Final Notice

by Jonathan Valin

  “Harrison,” Reaves said suddenly. “Pop Warner's Trailer Park in Harrison. Now, won't you call an ambulance?”

  I got to my feet and walked into the farmhouse.

  17

  THE INSIDE of the cabin smelled of sweat and dirty clothes. There were a couple of wooden chairs in the living room, an oil heater on the wall opposite the door, and a single photograph of an old man in a broken straw hat propped on a cabinet. The floors were painted wood, the walls unplastered lath. I walked through a bead curtain into the kitchen, found the phone on a trestle table beside a Franklin stove, and dialed the county police. Then I walked back into the living room and looked out the front window to make sure Norris hadn't gotten to his feet again. I had the pistol with me this time. Tucked in my belt. And if he did get up, I would have been only too happy to shoot him with it. But he was still lying in the yard.

  There was only one other room in the tiny house. A bedroom to the left of the living room. I stepped inside and looked around. It was Norris's room. I had the feeling that it was Norris's house, too. There were muscle magazines scattered on a desk top and two posters of Franco Columbu on the walls. Jars of protein supplement on a bureau and in the top drawer a collection of just about every kind of vitamin I'd ever seen. But the second drawer and third one were a lot more interesting. Inside the second were two dozen big plastic jars of dexedrin. Twenty-four thousand hits of drugstore quality speed. And in the third drawer there were a couple of hundred glassine envelopes full of a white powder that was probably methedrine. That added up to a lot of barbells and chrome-plated wrenches. A tidy little business, indeed.

  After I uncovered the cache of speed, I went through the whole room carefully and discovered several boxfuls of hospital syringes in the desk and about two thousand dollars in cash under a striped mattress on the floor. It was quite a haul. Not what I'd expected or what I’d been looking for, but it would certainly make the county cops happy. Once they saw it, I figured they wouldn't much care that I'd stuck old Norris in the thigh with a pitchfork.

  I walked back out to the porch, sat down on the swing, and with Reaves groaning softly beneath me, waited for the county police to come calling.

  ******

  It was nearly two o'clock when the troopers finished with me. They took my statement, confiscated the money and the drugs, and packed Norris off to the County Hospital, criminal wing. Everyting went smoothly. I even got a slap on the back from one of the local detectives.

  “Damn fine work!” he said. “Damn fine!”

  Of course, my name wasn't going to appear officially in the record, he told me. But I didn't care about that. Just about getting off that muddy hillside as quickly as I could and down to the flats, where the world didn't come at you with a shovel handle.

  He gave me directions back to the Pike. I probably could have gotten an escort if I'd wanted one. Once I hit the Pike, I pulled into a gas station; and while an old man in a Reds cap gassed up the Pinto, I walked back to the john and tried to clean up. I took one look at myself in the mirror and got the shakes. I could feel them coming on as soon as I got out of the car. They had to come, after that fracas in the barn. So I just sat down on the toilet seat and let them roll over me, in little waves of nausea and fright. Took deep breaths. Read my name off the credit cards in my wallet. Looked at the graffiti on the walls. And when I could stand up again without my knees buckling, washed my face and dabbed at my pants with a wet paper towel until I'd gotten most of the mud off of them. I couldn't do anything about the dark brown blood stains.

  There was a small diner beside the service station. A stucco shack with a mansard roof and a yellow paper rack outside the door. I bought a paper even though I'd already read The Enquirer that morning with Kate, walked through the smoked glass door past the register lady, who looked as if she'd just come back from a funeral and was glad to be alive—prim, dark blue suit, with a huge carnation at the neck—and sat down at the lunch counter.

  There was an old-fashioned chrome juke box on the counter, the kind with metal tabs on the bottom attached to framed sheets inside a glass display. I flipped through the selections like I was flipping through the pages of a menu, shoved a quarter in the slot, and listened to some country music. After fifteen minutes of coffee and Loretta Lynn, I could think about what had happened on that hilltop without going numb inside. I'd come closer to death before. But not much closer. And a part of me knew that if Reaves had been a step quicker or a tad smarter I'd be lying under that barn floor, instead of sipping hot coffee and listening to Loretta Lynn and thinking about Kate Davis and about how nice it would be to hear her voice again. No matter how tough you think you are, Harry, I said to myself, how clever or quick or smart, what it comes down to in the end is luck, pure and simple. And I'd had it on my side that morning. Luck or Miss Moselle's stars and their baleful or benign influences. And, of course, the corollary was that there might come a time when I wouldn't be so lucky. That's why I was sitting there on that mushroom-shaped stool instead of driving off to find Pop Warner's Trailer Park. Which is what you should be doing, I told myself.

  Around two-thirty, when the last lingering chill had left me and I felt safe and relatively lucky once again, I paid my chit, walked out to the Pinto, drove south to the expressway and then west to Ohio.

  ******

  Pop Warner's Trailer Camp was located about ten miles up I-74 on the northern edge of Harrison township. There was a banner hung above the entranceway, decorated with Pop's name and a little picture of Pop in his prime, smiling out hopefully at a world of Air-streams and Winnebagos. Inside the gate, the place looked as grungy as a circus fairgrounds. Cigarette butts in the grass. Rusting tar barrels for the trash. A couple of plastic lawn chairs sitting in the mud, where they'd been left when the storm blew up. A dilapidated pickup truck jacked up on concrete blocks like third prize at a raffle. And maybe ten trailers scattered about a central yard. None in good repair. None of them hooked up to cars. This was the end of the line for those ten highway gypsies. This was home or something like it. The muddy pasture and the small concrete block house where old Pop probably held court and collected rents.

  I parked the Pinto beside the block house, got out, and took a look around. There were clotheslines hanging between a couple of trailers. And somebody had planted a bed of mums in the dirt. But, all told, it was a pretty grim and unfriendly looking spot.

  I was wondering which one of the trailers belonged to Effie Reaves when someone tapped me on the arm.

  “Looking to buy, are you?” a cracked, cheerful voice asked me.

  I turned around and saw an old man standing beside me, gazing out at the dingy lot with an unmistakable air of proprietorship. He was wearing a blue cardigan sweater over a coffee-stained undershirt and baggy chino pants. And he smelled strongly of whiskey and tobacco.

  “You're Pop Warner,” I said.

  “That's me,” he said and hiked up his pants with his thumbs. “I'm Pop, all right.”

  Pop had a fat, whiskey-red face, peppered on the cheeks and chin with razor stubble. It was the face on the banner fifteen years and two or three bankruptcies older. And while the mouth was still brimming with cheer, the weak blue eyes had the mean, disappointed look of a man who expects to be cheated.

  “You need some, gas, maybe?” he said, glancing at the Pinto. “I got a pump around back, if you do.”

  “No gas,” I said. “But I could use some information.”

  “Directions, huh?” He looked over at the highway as if he'd had a hand in building it. “I can give you directions, all right. You headed for Indianapolis, are you?”

  “I don't want directions, Pop,” I said. “I want to know if you have a woman named Effie Reaves staying in your park.”

  He took a step back toward the block house and looked me up and down with shrewd reserve.

  “I don't want no trouble, mister,” he said.

  I wondered if I looked like trouble or if Effie Reaves did.

&nbs
p; “I don't want to cause any trouble, Pop. I just want to talk to the lady.”

  “Well, she ain't a big one for visitors,” he said. “Not since that guy stopped hanging around.”

  “Medium height?” I said. “Black hair? Tattoo on his right forearm? Built like a weightlifter?”

  He rubbed his chin and said, “That's him, all right. All except for the weight-lifter part. This guy was pretty near skin and bones and real nervous acting.”

  This guy was on speed, I said to myself, and shivered when I thought of Norris Reaves. He'd claimed that Hack was a real Casey Jones. And the fact that he'd tried to kill me, rather than taking the chance that I couldn't find Hack or get him to talk, made me think that the last time Norris had seen him Hack must have been in very bad shape, indeed. A psychopathic killer was certainly scary. But a psychopathic killer wigged out on speed was just about unthinkable. I sighed out loud and asked Pop Warner when he'd last seen Haskell Lord.

  “Two, maybe three weeks now. She and him had a helluva fight. Shouting. Dishes breaking. I run a respectable place, mister, and I told her the next day I wouldn't stand for anymore of that. I think she got the message,” he said with a wink. “’Cause I ain't seen him around since then.”

  I had a sudden, nasty intuition. If in busting Norris Reaves I'd inadvertently busted Haskell Lord's drug connection, he was going to get mighty strung out and mighty mean in a few hours. Mean enough to kill again. And my girl Kate was out there somewhere, maybe with his intended victim.

  “Which trailer does Effie live in?” I said to the old man.

  “Oh, now, I don't know if...”

  I dug into my wallet and pulled out a twenty and Pop Warner's face lit up like a Christmas tree light.

  “Third one on your left from the front,” he said and snatched the bill out of my hand.

  He ambled back to the block house, snapping the twenty crisply between his fingers, and I walked across the muddy lot to the third trailer. It was a sixteen footer. All corrugated metal and about as squat and homey as a biscuit tin. There were some flowers in the tiny kitchen window beside the door and a yellow curtain drawn behind them. I pulled the screen open and knocked on the door.

  No one answered. I waited a minute or so and knocked again. When there still wasn't any answer, I climbed the two metal steps that served as a stoop and tried the door handle. It was stuck. I put my weight against it and it opened a crack. Something was blocking it on the inside. Maybe a chair or a chock of wood. I wondered for a second whether Effie had been expecting unwelcome visitors like Hack or, maybe, like me, then I pushed again hard on the handle.

  Blood dripped from beneath the door and down the two metal steps on to my shoes. I jumped off the stoop with a yelp of terror.

  “Oh, my God,” I said aloud.

  Things were going too bad, too fast. Things that I couldn't anticipate or prepare for, and for a second I felt like running away. Instead I counted ten, took five deep breaths, and walked back up the metal steps—red now and greasy with the blood that was still seeping out from beneath the half-opened door. I hesitated a second before sticking my head inside.

  It was dark in the trailer, except for the square of yellow light coming through the curtains in the kitchen window. But the smell was unmistakable. It was the smell of death. Violent death. I could hear a fly buzzing around and thought grimly that he was probably having a feast.

  I took another deep breath and looked down at the floor, at the space behind the door. And my throat backed up.

  I jerked the door shut and almost fell down the steps into the yard. Put a hand to the trailer, leaned over and vomited into the grass. I couldn't stop gagging for several minutes. Not since ‘Nam, not since Khe Sanh. And even then, not like that... twisted thing, gouged and flayed almost past recognition. Parts cut away and piled like suet on the smoking floor.

  Warner had come out of his block house and was walking toward me across the mud flat.

  “Something wrong?” he called out. “You sick?”

  Then he caught sight of the bloody steps and gasped.

  “Call the police!” I shouted to him. “Now!”

  He nodded and scampered back across the yard. I waited another couple of minutes, then followed him into the block house. When he finished talking to the cops, I phoned the library and told Miss Moselle, as calmly as I could, to get hold of Kate Davis and to tell her to come back to the library and to stay put until I returned.

  ******

  They came with an ambulance. And two men in white hospital attendant's uniforms carried away what was left of Effie Reaves, sloshing like soup in a green disposal bag. A forensic team from the county police filed out the door as the ambulance drove off, while a beer-bellied deputy marshall from Harrison snapped pictures of the trailer. There were so many cops around, from so many different districts, that at first I didn't know who to talk to. A couple of them started squabbling about jurisdiction, then the beer-bellied marshall was chased away when it turned out he was off-duty and taking those snapshots to show his friends and neighbors.

  Things settled down as soon as a white Buick Riviera pulled up and a huge, silver-haired man wearing a dark business suit and a Stetson stepped from behind the wheel. The decal on the door read Hamilton County Sheriff, and the strapping gent in the Stetson was Cal Levy.

  A big ex-marine turned peace officer, Cal wore a Texas hat and carried a silver-plated .45 and had been county sheriff for as long as I could remember. Someone once told me that all it takes to become a county sheriff is part-ownership in a bowling alley and a bit of pull with the local branch of the Republican party. Well, Cal owned a whole bowling alley and a car dealership, to boot. But he was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, a party man who had actually worked, albeit with a scowl on his granite face, for George McGovern's election back in ‘72. Nobody held it against him, because, in spite of his politics, he was a damn good sheriff. And after all, how many Republicans in southern Ohio wear Stetsons and carry silver-plated revolvers?

  He walked into the trailer and came back out a few minutes later, looking unnerved. Then one of the patrolmen pointed me out to him. Levy walked across the yard to where I was sitting on the stoop of Pop Warner's block house.

  “Your name Stoner?” he said in a crusty, down-home voice.

  I said I was Stoner.

  He pushed the Stetson back from his forehead and looked over his shoulder at the Reaves trailer. The sun was setting in an orange band beneath the storm clouds. Yellow lamp light had begun to spill softly from the tiny kitchen window.

  “Helluva thing,” he said to himself. “Never saw one like it before.” He resettled the hat on his head and looked down at me. “I hear you discovered the body.”

  I nodded.

  “I also hear you came looking for this woman and that you had a little run-in with her brother earlier in the day.”

  I told him all of it—about the books and about Twyla Belton and about Hack Lord, the man who'd turned that trailer into a charnel house. The man I'd come looking for.

  “Brother,” Cal Levy said. “You got a bitter job ahead of you, judging from what he did to that woman in there.”

  “I know it,” I said. “The thing is he's on speed, and he might be so wigged-out he could kill again tonight.”

  “I'll put out an A.P.B. on him right away,” Levy said. “That tattoo on his arm ought to be easy enough to spot.”

  “It hasn't been so far,” I said gloomily.

  He grunted. “At least it's a starting point.”

  “Do you know the time of death?” I asked him. “Or how he got into the trailer without being seen?”

  “Let's go see what the lab team's got to say.”

  We walked back across the yard, which had dried into furrows in the cold evening air, and up to the door of the trailer. I hesitated a second before gripping the handle, then jerked it open.

  They'd cleaned up most of the blood and waste. All that was left to show that Effie Reaves had been
butchered on the trailer floor was a chalk outline behind the door, shaped vaguely like a human body. I hadn't really seen the inside of the trailer before; so while Levy talked to his forensic officer, I took a look around. The front door opened on a small living room, decorated with cheap pine furniture stained chocolate brown. There was a couch on the right wall and an arm chair opposite it and a coffee table between them. The table and chair had been overturned; the chair cushions were stained with blood. Beyond the living room area was the kitchen—just a plank breakfast table, a couple of canvas chairs and an L.P. range. The table was lying on its side and there was a large blood stain on the straw mat beneath it. The door to the bedroom was closed. It must have started in the kitchen, I thought, while they were sitting at the table. Then they'd worked their way forward to the living room, until she'd gone down behind the door and he'd pounced on her.

  “She'd been dead almost two hours when you found her,” Levy said to me. “It happened in the thick of that rain storm we had. Old man Warner says he didn't stick his head outside his hut until after it cleared up. And then he's a juicer anyway. Your boy Lord must have walked up to the front door during the storm. She let him in and then they sat down at the table in the kitchen. He used some kind of razor in case you wondered. Cut off one of her hands with it. We also found a

  breadknife stuck inside the body. Got it bagged over there if you want to take a look.”

  I shook my head.

  “Don't blame you. Anyway he did his business, then went out through the bedroom window after he got through. There's a rest stop on the other side of this pasture. We figured he might have had a car stashed over there. Just walked across the field, cut her up, then walked back again the way he came. Nobody in any of the other trailers seen a thing. But they were probably glued to their radios. We had a twister come through Xenia one October killed several people. Folks living in trailers always keep that sort of thing in mind. The lab team found some pills in the bedroom. Dexedrine.”