Wilt waggled his shaggy head back and forth. “Poor little guy.”
“How long have you known him?” I asked.
“Like, forever,” said Wilt. “I mean, since when he still had a crewcut, you know? High school.”
“And you’ve never seen him like this?”
“S’what I said, right? Seriously . . . never.”
I briefly considered asking him what he thought of the idea that Simon was somehow involved in the Rose Girl thing, that he’d at the very least have to have set up Sembles to be killed by warning Schneider or somebody else, but then it seemed like a better idea to keep that cat shoved deep in the bag.
The rest of the morning crawled by on its knees over broken glass. I spent most of it with Harvey Kaiser’s Great Camps of the Adirondacks open on my desk, making what I hoped appeared to be relevant notes on a steno pad. Mostly, though, I just skimmed the chapter on Dodie’s family camp—its pristine “pond” the spoils for ruining Lake Oncas here in Syracuse—then started jotting down ideas about Sembles, Simon, Schneider, and the whole rest of the minstrel show.
My handwriting is so bad I didn’t even need to encode anything.
I was leaning back in my chair, considering what I’d jotted down, when Ted slimed over and leaned against the wall by my desk, his lips peeled back in reptilian glee.
“Oh, don’t get to work on account of me,” said Ted. “It’s not like we’re running a business here or anything.” He turned his hand and examined his nails. “I’m just wondering how you’re coming on that Adirondack piece.”
“Fine,” I said, patting the Kaiser book.
“Bullshit.”
“Even if I was working on the Rose Girls . . . which I’m not . . . Adirondacks aren’t, like, going anywhere, Ted.”
“Gotta learn to keep more than one ball in the air.”
His tone was so nasty I gave up my pretense. “I find a dead guy yesterday, I’m working on tracking down a killer, and you want me to crank out some travel-puff crap? I mean, I’m sorry your wife left, but there’s no need to shit all over me. I’m pulling my weight.”
“The hell you are . . .”
“Jesus, Ted,” said Wilt from across the room, “lighten up.”
“You can screw around with this other bullshit all . . . you . . . want,” said Ted, turning his back on Wilt and stabbing his finger into the surface of my desk with each word, “but I expect that Adirondacks piece on my desk Tuesday. You took it on, you goddamn well finish it on deadline.”
I tilted my head back so I could consult the ceiling tiles, and he stormed back into his office.
“Place is a nuthouse, man,” said Wilt. “Goddamn cacophony. The Eagle has landed.”
“How the hell did his wife last this long?”
“Guy’s hurting, man.”
“Shit flows downhill?”
“Doesn’t give him the right to come down on you. Stick to your guns.”
“Big hill,” I said. “No shortage of shit.”
The extension on my desk bleated like Wodehouse’s sheep with a secret sorrow.
Wilt gave me a floppy salute as I picked up the receiver.
“Madeline Dare . . .”
“How’s things down-city with all them pinkos?”
Wimpy? “Scott?”
“Yup.”
What the hell . . . he had never called Dean at the apartment, much less me at work.
Had to be some horrible news. “Everybody okay? Your parents?”
“Hunky-dory,” he said.
“So, ah, you just calling to chat?”
“Some guy called for you, here at the shop.”
“Some guy?”
“Might’ve been one of your kike buddies.”
“Yeah?”
“Guess so,” he said.
“You know, Scott, I’m kind of having a day, down here. Me and the pinkos.”
“No kidding?”
“Wouldn’t kid a guy like you.”
“Huh,” he said, volunteering nothing.
“Well, Scott, I guess I need your help with this.”
“That a fact?”
“See, it’s just that I have so many kike buddies . . .”
He chuckled.
“. . . that I’m just sitting here, wondering whether you can possibly get your head out of your ass long enough to tell me which one this was.”
“Hell you say?”
“Now, Scott, I think you should keep in mind that even though Dean’s in Canada, it’s not like he won’t kick your teeth in the minute he gets back. All I have to do is say the word.”
That shut him up. Now I could hear him breathing.
“Look, like I said?” I continued. “I’m pretty busy today. So why don’t you just tell me who called and what the hell they wanted.”
“Izzy Fleischmann’s coming here. Five o’clock.”
I heard him mutter “bitch” as he dropped the phone.
CHAPTER 41
Ted’s office door was shut for the rest of the day, his voice alternately rumbling and shrilling, depending on whether he was on the phone with his lawyer or his wife. Wilt was off eating ziti at another failing campaign headquarters—the Republicans seemed to be cornering the market on soon-to-be-landslide-winner shrimp buffets. Simon was nowhere to be seen, which was just fine by me.
I was exhausted, and the hours between two and five seemed countable in dozens. My head hurt so much it was like I could actually hear the whining frequency of the fluorescent tubes.
I pounded Excedrin and kept slogging until 4:37, when I crept to the parking lot, head low, and raced out to the Bauer farm.
Wimpy was nowhere in sight.
I waited outside the shop, trying to keep out of a chill wind coming off the rows of corn. I stayed out of sight, ducking my head around the corner of the cinder blocks to check the road, feeling like Lucy Ricardo meets Clockwork Orange.
There was a sudden little gust of cold air, filled with dirt and tiny bits of dead leaves, one of which I caught in the eye. I rubbed at it with my fist to get it out, and when I looked up, there was Izzy Fleischmann’s theory-of-relativity hair and broad ruddy face.
He grasped both my hands and bussed my cheek. “You don’t mind I give a little kiss, hein? Make an old man happy?” he twinkled.
“How’s business?”
“Business . . .” Izzy waggled his eyebrows, shrugged. “Ah, you know, selling heifers . . . today we get too many little beauties with no calf to freshen them, the kind you have to say, ‘Take her home and breed her to your fave-orite sire.’ Maybe I sell a few to your uncle-in-law, hm?”
“God forbid,” I said, and Izzy cackled.
“And you?” he asked. “How is your business?”
“Scary,” I said.
“So I am hearing.”
I shivered. “Hearing? What do you mean?”
“I think you are finding things out? Small towns, this does not go unnoticed. . . .”
“You know what I want to find out?”
“I remember about those girls. Long time ago, now, when it happened.”
I nodded.
“The police, I think . . .” He paused, looking out toward the far trees. “Maybe not so interested in the solution, back then?”
“Maybe not so interested in the solution now,” I said. “Maybe they are. Some of them.”
“Ah, but which ‘some’? Always, that is the most important question.”
“I would say not Schneider,” I said. “You ever run across him?”
Izzy’s lips twisted into a moue of distaste.
“Guess you have,” I said.
He leaned around the corner of the shop, checking for traffic on the narrow road.
“So, just now you and me,” Izzy said, tucking my arm through his, “I think we need to have a little talk. It is concerning things I overheard when I was at Johnston’s farm yesterday, settling accounts from the auction. I am not sure what-all to which it pertains, you understand, but
I am thinking perhaps it has to do with your mysterious undertakings.”
I got hit with a wave of exhaustion as we moved slowly across the shop yard. Jesus, I needed sleep. Speed. An eight ball of John-the-Conqueror root.
Izzy steered me out beyond the pole barn, hidden from the road and even from the Bauers, should Wimpy or Weasel decide to visit the shop.
“You should know that your husband, I saw him again after we met. He told me some of what is concerning you,” he said. “He asked me to pay attention, see if I heard anything while I was around the town.”
“He did?”
“I know these people, around here,” he said. “Over the years, I’ve become, well, maybe a good word is ‘cautious.’ I pay attention, just in case something should start to . . . occur. Again.”
“I understand,” I said.
Izzy sighed.
“Nu,” he said, “so what you are mixed up in, it is coming as they say ‘to a head’ perhaps?”
“I get that feeling.”
“It is ugly business, whatever is going on. That oisvarf Schneider figures in the picture. Johnston is in it, also, from a long time ago.”
“Johnston?”
He looked at the ground for a moment as we walked, then, patting my hand, back at me. “I think that you may be in some danger.”
I stopped dead. “Why, specifically?”
“Because, my dear, what I heard them talking about was you.”
“Talking about me?” I pulled my hand back out of the crook of Fleisch-mann’s elbow. “Who’s ‘they’?”
The wind stirred distant tree branches into clattering black kanji against the sky. Shifting haiku. Indecipherable.
“Johnston and his son-in-law,” Izzy said, “just when I was coming into the barn. They were discussing, please pardon how I am saying, the day of the ‘sweetheart auction,’ then mentioned ‘that nosy little bitch from downstate.’ And also, shortly after that, how ‘Schneider wouldn’t like anybody messing with his livelihood, nosiree Bob.’ At least that’s how I remember exactly the wording. Of course, it is not just you they are insulting. Me, I am apparently ‘that goddamn little hunchback Hebe who’s never on time.’”
“I’m sorry you had to hear that.”
He crossed his arms and rubbed his hands briskly along his biceps, his slick windbreaker squeaking at the friction. “Is getting cold already. Too early in the year.”
“Did they say anything else?”
“It made no sense to me . . . maybe for you there will be some meaning. The father said something like, ‘I told him when he brought that little fruit out here it wasn’t no good. Guess he lived all right off it for quite a while but everything comes to an end.’ And the son said, ‘Won’t come to an end if Schneider shuts that girl up.’ And I am afraid that once again, Madeline, he was speaking of you.”
“Wait, ‘the little fruit’?”
“Oh yes, hardly an agricultural product,” said Izzy. “Someone named Simon.”
Well, there you go.
Izzy peered at me with concern. “You look as though this confirms your suspicions,” he said.
“You could say that.”
“Your face has changed since last we met. You are less . . . innocent. It is the eyes, I think. You have been seeing things that are very painful. Very troubling to you. And, nu, maybe you are feeling a bit responsible for these things?”
“Are you fortune-telling again?”
“Oh yes indeed, my dear, and do believe me when I say you must be extremely careful,” he said.
“Are your predictions always very accurate?”
“Accurate? Oh yes. Sadly, I have been cursed with a great deal of accuracy.”
Of course, when I got home, there was a message from Dean. If I hadn’t met with Izzy, I would have been there in time, could have told him about Sembles, and how everything was closing in.
I paced around the apartment, pissed at Dean for being gone and not calling back, pissed at myself for being pissed at him. I wanted to talk to someone. Mom didn’t answer her phone. Ellis was no doubt with Lapthorne, though neither of them picked up.
Finally, I dialed the Crown.
“Kenny,” I said, “I should have told you right off the bat this morning how grateful I am for your kindness yesterday . . . I mean, not just the toast and the Shirley Temple, but all the work you’ve done, trying to help me figure this thing out.”
“My pleasure. Anything new?”
So I started to tell him about the morning’s events, about how it was now obvious that Schneider knew Simon, obvious that there was some question over what Simon did with all the money he was earning.
I said how I’d been thinking it didn’t look like too much of a stretch that the photographer and the ex-cop had at the very least shared observations on the poor silhouettist before his untimely demise.
“But Kenny, I just can’t picture Simon as a killer,” I said. “I mean, again, why would he show me the photographs?”
And then I related what Izzy had told me, out at the farm.
“What the hell does that mean,” he asked, “‘the little fruit’?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Simon’s gay. Maybe they just wanted to insult him.”
Kenny sighed. “Something about that just . . . it’s like it’s ticking somewhere. A clock in another room when you can’t sleep, you know? It’s right at the edge and I can’t quite remember . . .”
“I’m just not getting a bead on anything, here,” I finished lamely.
“You’re still sure you want to pursue this?”
“No one else will. I just keep seeing those poor girls’ faces, and now Sembles.”
And as I said that, I really did flash on the images of Sophie and Delphine Descognets, whom I’d never met.
What was it about them that had such a hold on me? Sophisticated young women, near my age, lost forever in Syracuse, a town that seemed completely uninterested in them, in what their presence here had ultimately cost them.
Oh . . . right. I’m afraid they’re me.
“Houston . . .” said Kenny, “we’ve lost contact—”
The sound of his voice yanked me whizzing back out of the ether.
“What’s with your family?” he asked. “You’re a good kid, and it doesn’t seem like there’s anybody looking out for you in all of this. My parents . . . every day I was a cop, they worried. Said they didn’t leave the old country so I could get myself killed in the new one. The only son. My mother said, ‘Already you go Vietnam. Now is time for your opportunity. Milk and honey . . . no more the guns.’”
I looked out the window.
Kenny paused for a minute. “I guess what I want to say is, and no offense, where’s your parents? Your father? Doesn’t he worry about you? His daughter’s up here, chasing murderers around?”
I looked up at the clock on the stove—6:37, three hours earlier in Malibu. Well, Dad would be doing his ninety-fifth bong hit of the day over his I Ching in the VW overlooking the Pacific, and Mom was probably ladling dented-can pork and beans into a pair of exquisitely rendered soup plates while threatening Bonwit with the cricket bat.
The usual.
“I dunno,” I said. “I guess it’s different. America is my old country. My parents aren’t exactly looking to me for the milk and honey. They figure it’s all used up.”
“But this country . . . there’s opportunity enough for everybody. It’s just a question of attitude.”
“Yeah,” I said, and he had no answer to that.
“I just want you to know,” he said at last, “that I worry about you. I don’t mean that to undermine what you’re doing—but I want you to know I’ve got your back if anything comes up. I mean it . . . anything at all.”
He’d spoken with a slow dignity—an ancient senator’s gravitas.
“Really?” I said. “That means a lot.”
“You’re a good kid,” he said. “You’re going to make your own opportunities. No one can take tha
t from you. Why don’t you come down to the bar for breakfast?”
“I will,” I said. “Thanks.”
Sleep wouldn’t settle in with me that night. Maybe it was Kenny’s observation about the ticking clock, but every little noise from up and down the street seemed to rattle around in my head whenever I shut my eyes. The house creaking, the wind coming through increasingly bare branches, making them clatter—even the halting progress of every last car.
CHAPTER 42
The next morning I drove downtown, exhausted despite a full night’s sleep. I left my car in the Weekly’s lot, then walked back up to the Crown.
I thought Kenny had stood me up. There were no lights on inside, nothing visible through the door’s tiny window.
I pushed against the scarred wood, expecting to find it locked. Instead it swung inward, easily, so I stepped into the darkness.
The door closed behind me.
I couldn’t see. I blinked.
There was no sound, only a smell.
Thick and rancid. Sweet.
The same fetor I’d choked on at Sembles’s house.
I was alone in the dark with something dead.
I backed toward the door. Didn’t want to see, didn’t want my pupils to dilate in the gloom.
Too late. Shapes emerged, sharpening.
The walls . . . the bar’s solid length . . . the mass laid out along it . . .
Kenny.
On his back. On top of the polished wood.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t leave. Couldn’t breathe.
I could only stand, frozen, watching the details bloom, slow as an image on photographic paper, conjured forth beneath the surface of a chemical bath.
The pallor of his skin.
The worn soles of his shoes.
His shirt, once white, now dark to the waist.
His throat, slashed deep as the Rose Girls’ had been.
The blood, so thick it had dried in stalactites off the edge of the bar.
And there were more details. Little touches, to set the scene.
The broad arc of silver coins glittering around his head. How one hand clutched something to his chest. Only I couldn’t see what it was.
He would have forced himself to go over there and look, if it had been me laid out in his place. He would’ve been brave enough to do that, because if he could see everything, he’d know what happened. What it meant.
A Field of Darkness Page 26
