Fire Lake

by Jonathan Valin

  “It’s pretty scary,” I said.

  “You don’t think...” She glanced at the stairwell.

  “He’s dead, Karen,” I said.

  “Dead,” she repeated.

  Someone jiggled the front doorknob. Both Karen and I jumped. Thelma, the teenage girl with the punk hairdo—the one who thought Cal was so cool—came stomping into the hall, shaking the snow off her high-heeled go-go boots. She was wearing a cloth coat with a fur ruff, buttoned at the neck. Under the coat, she was dressed like she’d been the day before—in a torn T-shirt, and a leotard, and a short leather skirt.

  “Hey!” she said, staring at us through the archway. “I remember you.” Her baby’s face fell momentarily, as if she did remember us. “Cal said you were narcs.”

  “We aren’t narcs,” I said. “We’re friends of Lonnie Jackowski’s.”

  “Norvelle’s old pal?” Thelma said, coming up to the archway and leaning against it. “The cute old guy that used to have the band, right?”

  Karen straightened up on the sofa. “Do you know where he is?” she asked Thelma.

  Thelma shook her head. “I just met him a couple of times. He came over here on Wednesday. I wanted to talk to him, but Cal took him upstairs. He and Norvelle and Cal spent most of the afternoon up there, talking business.” She made a face, as if she didn’t like it when Cal “talked business.”

  “How about the second time?” I said to Thelma.

  “Huh?” She made a questioning face.

  “That you saw Lonnie,” I said, prompting her with a smile, although she didn’t seem to need much prompting. She was much more of a kid than the other one, Renee.

  “That was on Friday night,” Thelma said. She gave Karen a quick, nervous look. “He didn’t look so hot. Somebody’d beat him up and he was acting kind of...you know, crazy.”

  Karen put her hand on my knee and squeezed hard. “Do you know where he went after that?”

  “Norvelle and Cal drove him out to meet somebody.”

  “Who?” Karen said breathlessly.

  Thelma shook her head. “I don’t know. It was out in the country, I think. That’s where he said he wanted to go, anyway. Cal said they’d be gone for a while.” The little girl glanced behind her, at the stairs. “What’s that smell?”

  Neither one of us knew how to answer her.

  She could see by the looks on our faces that something was wrong. She stepped back toward the hall. “Where’s Cal and Renee? Where’s Norvelle?”

  I got up from the couch. “They’re gone, Thelma. Everybody’s gone.”

  She stared at me disbelievingly. “Bull!”

  Before I could stop her she’d run up the stairs.

  “Harry!” Karen cried out. “Don’t let her see him!”

  I bounded across the room after her. As I got to the hall landing, I heard Thelma shriek. I ran up the stairs to the john door. She was kneeling against the doorjamb, holding her stomach. She’d thrown up on the bathroom tile; her little girl’s face was sick with terror.

  “Don’t kill me!” she screamed when I walked over to her. She scrambled away from me, backward on her hands. “Don’t kill me too!”

  “Honey,” I said gently, “I didn’t kill Norvelle. He overdosed. We found him that way.”

  She stopped scrambling down the hall and settled back against the wall. Her eyes began to glaze over—she was going into shock.

  “We were all going to get well,” she said staring dully at the floor. “Everybody was going to get well.”

  I picked her up from the floor and carried her down the stairs.

  When we got to the living room, I put her back on her feet. Karen took her over to the couch, cooing at her sweetly and holding her in her arms. “It’s all right,” she said. “All right.”

  I left her consoling Thelma and went upstairs again to check out the other rooms.

  38

  THE SMELL from the john was horrendous. When I got back upstairs, I closed the bathroom door, pulling it tightly shut. Then I walked down to the room at the end of the hall. The door was open and sunlight was pouring in through greasy, unblinded windows.

  It wasn’t much of a bedroom. Except for a peach crate with a lamp on it, and an unmade-up mattress beside the crate, there was no furniture. There were no decorations on the peeling walls either, no rug on the rough pine floor. A few clothes had been stored in the crate—a pair of jeans and some rumpled shirts. I checked the jeans and found a wallet in the back pocket. The only thing in the wallet was an identification card—the kind that comes with any wallet when you first buy the damn thing. It had Norvelle Thomas written on it. No address. No phone number. He didn’t even have a social security card, much less a driver’s license. And no photographs or mementos at all. By comparison, the stuff that I’d found in Lonnie’s clothes seemed like a treasure trove.

  The bedroom was so grim and empty that I didn’t feel like searching it any further. It was clear that Norvelle’s whole life—everything that mattered to him—had been arrayed at his feet, on that bathroom floor. Outside of smack, he just didn’t exist.

  But I went through the bed and bedclothes anyway. And, to my surprise, found seven hundred dollars rolled up in a wad and hidden inside the zippered pillow on the mattress. There were also several dozen glassine envelopes full of brown powder inside the pillow. About three thousand dollars’ worth of drugs and money, all told.

  I picked up one of the brown envelopes and stared at it. Mexican smack was brown, I’d read somewhere. Norvelle had had a hoard of it—enough to keep him happy for weeks. Enough to kill him.

  I dropped the glassine envelope on the bed and walked back down the hall to the turreted room. Its door was closed. I pushed it open and stepped inside.

  It looked a lot more like a bedroom than Norvelle’s barren digs. There was a desk with a lamp and a phone on it on the right side of the room, a brass bed with a parachute hung above it on the left, an oak bureau on the far wall across from the door, and assorted blacklight posters on the walls. A threadbare brown oriental rug covered the floor. Just like the sixties.

  I went over to the bureau and opened the top drawer. It had been emptied. So had all the other drawers. I opened each one and all I could find were the sort of tail ends—the unmatched socks, the faded sheets, the torn underwear—that people leave behind them when they move.

  I went over to the desk—an old oak library table with one long drawer in front. Behind the desk, the turret’s bay windows looked out on Cross Lane.

  I pulled the drawer out, picked it up, and put it on the tabletop. It was filled with the usual items—pens, pencils, loose papers. I started sorting through the papers and found a school notebook with Hughes High printed on the cover, a math pad, a calendar. The notebook and most of the other items obviously belonged to Cal’s teenage girlfriend, Renee. As I was thumbing through the math pad, a blue-and-white folder fell out.

  At first I didn’t realize what it was. I was about to toss the folder back in the drawer, unexamined, when I happened to turn it over and saw the greyhound printed on the front. Lonnie’s bus ticket—the return ticket to St. Louis—was tucked neatly in its paper pocket.

  I stared at the bus ticket for a long moment. Thelma had already said that Lonnie had returned to Cal’s house on Friday night, apparently after he’d run away from my apartment. He must have taken the bus ticket with him when he’d run. It was logical to assume that he’d also taken his driver’s license. And now the folder with the ticket was sitting in Cal’s desk drawer. And the bloodstained license had been left at the scene of a murder, where it most certainly would have incriminated Lonnie, if I hadn’t come along to pick it up.

  I started to feel very bad about Lonnie. He wouldn’t have left the damn ticket behind him, or the license, even if Cal and Norvelle had taken him to meet a friend in the country, as Thelma had said.

  I tucked the bus ticket in my coat pocket and put the drawer back in the desk. As I was closing the drawer I hap
pened to glance out the turreted window. Jordan’s gray Ford was coming down Cross Lane.

  “Jesus!” I said aloud.

  I slammed the drawer shut, ran out of the room, and bounded down the stairs. If Jordan came in the house and found Norvelle in the john and all that smack in the bedroom, I was a dead man. I knew immediately that if he stepped through the front door, I was going to have to kill him or he would kill me just like he’d said he would. I’d already taken the pistol out of my coat.

  When I got down to the living room, I went directly over to the front windows and peered through the curtains at the street. I didn’t even give Karen or Thelma a glance.

  “Harry?” Karen said with concern.

  “It’s Jordan,” I said, still staring through the window.

  She grasped the situation at once. “My God, what if he comes in.”

  I didn’t answer her. But she could see the gun in my hand.

  “You can’t kill a cop, Harry,” she said in a frightened voice.

  “I can if he’s planning to kill me.”

  The Ford was sitting in front of the house now, idling in a cloud of white exhaust. I could see Jordan squinting through the side window at the porch. He couldn’t see me from where he was sitting because of the glare of the sun.

  “Harry, the girl...” Karen said loudly.

  I glanced back at Thelma. She had calmed down somewhat, but her face still looked a little stoned out, as if she couldn’t fathom all that was going on around her. I stared at Karen, who gave me a desperate, pleading look.

  “Please, Harry,” she said, “there has to be another way.”

  I peeked through the curtains again. Jordan had pulled over behind the Pinto. As I watched him, he opened the Ford’s door and stepped out onto the street.

  “Is there a back door?” I said, not taking my eyes off Jordan.

  When Thelma didn’t answer me, I whipped around and glared at her. “Is there a back door!” I shouted.

  Thelma shook as if I’d slapped her, and nodded spastically. “Down the hall in the kitchen,” she said, pointing behind her.

  I looked out the window again. Jordan was making his way across the street, toward the house.

  “C’mon!” I said. “We’re getting out of here!”

  I ran over to the couch, jerked Thelma up with one hand and Karen with the other.

  “Quick now,” I said, pushing Thelma ahead of me. “Show us the way.”

  The little girl led us through the archway and down a short hall to the kitchen. There was a windowed door on the rear wall. I unlocked it, pulled it open, and ushered the two women out onto the back stoop, shutting the door behind me.

  The stoop overlooked a snowy lot that ran between the back of Cal’s house and the backs of the shops on McMillan Street.

  “Go!” I said, pushing Karen and Thelma down the stairs.

  Before leaving the stoop, I glanced back through the tiny window in the kitchen door. I could see all the way up the hall. When the front door opened, I skedaddled down the steps and followed Karen and Thelma, who were making their way across the snowy field to McMillan Street.

  39

  ONCE WE got across the field, we ducked into a muddy alley between two brick buildings and followed it up to the south side of McMillan Street. The three of us stopped as one when we got to McMillan, leaning against the cornice of the building at the head of the alley, trying to catch our breath. Out on the street, cars drifted by, wreathed in exhaust smoke and drenched in cold white sunlight.

  “The car,” Karen said, huffing. “How do we get back to the car?”

  I shook my head. For a second I couldn’t find the breath to speak. “We don’t,” I finally said. “We can’t risk it. We’ll have to catch a ride with someone else.”

  “Who?” Karen asked.

  I glanced at Thelma. “I don’t suppose you’re old enough to drive, are you?”

  She shook her head. The run across the field had left her exhilarated, chasing away the last of the shock that had paralyzed her inside Cal’s living room. She looked herself again—a fourteen-year-old kid with a punk haircut and a brazen attitude, for whom death, even the death of a friend, held no real meaning.

  “That was a cop outside, wasn’t it?” she said to me with excitement in her voice, as if the whole thing had turned to TV adventure in her mind.

  I nodded. “Are you going to turn us in?”

  “Shit, no,” Thelma said, looking outraged. “I hate cops.”

  “What are you going to do?” Karen asked her with genuine concern.

  Thelma’s face knotted up momentarily, as if she’d taken the question to heart. “Now that Renee and Cal are gone...I don’t know. Go home, I guess.”

  Karen smiled approvingly. “That’s a very good idea. And stay there, honey.”

  Thelma nodded determinedly. But I could see from the slight restlessness of her eyes that her resolve wasn’t going to last long. She’d probably have a few nightmares and swear off drugs for a week or two. But there would be another Cal within the month. For Thelma, there would probably always be another Cal.

  “I guess I’ll go, then,” Thelma said regretfully, as if she were leaving a party too early in the evening.

  “You can find your way?” Karen asked.

  “Always,” Thelma said, putting a very adult look on her kid’s face. She gave Karen a quick hug, then walked off down the snowy sidewalk, toward Gilbert—her little butt swinging beneath the coat.

  Karen stared after her for a moment, then turned to me. “I hope she’ll be all right.”

  “She’ll be fine,” I said.

  She looked back up the street, at Thelma’s receding figure. “I was like that when I was her age.”

  “You were a little older,” I said, “when you were her age.”

  Karen smiled and turned back to me. “Shouldn’t we get off the street?” she said. The run across the field seemed to have exhilarated her, too. Or maybe it was the fact that I’d chosen to run rather than to confront Jordan.

  I glanced across McMillan. There was a Frisch’s a block up near Victory Parkway. “Getting off the street is probably a good idea.” I nodded toward the restaurant. “Let’s get something to drink.”

  We waited for a lull in the traffic, then dashed across McMillan and into the restaurant.

  ******

  We sat in Frisch’s for about a half an hour, drinking coffee. At first I let Karen do most of the talking—partly because I was trying to keep an eye on the street, in case Jordan blew by, partly because I didn’t want to tell her about what I’d found in Cal’s desk drawer.

  “You know,” Karen said, sipping her coffee, “while you were upstairs, Thelma told me a couple of things that might be important.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like the fact that Cal and Norvelle had a big fight with another man on Friday afternoon. A skinny guy with red hair. The whitest guy Thelma had ever seen.”

  “That would be our friend Claude Jenkins.”

  Karen nodded. “That’s what I figured.”

  “Did Thelma tell you what they were arguing about?”

  “Selling some drugs,” Karen said, giving me an arch look. “A lot of drugs that the white guy, Jenkins, was holding for them.”

  “Lonnie’s crack from the motel,” I said.

  “It had to be. Cal and Norvelle wanted to turn the stuff over immediately.”

  “To whom?” I asked.

  “To a friend of theirs. Thelma didn’t know his name. But the other guy, Jenkins, thought it was too risky to move the crack right away. He wanted to hang on to it for a while.”

  “Until LeRoi caught up with Lonnie,” I said. “Or with me. That’s why Claude kept Lonnie alive on Thursday night; so he could play the fall guy with LeRoi.”

  “After Jenkins left, Cal and Norvelle kept arguing with each other. Thelma said that Norvelle was pretty strung out. He hadn’t had a fix in better than a day, and neither one of them had any cas
h to cop.”

  I thought of all those glassine bags full of smack, hidden in Norvelle’s pillow. And the seven hundred dollars wrapped in the rubber band. Between Friday afternoon and Monday morning, Norvelle had found a lot of dope and a lot of money. I imagined that Cal had found some, too, and taken it with him when he ran. It was obvious now how they’d scored—by taking Claude off the way Claude had taken off Lonnie.

  “Thelma went home for supper,” Karen went on. “When she came back that night, Lonnie was there. Later in the evening, the three of them drove off to a place in the country together—a place that Lonnie said he wanted to go to. When Norvelle and Cal came back home late that night, Thelma said their moods had changed completely. They were talking about partying. Everybody was going to get well, Thelma said.”

  I’d heard her say it myself—outside the john.

  “Norvelle and Cal must have killed Jenkins that night,” I said. “Taken the crack off him. Then sold the whole bundle to their friend the buyer. Whoever the hell he was.”

  “Maybe they didn’t sell all of it,” Karen said. “Maybe they just sold enough to party with.”

  “I found several dozen dime bags of smack in Norvelle’s room, along with seven hundred dollars in change. That’s not just party favors.” I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out the bus ticket. “I also found this.”

  Karen picked up a paper napkin from the Formica table and dabbed it in a glass of ice water.

  “What is it?” she said, wiping out her eyes.

  “It’s Lonnie’s bus ticket,” I said.

  She stared at it for a moment curiously. “So?”

  I explained it to her, trying my best to gloss over the worst of it. “When Lonnie ran to Cal’s house on Friday night, Karen, he must have taken this ticket with him and his driver’s license, too. Later that night, the license was planted in the motel office to incriminate Lonnie. Norvelle and Cal left it in Jenkins’s office, along with a little crack. The murder was made to look like a revenge killing—like Lonnie had run amuck after getting ripped off for drugs by Claude.”