dusk, and it seemed I was alone in it. “Hello!” I called into the aged air. Nothing happened. Maybe in here nothing ever happened. I called “Hello!” again, louder; then went back to the door and rattled it, ringing the sleigh bells again and again.
I stopped because I thought I heard a voice. I listened, ready to go back to my sleigh bells; but I was right. Faintly, from somewhere beyond a clutch of stuffed chairs in the center of the room, came words, and with the sound came movement, a figure shuffling toward me out of the primordial twilight.
“Yes, yes!” it muttered as it inched along, placing objects from a pile in its arms onto bureaus and bookcases like a glacier depositing rocks. “My, my!” The figure came very, very slowly to stand before me. It was the figure of a man, round for the most part. His age was unguessable, as was the actual color of his hair, now a thick dust gray.
He squinted up at me over dusty glasses that seemed to have been forgotten at the end of his nose. “You must learn to curb your impatience, young man. It will get you nowhere in life.”
“I’ve been there already,” I said. “I didn’t like it.”
He sniffed, “Well,” he said. “Well. An impatient young man like yourself hasn’t come here to browse. You’re looking for some particular item. Yes; you know precisely what you want. Not for yourself; a gift most likely, for someone who”—he peered at me intently—“who assuredly would rather have you at home by the fire than running all over hell-and-gone seeking out the perfect gift. But you won’t hear of it, so we’ll say no more about it. What was it you wanted?”
I stared at him. “Old silver,” I said. “Was that just for me, or can you do it all the time?”
“Some people,” he sighed. “Some people could benefit; but they won’t learn.”
He turned and moved off with the speed of an acorn becoming a mighty oak. I followed. Luckily we were only going around a glass-doored breakfront to an alcove where wooden shelves were piled high with platters, plates, and carving knives, teapots and baby spoons. I don’t think it took us more than an hour to get there.
“Here.” He made a round, inclusive gesture. “Here is old silver. But you, of course, had a particular piece in mind. What was it?”
“A teapot. I called earlier; I may have spoken to you.”
“I’ve spoken to no one on the telephone today, young man. Perhaps my wife . . .” He turned a full circle like the light in a lighthouse. “I don’t see her now, but she’s in the shop somewhere.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said hastily. If he went wandering off to find her it might be years before. I saw him again. “Is this all your silver?”
“You’ve looked at none of it yet, but you’re unsatisfied?”
I didn’t need to look at it. Everything was covered with a layer of dust so thick that the dust itself was probably on the National Register. Nothing had been put on these shelves in the last few days.
“Is this all your silver?” I asked again.
“Well,” he sighed, reached up onto the shelf. “As to teapots, this one, for example, is particularly fine.” He blew a cloud of dust off the graceful pot in his hands; it settled on my shoes like snow. He handed the pot to me. I took it, turned it, examined it. He was right; even tarnished as it was, it was beautiful. I handed it back.
“I do have something particular in mind.” I described Eve Colgate’s teapot, the chased floral pattern, the scroll handle. He pursed his lips and shook his head slowly.
“Young man, I can’t help you. If you really are going to insist on a pot of that description, good luck to you; you will waste more time searching for it than the finding of it will be worth.” He looked at me sadly in the dim light.
“Well, thanks anyway,” I said. “You’ve been a great help.” I started to leave before I got any older.
“Wait,” he said from behind me as I rounded the breakfront and reached for the door handle. “Young man, come back and look at these. They’ve only just come in. There isn’t a teapot, but if the one you describe is to your taste, these may be also.”
I let go of the
door handle, not without a pang of regret. I circumnavigated the breakfront again and found him kneeling in the dust, unwrapping newspaper from around a small silver tray. A pair of candlesticks, already unwrapped, stood on the floor beside him.
Bingo.
He smiled up at me. “You’re pleased. My, my.” He handed me the tray and clambered to his feet.
They were a set, the tray and the candlesticks, as extraordinary as Eve Colgate had said they were. The minutely detailed pattern of grapes and grape leaves that covered the tray was repeated on the candlesticks’ shafts.
“Where did you get these?” I asked.
He frowned. “Young man.” He shook his head. “If you find them beautiful, you mustn’t worry about provenance. They are silver, I assure you. A pedigree does not ensure that they will give you pleasure, only that someone else will be willing, someday, to give you cash.” He peered again. “And you do not strike me as a man to whom that matters very much.”
“Where did you get them?”
His round eyes blinked in his round face. “Some people . . .” he quoted himself sadly. “A young lady brought them. She was given them by her grandmother and doesn’t care for them. Though I must say she seemed a refined young lady; I was surprised at her taste, but—”
“When?” I interrupted.
“When? Saturday.”
Three days ago. “Did you know her?”
“Not I.”
“Can you describe her?”
“Oh.” His face took on a faraway look. “Oh, my, she was lovely. Petite; with golden hair, not straight and pale as straw the way they wear it now, but thick and golden, like summer sunlight. Red cheeks glowing from the cold; shining eyes. Standing at the threshold of womanhood, but still with a child’s eagerness and joy. Lovely.”
