I opened the freezer again and picked out a pint of strawberry cheesecake ice cream, which I ate standing up with a spoon from my camping gear. When I finished, I tossed the carton into the garbage can, stuck my hands in my back pockets and rocked back and forth on my heels. That got old in a hurry. I couldn't think of any other way to stall. I got my gun and the bundle of clothes from the car and unlocked the connecting door to the house.
I stepped into the hall.
The soft swell of classical music greeted me.
Home sweet home.
Shit.
I tossed my clothes into the laundry room to my left. Next to it was a bathroom with a shower stall. To the right was a big pantry. Directly ahead was the kitchen. I walked quickly through it, putting my gun down on the long curving counter that separated it from the dining area of the family room. I walked the length of the family room and switched the stereo to a station playing hard rock, turning the volume up so the driving beat would make it hard to think. I went down a short hallway, past the closed door of a half bath, and then I was in the front entry.
I stopped dead.
After a moment, I leaned back against the front door. To my left was the hall I'd just come down. To my right, a curved arch opened into the living room, which was full of heavy oak furniture that April and I had found in second-hand stores and spent months restoring. The gleaming hardwood floor was bare except for a couple of area rugs. The far wall was old brick surrounding a big fireplace. In the back wall were closed French doors. The room behind the doors was supposed to be a den but I used it as my bedroom.
In front of me, a curved stairway led to the second floor. Upstairs were two medium-sized bedrooms, a bathroom, a small room perfect for a nursery, and a master bedroom suite with an enormous tub in its bathroom. April had wanted a tub big enough to play in, big enough for two.
The house was a lot more than half-finished. The downstairs had been complete when April and I moved in three and a half years ago. Three months later, April was gone and the upstairs was still as it had been then. Beyond the top step, the floors were plywood, the walls were aging sheetrock mud, the light switches and electrical outlets had no covers, the ceiling lights were bare bulbs. Only the bathrooms had doors. I had hung cheap curtains so the house looked normal from outside.
I pushed myself away from the door and touched the cool smoothness of the oak banister. As if in response to my touch, the light at the top of the stairs came on. Another light flicked on in the living room.
Ghosts.
I didn't want to be there.
I packed a lot more clothes than I thought I would need. There's nothing worse than needing to sidetrack to the Laundromat when you're hot on someone's trail. On my way to the garage with the luggage, I stopped at the closet beneath the stairs. Pushing some jackets aside, I ducked under the clothes rod and turned a concealed latch. The paneling on the back wall snicked open. I stepped into a small room with reverse stair steps for a ceiling. Built into the back wall was a gun cabinet containing enough of an arsenal to make a survivalist's eyes gleam. Also built into the wall was a safe. I spun the dial and the door swung open silently. After taking out some stacks of bills, I locked everything up again and made a quick tour of the house. The stereo had gone off and the television was on, the volume slightly too high. A lamp was on in the family room. The late summer sunset was just beginning to color the sky but dusk comes early beneath the big trees surrounding the house.
Fifteen minutes later, I rang the bell on a gingerbready house in one of Mackie's stately older neighborhoods. Mattie Hagen opened the door. Her plump curves were wrapped in a worn red velour housecoat and she had a pencil sticking out of her salt-and-pepper curls over each ear. She had another pencil in her hand.
She said, “Oh, hi.” I followed her inside and joined her at the dining room table, where she was revising her latest manuscript. I started reading through the stack of finished pages. The heroine, whose name was Felicity, seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time running into strange men in her underwear. She was in the underwear, not the men. The men were all macho studs of the highest order and were given to casting sardonic looks at Felicity. I didn't think I could manage sardonic if I ran across a voluptuous raven-haired beauty in flimsy lace. Dumbstruck, possibly. Hopeful, undoubtedly. But not sardonic.
It was about eight-thirty when Mattie removed all her pencils and stood up. I tore myself away from a steamy bathtub scene and followed her upstairs to a gold and white room where a big brass four-poster gleamed coldly in the fading glow of the long summer sunset filtering through gauzy curtains.
Between the hellos when I arrived and the goodnights an hour or so after we went upstairs, we exchanged maybe two dozen words, few of them containing more than four letters. With Mattie asleep at my side, I stared at the swirling pattern on her ceiling and thought about April. When it started hurting too much, I turned and pulled Mattie into the curve of my body. She felt soft and warm and she murmured something that might have been an endearment but probably wasn't. Better than nothing. But not much.
I fell asleep just after the grandfather clock downstairs bonged ten times. Six and a half hours later, while I was nudging Mattie awake enough to be compliant—if not exactly enthusiastic—about early morning sex, a murder was committed in Mackie.
Chapter Five
Mattie was asleep again when I rolled out of her bed at five o'clock. I hadn't told her I was leaving town. If I didn't show up eventually, she'd replace me. Mattie considered men an expendable commodity. She put it a bit more graphically—“Men are good-for-nothing-but-fucking bastards.”
Showered and shaved and perked up by a cup of instant coffee, I revved the Nova up twenty minutes later. The fastest way to Portland was to head north and pick up Interstate 84 just outside of Pendleton. I chose the less traveled road, which was Bunyard.
In the early morning light I passed Carrie's house, where the arc light on the cupola was still glowing weakly. Six miles later I passed my own house, barely visible in the small forest surrounding it. A light was on upstairs. Soon, it would go off and the kitchen lights would come on as my electronic gadgetry tried to make an empty house look lived in.
The air conditioner would purr on occasionally to keep the plants from dying of heat. The sprinkler system would water the lawn. All the mail I wanted went to a post office box in town. I had eliminated the junk mail problem at the house by removing the mail box. If anyone phoned the house, which didn't happen often, they could leave a message after the beep. Just before leaving Mattie's, I had called Fanciful Flowers and left a message after its beep. Myrna and Rosie had a key to the front door of my office and would take care of the plants. If I wasn't back in a few days, Carrie would water the houseplants and clear the perishables out of the kitchen. If burglars showed up, a deafening alarm would sound and another would silently summon the county sheriff to save my worldly goods. When you got right down to it, I wasn't very necessary.
Beyond my house, Bunyard Road bumps and grinds its way westward. Just past Allentown, which was my immediate destination, the road makes a long slow curve north, intersecting I-84 forty miles west of Pendleton. From there, it's a straight shot into Portland, a hundred and seventy miles farther west in the Oregon tourists know about.
I was still five miles from Allentown when I heard about the murder. Johnny Cash and I had just finished a day-late rendition of “Sunday Morning Coming Down” when the DJ, in the middle of a yawn, gave the time and temperature, adding unnecessarily that it was going to be another hot one in eastern Oregon. Sounding more interested, he announced the lead story of the local news. I turned the volume up.
At the Mackie Arms, the small, handsomely restored hotel in the center of town, guests had been rudely awakened at four-thirty in the morning by the sound of gunshots. After what sounded like a considerable amount of confusion, the police found the body of a sixty-eight-year-old man in a third-floor room. His name was being withheld pending
notification of next of kin. There were no witnesses, but the police, as usual, were investigating a number of leads. I was advised to stay tuned for updates. I did, but there weren't any before I pulled up to the Allentown gas pumps.
Allentown's hand-lettered welcoming sign proclaimed a population of four hundred and thirty-eight. Someone had used spray paint to change the last digit to a nine. A few pot-holed roads led south off Bunyard past saggy-roofed houses. The north side of Bunyard was lined with old trees tangled in undergrowth. The town's business district consisted of a large veterinary clinic, the Allentown Cafe, and a rambling store that had no name as far as I knew but stocked most of life's necessities and a few of its luxuries. The gas pumps were in front of the feed section of the store. Off to one side was a garage that had once been a barn.
The garage and gas pumps had been managed for several years by Russell Garvey, a legless Vietnam vet known to everyone as Sarge. I knew him only slightly, having made his acquaintance several years earlier when I refused to arrest him for popping wheelies in his wheelchair in the middle of Mackie's busiest intersection. He was creating a hell of a traffic jam in a one-man demonstration protesting the fact that several of Mackie's older businesses had narrow doors, skinny aisles, lots of stairs, and no ramps.
I mentioned a few of the laws he was breaking and asked him to get out of the street. He refused, showing me a copy of the letter he had sent to City Hall and to the offending businesses. After two months, he had received no replies, not even a single form letter acknowledging receipt of his complaint. I used the radio in my patrol car to inform my superiors—as well as several hundred citizens who had nothing better to do than monitor police calls—that they'd have to send someone else to arrest him because I wasn't going to do it.
The next two cops who arrived on the scene had both done time in Southeast Asia. They joined me in my traffic management exercise and we soon had a detour around the block. By that time, Sarge had a couple hundred supporters cheering him on. Half of them had no idea what was happening but they knew a good time when they saw one. Hastily lettered protest signs sprouted like weeds in sidewalk cracks. A lot of the signs sported anachronistic peace symbols and a lot of the peace symbols were really the Mercedes-Benz logo but, what the hell, it had been a few years.
Ten blocks away, the high school dismissal bell clanged. Scenting excitement with the uncanny sixth sense peculiar to adolescents, a hundred or so students spilled into Sarge's demonstration. Vietnam was history to those kids but a party is a party. Guitars materialized and a group of kids with designer jeans and a fair knowledge of old fogey music sang sixties' protest songs with a disco tempo. “Blowin' In The Wind” had never sounded so upbeat.
A television camera crew, fresh from filming a fire in Pendleton, began thrusting cameras and microphones at faces in the crowd just minutes before Chief Detective Robert Harkins and the mayor arrived on the scene. The two of them took turns ad-libbing speeches full of motherhood and apple pie and remember-our-war-heroes.
With Sarge in the lead, the demonstration was formed into a disorderly parade and moved three blocks to Main Street Park, where it turned into a party that broke up some time after dark.
Sarge triumphed. The Mackie Mirror printed several guilt-inducing editorials and the town's unemployment rate dropped briefly as work crews were formed to do some overdue remodeling. Mackie received some nice publicity as a small town with a heart of gold. But Chief Detective Harkins, whose heart was dross, was not a happy man.
At the end of my shift, I reported, as requested, to his office. Thin-lipped and shaking with anger, Harkins told me that from now on I would by God enforce the laws I had sworn to uphold and if the goddamn media wouldn't make a goddamn circus out of it, he'd throw that goddamn pathetic little cripple into jail and kick my goddamn ass right off the goddamn force. It wasn't the first time I heard the latter threat from him and it wasn't to be the last.
Since the day of the demonstration I had seen Sarge maybe once a year when I stopped in Allentown on my way to somewhere else. One of his lanky redheaded sons was pumping gas into the Nova when Sarge rolled down the ramp from the feed section and headed my way.
“Hi, how's it going?” he asked. “Why aren't you in town solving the big murder?”
“I'm not a cop anymore.”
“No kidding. What are you doing now?”
“I'm a private investigator.”
“No shit. Just like Magnum, huh?”
I grinned. “It isn't much like Magnum at all.”
“I guess not. This sure as hell ain't Hawaii either.” Sarge had stopped just in front of me, his head bent awkwardly back. “Shit, you're tall,” he said and rolled back a couple feet to improve his angle. “I used to be six foot even,” he said.
“So did I.”
Sarge bellowed with laughter, his shaggy copper hair and beard sparking in the sunlight. After he stopped laughing, he asked where I was headed.
“Portland, as soon as I have some breakfast.” I glanced down the street at the Allentown Cafe then took a much longer look at the tall blonde who was busy looking out of place on the cafe's long porch.
“Foxy chick,” Sarge said.
“Mm-hmm. Does she live here?”
“You gotta be kidding. All the women in Allentown look like Miss USSR of 1956. Except for my wife. I thought she was a mirage at first.”
“How long's she been there?”
“I dunno. I saw her about five-thirty when I unlocked the pumps. Maybe she's meeting someone for breakfast.”
The Allentown Cafe seemed like an unlikely place for a breakfast date. I'd eaten there before on my way west. The food fulfilled the “home-cooking” promise on the peeling sign above the entrance but the customers, at least at six in the morning, were mostly ranch hands and laborers.
I talked with Sarge a few minutes longer then paid my gas tab and drove the fifty yards to the cafe. The Nova's tires spit dust and gravel as I pulled into a parking place twenty feet away and got my first good look at the girl.
She didn't belong in Allentown. Allentown was faded denim. The blonde was silk. She was gold. She was fine leather. She looked like money with a capital M and elegance with a capital E. She also looked like hell.
I'd have bet the rent no one had ever called her cute and few people would call her pretty. Her face was too unconventional, too full of planes and angles, too lacking softness. Her forehead was high and wide, her cheekbones prominent and almost horizontal. She had a long, incredibly straight nose and a delicately tapered jawline. Her dark eyes were deeply lidded beneath pale straight brows. Her wide mouth tightened every thirty seconds or so as she yawned with it closed. I've never been a fan of conventional prettiness. I thought she was beautiful, even with fatigue draining her face of color.
She was young, not more than twenty, I thought, and had the fragile slenderness that results from the body having recently spent several years concentrating on upward growth. The upward growth in her case had been considerable. She was at least five-nine.
A thin line of gold glinted on her neck, a narrow band of gold circled her left wrist, a slender hoop of gold hung from each earlobe. Her thick light-honey hair was piled on the crown of her head and secured with an intricately twisted clasp of gold. Several strands had escaped and hung almost to her waist. A thick loop of hair drooped against the nape of her neck.
If the pale blue dress wasn't silk, it was close enough. It had a softly draped neckline and oversized sleeves gathered at the elbows. In spite of having the deep diagonal creases that come from hours of careless wear, the skirt fell with flawless grace from a wide shirred waistband.
A run down her left leg revealed skin a shade lighter than the silky hose. Her low-heeled strappy sandals were white leather with a fine coat of dust. The matching shoulder bag was big but apparently not quite big enough. It was bulging badly and looked heavy enough to qualify as a lethal weapon. It must have felt it, too. She switched it from shoulder to shoulder a
nd finally dropped it onto her right foot, the long strap dangling from her hand. In her other hand she was gripping a bulky-knit white sweater. Its hood brushed the dusty floorboards as she shifted her weight from foot to foot.
While I was busy checking out the most interesting sight I'd ever seen in Allentown, the parking lot filled up with pickup trucks, four-wheel drives, and assorted rattletraps. The Nova fit right in. I didn't know where they all came from but the Allentown Cafe never lacked for customers. A couple dozen men and two women in white uniforms had joined the blonde's vigil, leaving a small empty circle around her as if in fear of standing too close to the flame.
I got out of the car and joined them, standing at the inner edge of the circle, about three feet away from the girl. I revised my age estimate down a year and my height estimate up an inch and when she finally looked my way, I changed my on-a-scale-of-one-to-ten rating from nine and a half to about a zillion.
I was wrong about there being no softness in her face. It was there, all concentrated in her eyes. They were blue, but not everyday, ordinary blue. They were dark blue, deep blue, twilit-sky blue, newborn-baby blue, so blue the color spilled over and tinted the whites, so dark the pupils were an almost undelineated deepening at the centers.
In the half second or so that our gazes held, I felt a swooping sensation just beneath my diaphragm, a feeling I associated with bending over in an upward-bound elevator. A feeling I also associated with the transient, frantic passions of adolescence. Maybe I was just hungry.
The cafe opened promptly at six. The blonde entered first through a door help open by a man with cracked-leather skin. I thought he was going to bow as she passed but he settled for touching the bill of his green John Deere cap. I filed in with the rest of the peasants.
Cat's-Paw, Inc. Page 4
