by S. J. Rozan
I looked around as I took the package from my trunk under the heavy sky. A car rolled down the cracked street, turned the corner. It hadn’t been following me. I was making sure of that now, as routinely as I did in the city. A kid on a thick-tired bike bounced along the opposite sidewalk, and a couple of college-age girls came out of the bus station, wearing backpacks. Otherwise the street was deserted. Whatever happened in Cobleskill these days didn’t happen here. It happened in the office parks and Pizza Huts and Friendlys and multiplex cinemas that lined the state highway as it ran into and out of town.
I put my package on the next bus out to New York, a one o’clock local due at the Port Authority at eight forty-five. Very local. I didn’t insure it. The fewer people who knew it was worth something, the more likely it was to get where it was going. Cobleskill had a Federal Express office and I’d considered that, but this was still faster, and Lydia wouldn’t have to sit around waiting for delivery.
I called her again, got her machine again, sketched in what was going on. I left the time of the bus and the number of the receipt. I told her to messenger the package in the morning to Shelley at the lab, tell her it was for me, tell her to rush it. I started to tell Lydia something else, but I wasn’t sure what it was, so I stopped and hung up.
Tomorrow I’d have to figure out how to get MacGregor to run the prints for me, if they found any. I had cop friends who would’ve run them in New York, but that wouldn’t show up anything strictly local, as for instance if someone had been arrested by a county sheriff. Maybe MacGregor could be bent; maybe I could bribe him with a new pair of waders.
* * *
Appleseed Baby Foods was west of town, at the end of a three-mile spur off the highway built just for them. The white concrete-panel building spread in various directions from the center of a sprawling parking lot. A low office annex connected to the processing plant through a glass-enclosed entranceway.
I gave the guard at the desk my name, which he passed along over the phone to someone else. He listened, nodded, and hung up; then he told me to sign in, pointed at a pair of double glass doors, said “Upstairs.”
I went up open-riser oak steps with an oak rail and a skylight at the top. Ferns hung in the light well in white plastic baskets. At the top was a hall lined with oak doors. The pair at the end were labeled President. I went through them into a large outer office with a beige carpet, and framed pictures of carrots, zucchini, and tomatoes on the walls.
A young woman with a heart-shaped face smiled behind a white desk in the middle of the room. Her glossy blond hair was an organized cap cut neatly at chin length. She wore a blue wool dress, and her nails were an understated length and an understated color.
“Did anyone ever tell you you have a beautiful voice?” I asked before she spoke.
She blushed but kept her composure. The effect was becoming. “Mr. Smith? Mr. Sanderson has been expecting you. Please have a seat; I’ll just tell him you’re here.”
She picked up the phone on her desk, spoke into it, smiled at me again. Smiling was something she did well, probably from practice. I sat on a beige fabric-covered chair, the kind that puts you too low to the ground. I admired the vegetables. Five minutes; ten. For a man who’d been anxious to see me, in particular, Mark Sanderson didn’t seem very excited now that I was here.
I took out a cigarette, rolled it around in my fingers a little, lit it. After the first drag the phone on the desk buzzed. The secretary answered it, hung up, smiled again. “Mr. Sanderson will see you now. Go right in.” She nodded toward a door in the wall behind her.
Funny how often that cigarette thing worked.
Mark Sanderson’s office was a corner office, as I’d imagined, with a view out over the plant, the parking lot, and the soft hills wrapping the valley. Sanderson’s desk, though, was facing the door I came through. He’d have to turn his back on his work to get the benefit of that view.
“Smith.” Sanderson rose, came out from behind the desk as I came in. He extended a well-kept hand in a solid handshake. A smile came and went on his round baby face, leaving no trace. His steel-colored eyes studied me. Then, with the casual tyranny of a man so used to being obeyed that he rarely gave orders, he said, “Sit down.”
I sat.
Sanderson perched on the edge of the desk, one foot still on the floor, one hand folded over the other. I watched the action behind his hard eyes. “Look,” he said, “I think we may have gotten off to a bad start earlier. If it was my fault, I apologize. I can be abrupt, I know.” The smile blinked on and off again.
“I can be pretty rough myself,” I said. “Let’s forget it. What was it you wanted to see me about?”
“Frankly, I need your help.” He walked back around the desk, sat in a leather swivel chair. I was left trying to read his face against the glare from the uncurtained windows. “I need to find a boy named Jimmy Antonelli. I’ve been told you can help me.”
The cigarette I’d started in the outer office hadn’t been much fun. I took out another, lit it, looked around for a place to throw the match. There was an ashtray on a credenza against the wall. Sanderson didn’t move, so I got up, walked around him, picked it up. I repositioned my chair before I sat back down.
I pulled on the cigarette, breathed out some smoke. “Why do you want him?”
“It’s a personal problem.”
“Jimmy’s got some of those, too. Why do you want him?”
“Well.” He smiled again. This one was longer-lasting than the others, but it vanished as completely. “Well, I really don’t want him. But my daughter seems to have run off with him.”
“Alice?” I asked.
He looked at me blankly. “My daughter. Ginny. Who’s Alice?”
“Never mind. What makes you think your daughter’s with Jimmy?”
“They’ve been seeing each other. Two nights ago Ginny didn’t come home. I haven’t seen her since.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Naturally.” He frowned impatiently. “And they came to the same conclusion I had already come to.”
“If you’ve talked to the police you know they’re looking for Jimmy, too. So why call me?”
“You’re a friend of his.”
“That doesn’t mean I can find him.”
“Have you tried?”
“I’m not a cop.”
“Doesn’t that mean you’re likely to do better than they have?”
I said, “Do you have a picture of your daughter, Mr. Sanderson?”
He started to say something, but stopped. He picked up a photograph from his desk, stood and handed it to me. It was a studio portrait, maybe a yearbook picture, of a small, beautiful girl with thick golden hair billowing around a delicately boned face. A hint of a smile, high red cheeks, and something in her deep blue eyes that sent a chill up my spine. Sanderson watched me. “She’s fifteen,” he said, unexpectedly softly.
I looked up quickly. His face had lost none of its arrogance and his mouth was still hard, but his eyes held a sudden tenderness, a familiar desperation that cut through me like a knife.
He stood abruptly, turned to the window, hands in his pockets. “I didn’t want Ginny growing up around here, with the kind of punks that hang out in McDonald’s and drag race down the highway. I sent her to boarding school. But like any kid, she probably thinks the grass is greener where she’s not allowed to go, and she’s naive enough to fall for an SOB like Antonelli if he came on to her.”
“Do you know Jimmy?”
He turned back to me. “By reputation.”
“How did they meet, if she’s in boarding school?”
He regarded me silently. I thought he wasn’t going to answer; but he said, “She was sent home—suspended—a month ago.”
“For what?”
“Her roommate, a first-year girl, was selling drugs. When they caught the little bitch, she claimed Ginny was involved, too.”
“It wasn’t true?”
“Of course i
t wasn’t.” There was ice in his words and his eyes. “Ginny didn’t like that girl from the first day. She was loud and crude, Ginny said. I wish she’d told me that then. I’d have had that girl moved in two seconds flat.”
I put my cigarette out. “So Ginny was home, with nothing to do, and she met Jimmy at the soda shop?”
His eyes hardened. “I don’t have any idea how they met. And believe me, if I’d known they were seeing each other, I’d have forbidden it.”
“How did you find out?”
“I was told yesterday morning, by a friend.”
“Why didn’t your friend tell you sooner?”
“How the hell do I know?” he burst out, then clamped his jaw shut immediately, the jutting tendons in his neck proof that he was working to contain anger he hadn’t wanted to show.
I leaned forward, put the photograph back on his desk. “I don’t know where she is, Mr. Sanderson.”
“I know where she is.” His voice was tight. “She’s with Jimmy Antonelli. All I need is for you to tell me where he is.”
I didn’t say anything. His hard eyes looked me over. He said, shaping his mouth as though the words tasted bad, “Of course, I expect to pay for this information. Whatever a man like you would expect to be paid.”
The sun broke suddenly through the dark clouds behind him, streaking the sky with slanted rays. “Mr. Sanderson,” I said, “I don’t know where Jimmy is. I don’t know that your daughter’s with him. I don’t know that I could find him if I wanted to. But you’re right about one thing: I’m a friend of his. I won’t obstruct a police investigation, but that doesn’t mean I have to be point man on this.”
“Goddammit!” he exploded. “Goddammit, Smith, we’re talking about my daughter!”
“I’m sorry,” I said, toughening myself against the pain in his eyes.
For a moment he didn’t speak. Then suddenly his eyes became hard again, and he smiled that firefly smile. “You have a cabin near North Blenheim, don’t you? Off Thirty? I hear you come up here a lot. It’s a long way from New York. You must like it here.”
“Your friend tell you that, too?”
“Actually, I know a good deal about you. I like to know a lot about the people who work for me.” He sat, leaned back in his chair, smiled a smile that lasted. It reminded me of his daughter’s eyes. “Route Thirty.” His manner was musing. “You know, we used to use that road a lot, to truck to our eastern markets, but it’s winding and narrow. In my father’s day it was fine, but competition’s stiffer now. My father founded this company,” he interrupted himself. “Did you know that?”
“No,” I said.
“Fifty years ago. When I took over, I modernized a lot of things. I updated factory operations and office procedures. But transportation was the big problem. The demand was there, and we had the product, but we couldn’t get to market fast enough. I almost moved the whole plant to Georgia. But you know what happened?”
“No.”
“The county built me a new road. They were set to upgrade Thirty, until they saw that a new road on the other side of the valley made more sense. I helped them see that. And they got the state to put in a new highway spur for me, right out here. They want to keep me here, Smith.”
I said nothing. He went on, “Now, that new road is good, but cuts too far east to do us any good if we want to get to Seventeen. Binghamton, Elmira, central Pennsylvania—those are big markets for us.”
He looked out over the parking lot, where a truck painted with vegetables and smiling babies was pulling into a loading dock. “So I’ve been thinking about Thirty. You know, there’s a place about two miles from North Blenheim where you could take Thirty, drop it down the valley, then pull it through around the other side of the mountain. Then you could widen it as it runs south. That would still leave a narrow stretch before North Blenheim, but it’s pretty straight there, so that wouldn’t be a problem.” He turned back, steepled his hands over his chest. “That’s a pretty good idea, don’t you think?”
He didn’t expect an answer and he didn’t get one. “I think I’ll suggest it to the County Economic Development people. I think I’ll suggest that while they study the idea of improving Thirty like this, they start condemning the land they’d need to do it. That won’t be costly, because none of that land is worth anything. Most of the people who live around there”—he paused, locked his hard eyes on mine—“most of them would be glad to take a few dollars from the state and clear out. Some won’t like it, of course. But luckily, they won’t have a choice.” He spread his hands, palms up. “And if the state decides not to build the road, they can always sell the land again. That would be years from now, of course. These things always take a lot of time.”
I watched him across the desk, the two of us sitting motionless in the carpeted room while on the other side of the window cars and trucks crawled around the parking lot and dark clouds scudded across the sky.
“You’re blowing smoke,” I finally said. “You can’t do it.”
“Oh, you’re wrong.” His voice was rueful, self-deprecating. “There are a lot of things I can’t do. I can’t play cards and I can’t sing a note. And I can’t seem to find Jimmy Antonelli. But get land condemned in this county? That I can do, Smith. That I can do.”
He shuffled some papers on his desk. “Well, I imagine you’re a busy man, so I won’t keep you any longer. I’ll expect to hear from you soon.” He rose, stuck out his hand.
I stood. I looked at the outstretched hand, at the baby face, at the beautiful girl in the silver picture frame. I turned, walked to the door, left it open behind me, and went out.
The secretary with the beautiful voice began to smile as I came through the door, but the smile faltered and died when she saw my face.
10
I PULLED THE car hard out of the Appleseed lot and onto the spur road. My jaw didn’t start to unclench until I hit the state highway, which Sanderson didn’t own.
I fished in my jacket pocket for a cigarette and found that was all I had: one. I shoved it in my mouth, crushed the pack, flung it against the passenger-side door. It bounced. I smoked the cigarette right down to the filter, ground it in the ashtray as I hit the turnoff that would take me to 10 and south through the county to Jefferson.
An Appleseed truck, painted with enormous peaches and cherries, rumbled past me going the other way.
Cherries flowered early in the spring, up here; the three on my land, halfway up the slope between the cabin and 30, were always the first color on the hillside. For years I’d made it a point to be up here when they blossomed, if I could.
I checked to make sure I wasn’t being followed. I checked to make sure I didn’t have any more cigarettes. I checked to make sure I hadn’t missed 10, because the way I felt, I could have zipped right by it and been halfway to Buffalo before I caught on.
In Jefferson I had to stop and ask directions. The ones I got, from a toothless guy in a John Deere cap, were complete to the point of idiocy. My fingers tightened slowly on the wheel as he leaned in my window and ticked off every curve and corner between the center of town, where we were blocking the intersection, and Winterhill Road.
It turned out the drawing on the flyer wasn’t half bad; I might have recognized the little house even without the wooden Winterhill Kitchen sign that stood on the lawn. The house was freshly painted, blue with a darker blue trim and deep red accents. There were carved bits of gingerbread at the eaves and lace curtains in the windows. The porch light was lit, a warm yellow glow in the chilly afternoon.
I parked in a gravel lot by the side of the house. There were three other cars there. None of them was Jimmy’s Dodge Ram van and there was no blue truck.
A sign on the front door said Open—Come In in the same calligraphy as the logo on the flyer and the hanging sign. A bell tinkled as I opened the door and stepped inside. The air was scented with spices and the warm, sweet smells of vanilla, yeast, butter, chocolate.
To my right was a sta
ircase, small but with an elegant curve to the bottom steps. Straight ahead was a closed door, and on the left a wall of French doors, which stood open. I went through into a lace-curtained room that held four tables, an antique garden bench, and a display case.
Inside the display case were latticework pies, deep purple filling showing through woven crust; a tall, darkly glossy chocolate cake, and a smaller white one with crushed pistachios sprinkled over it and one slice missing; a tray of cupcakes glazed in pastel colors; and a basket of star-shaped cookies with tiny gold and silver balls in their white frosting. Pots of coffee and hot water steamed on burners behind the counter, a cappuccino machine gleamed, and a rush basket held foil-wrapped envelopes of fancy teas.
It occurred to me that I was hungry.
A slight young woman with fawn-colored hair and round glasses came through a door behind the counter. I caught a glimpse of bright lights, white tiles, and pies cooling on tall racks. She wore jeans and a smudged white apron. She asked shyly, “May I help you?”
“I’m looking for Alice Brown,” I told her, handed her my card.
She read it, nodded, disappeared through the door, and was back in moments to say, “Alice is on the phone, but she’ll be right out when she’s through. Would you like to sit down while you’re waiting?”
I pointed to a plate of thick slices of cranberry bread. “What I’d like,” I said, “is to have one of those and a cup of coffee while I’m sitting down.”
Smiling, she poured coffee into a dark blue mug, slid the cranberry slice onto a blue china plate. I paid her, took a seat at a table by the window.
The shy young woman disappeared behind the door again.
The coffee was good: fresh and strong with a faint bitter taste of chicory. I put it somewhere up around Eve Colgate’s. The bread was rich and crumbly, the cranberries moist, tart, and plentiful.
