by S. J. Rozan
The Creekside. Shabby mustard-colored shingles, brown vinyl trim, windows full of lit beer signs, most for brands the Creekside didn’t sell anymore. Inside, wood-grain Formica dimness and a stale smell. No sign of the drug dealing that went on from the bar or the bookmaking business in the back room, but it was early in the day.
Two guys my age were curled over beers at the bar; two younger guys and a girl with a fountain of hair springing from the top of her head were playing pool. They all looked up, measured me, an intruder in their territory, and just how tough was I, if it came to where that mattered? I sat on a barstool near the door, not near the other guys, the etiquette of the stranger.
“Haven’t seen you here before,” the bartender said, put my Bud on the bar. He was blond and big, shirtsleeves pushed up past his elbows.
“No,” I said. “I’m from North Blenheim. I don’t get over this way much.”
That placed me for them, told them where I’d been before I walked into their lives.
“What brings you over here now?” he asked.
I drank some beer. “Frank Grice.”
He made a show of looking around the near-deserted room. “He’s not here.”
“Been in lately?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Buy yourself a drink. It might help your memory.” I dropped a twenty on the bar.
“Why, thanks, friend.” He scooped up the bill, rang it into the register. He poured a shot of Dewar’s, downed it, smiled, and shook his head. “I don’t think that helped.”
“Think harder,” I suggested.
One of the pool players straightened up from the felt, strolled around the pool table, cue loose in his right hand. I drank more beer, put the glass down on the bar as he came to stand beside me.
“Something I can do for you?” I asked, not looking at him.
“You look familiar. You look like a cop.” A nasal voice, belligerent and edgy.
“I never liked my face much, either,” I said.
“What do you want Frank for?”
“He’s got something I want.”
“What?”
I looked him over. Smallish; fish-belly pale; eyes a little out of focus. Close up, he was younger than I’d thought, too young to be drinking in the Creekside in the early afternoon.
“Tell you what, Junior,” I said. “You tell me where Frank is, and I’ll tell him my secret, and afterwards, if you’re good, he’ll tell you.”
“Sonuvabitch,” he growled. He hefted the pool cue, moved closer.
I slipped off the barstool toward him, took a quick step in, too close for him to swing the cue. I socked him in the stomach, fast but not all that hard; but his eyes had told me he’d drunk enough that I didn’t need to hit him hard. He made a small noise, doubled over, was quietly sick.
“Hey!” came from his friend on the other side of the pool table. He headed for me.
“Mike!” said the bartender sharply. “Hold it!”
The second pool player halted, his hands rolled into fists. He glanced from the bartender to me, back again.
“You’re not going to break up my place,” the bartender said. “You,” he turned to me, “get the hell out.”
Standing, I realized that the beer was hitting me harder than it usually did. The room wasn’t as still or solid as I liked rooms to be. Getting out didn’t seem like a bad idea.
I dropped my card on the bar. “Tell Frank I know about Ginny Sanderson, and the truck,” I said to them all. “Tell him he’ll have to deal with me. I’ll be at Antonelli’s tonight. Tell him that.”
And I left the Creekside, my clothes still carrying that stale, sour smell as I drove, slowly and carefully, back to my cabin, to sleep.
The hot water faded to warm, lukewarm, cold. After a few minutes of cold I gave it up. I dried, dressed, built a fire in the stove, put the kettle on. Four twenty-five. I sat at the piano, worked at slow, even scales until I heard a car crunch down the driveway. Four-forty. I closed the piano, opened the front door in time to see a Ford Escort roll to a stop next to my Acura.
I crossed to the car as Lydia got out. I hesitated, then kissed her cheek, caught the scent of freesia in her hair.
“Don’t squeeze,” she said. “Where’s your bathroom?”
I pointed to the cabin door. “Just inside, on the left. I’ll bring your things.”
She scuttled up the porch steps, disappeared inside.
I reached into the car, brought out a zippered, snapped, strapped, and buckled carry-on of soft black leather. I followed her inside, dropped the bag on the couch. The bathroom door opened and she came out, combing her hair back from her face with her fingers.
“Didn’t you stop?” I grinned.
“I wouldn’t have made it by four-thirty if I’d stopped.”
“I always stop,” I told her. “Twice.”
She made a rude noise.
“That’s just what your mother always says to me.”
“I’m not surprised. What happened to your face?”
“I’ll tell you all about it. Do you want some tea? It’s only Lipton’s, in a bag,” I apologized. “It was all I could get.”
“When in Rome,” she sighed. I took that as a yes.
Lydia shook off her leather jacket, unclipped her holster from her belt. The lamplight was gold on her smooth skin; it caught highlights in her hair, which was black and asymmetrical, like her clothes. While I made her tea, and coffee for myself, she wandered around the room, investigating my drawings, photographs, books. She stopped at the small silver-framed photo. She picked it up in both hands, looked at it silently, then looked over at me; but I was busy with cups, spoons, and teabags, and I let her look pass.
“It’s just the way I thought it would be up here,” she finally said, coming over to the counter, collecting her tea.
“I didn’t know you ever thought about it.”
“Don’t play dumb.” She settled onto the couch, drew her legs up. The cushions molded themselves to her as if they’d been expecting her, as if they were already used to her being here.
“I’m not,” I said. “Playing, anyway. I’ll tell you the whole story.”
“That’s only part of it.”
“Part of what?”
“What I’m mad about.”
“I thought the problem was I wouldn’t tell you who the client was, why the paintings were here.”
“The other part is there’s a client at all.”
“I don’t get you.”
A log shifted on the fire. I could see sparks through the stove grate; then everything was still again.
“I thought you came up here,” Lydia said, “to get away from work.”
“I always have, before this.”
“But this time, someone from here called you in New York to hire you.”
“That’s right.”
“When you left you didn’t tell me that.”
I sipped my coffee. “I wasn’t sure I was going to take it.”
“So? When you did take it, you called me to work on it. To work for you.”
“With.”
“No, for. If it was with, you’d have told me from the beginning. Even if you weren’t sure.”
“I’ve turned down cases before,” I said. “Without telling you.”
“And taken them. And I didn’t care. But I thought things were supposed to be different now.”
“Am I supposed to consult you on every decision I make?”
“God, I knew you’d say that! No, and you’re not supposed to play dumb again, either.” She pulled her legs in closer, wrapped both hands around her mug. “This is a big deal, you working up here. You can’t pretend it isn’t.”
“I’m not pretending anything.”
She nodded, but I had the feeling it wasn’t because she agreed with me. “I think you did it for the same reason you didn’t tell me about it or tell me who the client is.”
“What reason is that?”
Her eyes confronted min
e. Her look was hard under the soft lamplight, but there was more than anger in it.
“Caring about you,” she said, “is a big problem for me.”
I reached onto the side table for a cigarette. “I’m not sure what that means, and I don’t know how to answer it.”
“Before,” she said, “when we just worked together, just sometimes, that was easy. Now, if we’re supposed to be partners and . . . and maybe whatever, then I can’t do it unless you really mean it too.”
“You think this has to do with that?”
“I know it does. You’re used to working alone. You took a case up here and didn’t tell me about it because you’re not so sure being partners is a good idea. Maybe it’s not, but if it isn’t, then I can tell you right now that all that other stuff you’ve been saying you wanted all these years is a worse one.”
I put my coffee mug down on the side table without looking at it. I didn’t have to look; years of sitting in this chair, reading, smoking, listening to music, had given me the measure of that table, of this room and everything in it.
“I don’t know,” I told Lydia. “If that’s what I did I didn’t mean to do it.”
“You didn’t mean to, or you meant to but you just didn’t know you did?”
Briefly, I met her eyes, then looked beyond them to the shadows gathering on the porch I’d built, the dusk starting its business of disputing the daylight’s confident disposition of the facts of time, depth, distance.
“I don’t know,” I said again.
“Well,” she said, “you’d better figure it out. Because I’m not going down this road if this is what’s there. I can still help it. So think about it.”
We sat in silence for a while, no sound but the crackle of logs in the stove, the hiss of a match as I lit another cigarette when the first was gone. I was beginning to think bourbon would have been a better idea than coffee when Lydia spoke again.
“Okay.” She surprised me with a grin. “Anyway, you have this case and I’m here. So tell me about it.”
I told her. I went through everything that had happened since Monday, everything I thought had happened before. I told her what I was sure of and what I wasn’t, what I was worried might be coming next. We talked the way we always talked, going back, forward, back again. I gave her everything, even things I didn’t understand.
She sipped her tea, listened, asked a few careful questions. When I had said all I had to say she was quiet; then she asked, “These people are very important to you, aren’t they?”
“Tony and Jimmy . . .” I began. Then I didn’t know anything else to say besides “Yes.”
“And Eve Colgate, too.”
“Eve, too.”
“And this place.” Her eyes moved over the room, stared into the woods, dark now beyond the windowpanes, then came back to me. “Bill, can he really do that? Have your land condemned?”
I looked into the murky depths of my coffee, answered, “I’m sure he can.”
“Is it worth it?”
I looked up, met her eyes. “Jimmy didn’t kill Wally Gould.”
“If you did what Sanderson wants,” she said, “Jimmy would get arrested, but your land would be safe, and if he’s innocent—”
“It wouldn’t matter. Between Brinkman and Grice, Jimmy’d be sent up for life, if he lived long enough.”
“So it’s worth it?”
“It’s got to be.”
In the silence I could hear the wind moving in the trees around the cabin, the whispering, the rustling and creaking as familiar to me as my own breathing, my own bones.
Lydia stood, crossed the room. She sat on the arm of my chair, kissed my bruised cheek very gently. Freesia and citrus mingled in the cool air.
“Okay,” she said. “Just making sure.” Her face grew serious. “I just hope you’re not—missing something,” she said. “Because of how you want things to come out.”
“That’s one of the reasons I asked you to come. I wanted someone I could trust, someone who’s detached.”
“Well,” she said doubtfully, “detached hasn’t ever been my best thing.”
“You’ll be fine. And besides being detached,” I said, “you have that beautiful, anonymous, rented car. I have plans for that.”
“My car,” she said, standing. She clipped her gun to her belt. “I drive.”
“Always. Besides,” I added casually, “it’s probably not a stick shift. I bet it wouldn’t be any fun anyway.”
“Forget it. I drive.”
So she drove, up my driveway and on to 30, north under the bare winter trees spread against the dark sky.
Our first stop was the 7-Eleven, where we picked up cigarettes, beer, and a chicken parmesan hero. The clerk stared at Lydia as though she were a black-petalled orchid that had sprung up in the daisy patch. Back in the car, Lydia grinned, said, “Not many Asians up here, huh?”
“Especially in black leather.”
“You think I’m too downtown?”
“I think you’re adorable.”
“Seriously, Bill. Will it be a problem? That I can’t blend?”
I shook my head. “Outsiders don’t blend here, no matter what they look like. I’ve been coming here for eighteen years; once I lived here through the fall and winter into the spring. I’m still a weekender. Brinkman calls me ‘city boy.’”
“When did you do that?”
“What?”
“Live here.”
I lit a cigarette, found the ashtray in the unfamiliar dash. “Seven years ago.”
Lydia said, “Mmm.” I didn’t say anything.
She rolled down her window. The wind blew her silky hair across her forehead. She combed it back with her fingers.
When the first cigarette was gone I pulled out another.
“If it makes you that crazy,” Lydia said, “you can drive.”
“Do all Chinese read minds?” I pushed the cigarette back in the pack.
“Only me and my mother.”
“I love your driving. Hear that, Mrs. Chin? I love your daughter’s driving. Turn here.”
We had reached the steep hardscrabble road. We bounced up it, emerged from the trees onto the flat, rock-strewn plain.
“We’re here,” I said.
Tonight there was a moon. The ridge was clearly visible, towering on the other side of the great pit, in whose glassy surface stars glittered.
“God,” Lydia said, staring. “Where are we, Mars?”
“It’s an abandoned quarry pit. The one I told you about, where Jimmy dropped the cars.”
A truck went by on the ridge road, its headlights passing behind trees a hundred yards above where we sat.
“That’s weird,” she said.
“There’s a road up there, but you can’t get here from it, except on foot. Stay in the car a minute.”
I got out, moved away from the car. The shack was dark and silent. “Jimmy!” I shouted, “It’s Bill. I have a friend with me. I need to talk to you.”
A short silence. Then from behind me, some distance away, Jimmy’s voice, hoarse and loud: “Who’s with you?”
I turned. There was a great mound of jagged rock, with smaller mounds piled at its feet like the ritual remnants of some brutal civilization. Nothing moved. I called, “No one you know. Another PI.” I motioned Lydia out of the car. She stepped out cautiously, her jacket unzipped but her hands empty.
Scraping sounds came from the mound. The moon covered everything with a silver light that had no dimension. The scraping stopped, and Jimmy, rifle in one hand, jumped from a rock that jutted sharply from the mound’s face.
“Man, where’ve you been?” he demanded. His face was haggard, sleepless. His jumpy eyes flashed from Lydia to me. “Where’s your car?”
“My car’s too obvious. I wanted to come up here in something Brinkman wasn’t looking for.”
He eyed Lydia again.
“This is Lydia Chin,” I told him. “We work together sometimes, in the city. She’
s okay.”
“Thanks,” said Lydia dryly.
We followed Jimmy into the shack. He lit the wobbly kerosene lamp. His clothes stank of sweat and smoke; there was a pile of cigarette butts on the table.
Jimmy shifted uneasily.
“You scared the shit out of me.”
“For Christ’s sake, Jimmy, what’s wrong?” I put the 7-Eleven bag on the table.
“Someone was here.”
A chill went through me. “Who?”
“I don’t know, man! Last night, in the rain. Someone came up the truck road. A car. I saw his lights.”
“Did he see you?”
“I don’t know. He could’ve. I had the lamp lit, you know, just . . .” He shrugged. “I killed it when I saw his lights, but he could’ve seen it.”
“And you didn’t see him?”
“No, man. It was raining, it was dark.”
“Did he drive close to the shack?”
“Uh-uh. Just to the top of the truck road. He was here maybe five minutes, then he split.”
“Did he get out of the car?”
“I don’t know! I couldn’t see him!”
“Okay, Jimmy, okay. Here, we brought you some dinner. And some beer. You look like you could use it.” I reached into the bag, put a six-pack on the table. Jimmy yanked a can off the plastic; I did the same. He looked unsurely at Lydia. “You want one?”
“No, thanks,” she said. She had stationed herself by the window, listening to us, keeping an eye on the empty landscape.
Jimmy sat on the rickety chair. I perched on the edge of the table. He unwrapped the sandwich, bit into the end as I asked him, “What did you do?”
“When?” he asked, muffled by chicken and cheese.
“Last night.”
He swallowed. “What did I do? I didn’t do anything!” He took a long pull on his beer. “I thought about it, man. I thought, soon as he’s gone, I’m history! I figured with the rain and all, I could make the Thruway and be in Canada by morning.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He stared at me. “Because you said not to! Because you said stay put!”
“Good.”
“But then you didn’t come last night, and you didn’t come today . . .” He looked at me out of eyes that seemed as tired as mine. “Jesus, Mr. S. What’s gonna happen?”
“What’s going to happen is that you’re going to tell me the truth.”
