Fire Lake

by Jonathan Valin

  “Maybe it was somebody in St. Louis,” Karen said.

  “Why don’t you call some friends,” I said. “In the meantime, I’ll go down to the lobby and make a few calls of my own.”

  I slipped the pants on and Karen shuddered. “I’ll stop at the apartment later on,” I said apologetically. “And get some fresh clothes.”

  As I put on my shirt Karen said, “I’ve thought of a few people here in town we could check with, too. Some of Lonnie’s old crowd.”

  “Fine,” I said. “We’ll get right on it.”

  ******

  I took the same precaution I’d taken early that morning, walking up one flight before I took the elevator down to the lobby. I was probably being paranoid, but until we had a few solid facts I figured my paranoia was excusable.

  Karen’s room had been heavily curtained. And the daylight pouring through the lobby doors made me wince. The storm had blown over sometime during the morning, and it had turned into one of those cold blue winter days, with a high sky full of blazing, cheerless sun. I bought an Enquirer at the hotel newsstand and sat down in a lobby chair to read it. I didn’t have to look very hard to find what I wanted—it was all over the front page, CLERK MURDERED IN MOTEL ROBBERY. I skimmed the article, looking for some mention of a possible drug tie-in; but the newspaper was playing up the robbery angle.

  I folded up the paper, stuck it under my arm, and walked over to a phone stand opposite the reception desk. The clerk smiled at me pleasantly, although his smile wilted a bit when he took a closer look at my trousers. That was going to be a problem. I decided to drive over to the Delores when I was done on the phone. There was no point in taking Karen with me.

  I called Al Foster at Central Station and asked him if there’d been any news about Lonnie.

  “It just went out an hour ago, Harry,” he said irritably. “Give us a chance.”

  “You must have had a busy night,” I said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that motel thing,” I said with as much casualness as I could muster.

  “It was pretty ugly, all right,” Al said. “Somebody must have really had it in for that guy.”

  “The newspapers said it was a robbery.”

  “That’s what we told them,” he said.

  “What are you telling me?”

  “You got a reason to ask?” he said.

  “Just plain old curiosity.”

  “Take it someplace else,” Al said, and hung up.

  I slipped another quarter in the phone and called George DeVries at the D.A.’s office. Al was a cop with principles; George wasn’t. DeVries regarded police work as the choicest flower of the free-market system.

  “Can’t talk right now, Harry,” George said after we’d exchanged hellos. “Got a million things on my desk.”

  “How’d you like to make it a million, one hundred?” I asked.

  “Sounds interesting,” he said. “Whad’ya have in mind?”

  “The motel murder—tell me about it.”

  “Don’t have much yet, Harry,” George said sadly, as if he could see that one hundred dollars flying south for the winter.

  “Was it a robbery, like the papers said?”

  “There was money missing from the till. But, Christ almighty, nobody carves somebody up like that for a few dollars. We figure it was personal. Revenge, maybe.”

  “Revenge for what?”

  “This guy Jenkins was a two-time loser. Real unsavory character. Statutory rape, indecent exposure, petty larceny. Dope.”

  “What kind of dope?” I said with interest.

  “Small potatoes. Grass. Ludes. Probably a little coke. He was in tight with a bunch of bikers out in Clermont County. We’re thinking maybe he screwed one of them, somehow. The way he was taken out—it looks like bikers. Or some other kind of psychopath.”

  “Thanks, George,” I said. “The check will be in the mail.”

  “’Preciate it, Harry,” he said. “Always good talking to you.”

  I hung up and stared dully at the chrome facing on the phone box. “Personal” didn’t get me very far. Personal could be bikers or Lonnie. Or someone else altogether. At least I’d learned a little more about Claude, whose criminal past hadn’t surprised me. The man was as venal as they come—I’d known that on Thursday night. It was still possible that his murder had had nothing to do with Lonnie Jack. But I didn’t believe that. There was a connection. It was just going to take a lot of dangerous work to piece it together. I hoped that it was worth the effort, that it got me closer to Lonnie, because if it didn’t, I knew that I could end up dead too—for “personal” reasons.

  14

  AFTER FINISHING with George, I located a house phone, sitting on a console beneath a gilded mirror across from the newsstand. I picked it up and rang Karen’s room.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Any luck with your friends in St. Louis?”

  “Not really,” Karen said. “You’ve got to remember, Harry, that I haven’t lived the life in almost ten years. Most of the old crowd knows that.”

  I sighed. “So nobody’s talking?”

  “Lonnie was in St. Louis, late last week. Down-and-out. That’s about all I’ve been able to discover.”

  “I’m surprised that he didn’t contact you.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Karen said with a grim laugh. “The last time we talked, right before his trial two years ago, I made it very clear that he and I were history. I think he finally understood that I was serious. It takes a while with Lonnie. He’ll just keep sticking his finger in the socket, unless someone turns off the juice.”

  “How did you turn it off?” I asked.

  “At the trial, I told him that if he showed up at my house or tried to see the kids, I’d call the cops again.”

  “Again?”

  “I called the cops on him the last time he was at my house,” Karen said without apology. “He’d come over to see the kids—stoned out of his mind, as usual. We got into an argument over his life-style, if that’s the right word, and he began raving about how he was going to take the children away with him, so far away that I’d never see them again. Then he started to break things—little things, stuff my mother had given me and I had given the kids. He was completely out of his head. I didn’t want to see him get busted—you know how I feel about cops. But I didn’t think I had a choice.”

  “The cops busted him?”

  “It didn’t come to that, thank God. Lonnie left before they showed up, and I didn’t press charges. A couple of weeks later, he got caught for possession in an East St. Louis shooting gallery.”

  “And that’s when they sent him to Lexington?”

  She said yes. “I worked hard to get my house, Harry,” Karen said with sudden defensiveness, as if I’d accused her of selling Lonnie out. “I worked hard to build a life for me and my children. He had no right—”

  “I understand, Karen,” I said in a soothing tone of voice. “You did the right thing.”

  But she didn’t sound convinced. “What’s the ‘right thing’ to do with a man like Lonnie?” she said despairingly. “Sometimes I think if I’d had a little more patience with him, if I’d given him one more chance...And then I ask myself, ‘Who are you kidding? You, of all people!’ That day at my house, he claimed he was going to get straight—that he had a big deal cooking with some booking agents that was going to make him healthy again. But when you’ve heard a thing a hundred times, maybe two hundred times, and it never happens...well, it gets old. I told him he was full of shit, and that’s what started the argument that ended with my calling the fuzz.”

  She sighed wearily. “During those last few years, from about ‘80 on, it seemed as if Lonnie always had a ‘big deal’ cooking. It was like his bow to the spirit of the age. You know, fuck the sixties. Fuck sharing and peace and love. He was going to become a capitalist, like the rest of the country. Lonnie, a capitalist! Well, as he said, who knew more about the consumer mentality than he did? If he co
uldn’t figure out what would make people buy it all, who could? His whole life had come down to engineering a big score. To a magical fix. Something that would even it all up—all those years of sticking a needle in his arm. He really believed in his own fantasy—that the clouds were going to part one day and a savior was going to descend and carry him off to Fire Lake.”

  “Fire Lake?” I said.

  “It’s a private joke,” Karen said. “A song Lonnie liked. He thought it summed up his life. Going off to Fire Lake meant taking a gamble, having the guts to tell society to go fuck itself, and daring to live your dream. It was also his buzzword for shooting up. Going off to Fire Lake.”

  “Maybe this time he got there,” I said grimly.

  ******

  I told Karen that I was going back to the Delores to get some fresh clothes and that I’d pick her up at her room around two-thirty. Then we’d go look up some of Lonnie’s old friends.

  “I don’t want to sound like an alarmist,” I said, “but do me a favor and stay in your room until I come back. Okay?”

  She laughed nervously. “Okay.”

  I hung up the phone and walked out of the lobby into the cold, brilliant December afternoon. It was Saturday, which meant the streets were crowded. Since it had been raining for better than three days, they were especially crowded. And that made it next to impossible for me to pick up anyone who was on my tail.

  I walked down Fifth, past a couple of black street vendors who had set up stands on the curbside. One of them was selling T-shirts and sunglasses from a folding table. The other was hawking paste jewelry, decals, and knives from a wheeled cart.

  “For your lady,” the one with the jewelry said, holding out a pair of blue glass earrings.

  I shook my head and he shrugged good-naturedly, dropping the earrings back into his cart. He was a middle-aged black with processed hair, a pencil mustache, and a thin, pockmarked face, glazed like marzipan.

  I glanced back at the vendors when I reached Plum Street. The one hawking the jewelry was wheeling his cart east on Fifth, toward the square. For a second, I felt like following him. It was paranoia, and I knew it. But just to be sure, I watched him until he’d walked past the Clarion lobby and was well on his way toward Walnut.

  When the vendor had drifted out of sight, I walked straight down Plum to the garage where I’d left the car. The pedestrian traffic thinned out as I neared Fourth Street, and by the time I reached the garage, there were only a couple of other people on the sidewalk—a smart-looking woman in a fur coat and a teenage kid in a parka and a Cougars cap. I figured I was safe.

  It was twenty degrees colder in the shade of the garage than it had been in the brilliant sunlight. I pulled my topcoat tightly around me and started down an oil-stained ramp to the basement floor. There was a chilled-looking attendant, bundled in sweaters and coats, sitting in a booth beside the ramp. He had a tiny TV set up on the counter in front of him and a glowing space heater hung on the wall behind; but he still didn’t look at home. I waved at him, as I started down the ramp. He nodded in an unfriendly way, as if he didn’t like being disturbed; but I’d just wanted him to notice me.

  The Pinto was still covered with ice on the hood and back windows. I should have cleaned them off, but all I wanted to do was get inside the car and get out of the garage. Claude Jenkins’s murder had unnerved me a lot more than I’d let on to Karen. Drug dealers scared me. It wasn’t 1970 anymore, when every doper had known every other doper on the block, like Karen had said. Drugs were a multibillion-dollar business—the biggest business in the country. And although every business had its rules, this one was less predictable than most. There were always strange little eddies, little pockets of weirdness, in the mainstream. Even in my sedate town, people ended up nastily dead because of smack or coke or both. It happened every day. I just didn’t run into it every day, like I had with Claude.

  After a couple of misfires, I managed to start up the Pinto and nurse it, coughing and sputtering, up the exit ramp, past the surly attendant, and out onto Third Street. Once inside the car and on the move, I felt safe again.

  I felt fine all the way out Gilbert to Reading. But when I got to the shadows of the McMillan overpass—about a block from the Delores—I started to get antsy again. I pulled into the Delores’s parking lot and stared nervously at the tall redbrick walls of the apartment house.

  “For chrissake,” I said to myself. “It’s your home.”

  I was acting like a wimp and I knew it. Slapping myself on the thigh, I got out of the car and walked quickly up the stairs. The courtyard was still frozen in ice. Rivulets of it ran from the eaves down the sides of the building, like glass ivy. I knocked an icicle off a dogwood branch and walked briskly into the lobby. I went up the stairs and down the hallway to my apartment.

  No problem, I told myself. No problem at all.

  I’d just put my keys in the lock when someone opened my apartment door and said, “Come on in.”

  15

  NO PROBLEM at all, I said acidly, and stared through the half-open door.

  There was a young black man, no more than twenty years old, sitting on the easy chair and smiling at me with every tooth in his mouth. My first impulse was to reach for my gun in its holster. But the door was angled in front of me, and I couldn’t see all the way into the room. Whoever had opened the door was still standing behind it, in the kitchen. And for all I knew there were several others in the bedroom. Under the circumstances, pulling my gun was likely to get me killed.

  I glanced quickly down the hall, toward the landing. Another black man—tall and heavyset—had come down the stairs from the floor above me and stationed himself at the end of the hall. He had one hand buried in his long-skirted overcoat. It looked like he was concealing a sawed-off shotgun under the coat.

  This is crazy, I said to myself. But that didn’t make the man with the shotgun disappear.

  “Ain’chu gonna come in, homes?” the black kid sitting in the easy chair called out again, in a scatty, high-pitched voice.

  “Do I have a choice?” I said to him.

  He grinned. “We all got choices, bro’.”

  I pushed the door fully open and walked into the room. Another black man stepped out from the kitchen. He was a huge kid, with a drooping lip and a nose like a wad of bubblegum stuck under a desk. He was wearing a stocking cap on his bullet head and a stained cord sweater that hung in tiers, like layers of fat, above greasy, pinstripe gabardine pants.

  I looked at the one sitting on the pieced-together easy chair. He was small, thin, and brindled brown. He was wearing a camel’s-hair overcoat and a white plantation hat, crooked rakishly above his forehead. I couldn’t see all of his face, because of the hat and because of the wraparound sunglasses he had on his nose. He wore his hair in oiled ringlets, with a milk mustache and a cute little spit curl right in the center of his forehead—like Prince. He even spoke with a touch of a lisp, just like Prince. He had big yellow teeth and red, receding gums that made his smile a lot less sexy than he thought. It wasn’t until I got close to him that I realized there was a gold Star of David, with a little diamond in its center, embossed on one of his incisors. The kid stank of sweat and of something else—something like decay.

  “Where’s your partner, huh?” he said in his cheerful, lisping voice. “Where you got him stashed?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Chill, man,” he said merrily. “That’s cool. We don’t care about him. We just want our goods back, dig?”

  “What goods?” I said.

  The kid rattled with laughter, like a shaken gourd. “Hear what the dude say, Maurice?” he said to his Fat Albert friend.

  “Bet,” Maurice grunted.

  Maurice stared at me in what I assumed was supposed to be a menacing way. I knew I was in trouble, but I had a problem dealing with this eighties version of Cosby’s kids. They just didn’t look old enough or tough enough to be as dangerous as they pret
ended to be. Prince and Fat Albert.

  “We want the lady back, jack,” the kid in the chair said, and then smiled again, as if he’d been amused by his own rhyme.

  “Cocaine?” I said.

  “Bet,” the kid said lazily. “Your partner be fucking with the man. Don’t nobody fuck the man.”

  “My partner?” I said, starting to understand. “You mean Lonnie?”

  “Who the fuck you think we’re talking ‘bout, homes?” the kid said drily.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t know where Lonnie is and I don’t know anything about cocaine. You’ve already searched the apartment, so you know it’s not here.”

  “Yeah, but we ain’t searched you, yet, bro’,” the kid said with a grin. He glanced at Maurice, who took a step toward me.

  All of a sudden it didn’t seem like a Saturday morning serial anymore. I reached inside my coat for the Gold Cup. But before I could pull it out, I felt someone press something cold and hard against the back of my head. It was the guy from the stairway. The guy with the shotgun. I left the automatic in its holster and pulled my hand out of my coat slowly, raising it, palm-up, to show them that I was clean.

  The kid tut-tutted me with his lips and waved a warning finger. “Don’t be uncool,” he said. He snapped up out of the chair, as if he was hinged at his middle like a knife. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out an ivory-handled razor.

  Sweet Christ, I said to myself.

  “You gonna do some cuttin’, Bo?” Maurice said, with a booming laugh that made him cough. The man with the shotgun laughed too. Maurice cleared his throat and spat phlegm on the floor.

  I thought of the sock in Claude Jenkins’s smiling face.

  Bo took off his sunglasses and came right up to me, moving his head in jerky little turns, like a parrot, as he stared furiously into my face. He had a mad, drugged-out look in his bloodshot eyes. He kept hefting the razor in his hand, as if it were a bag of shot.

  “Yeah,” he said, still staring at me. “I might do me some cuttin’,” He glanced at Maurice. “Take him on back to the shitter. We’ll do him in the tub.”