“I beg your pardon?” I said to Vera Kjellsen, because I had been thinking so loud that I didn’t hear what she had said.
“I said, I remember where they used to live, Tommy and his mother, if that’s any help. I used to give rides home to some of the drama students after the productions. One night I gave Tommy Cott a lift. I remember the house because it wasn’t really a house at all. It was more of a … almost a garage.”
That’s exactly what it was. Vera Kjellsen gave me precise directions and I found it without a single wrong turn. It was a two-story, rectangular, concrete-block structure, slathered with pink paint, as Mrs. Kjellsen had remembered. It sat in a kind of valley or hollow not far from the cataract that gave the town its name, the falls of the Big Sioux River. In fact, I fancied I could hear the low and lazy rumble of water as I sat in my car across from the place. It was not a residential neighborhood. There was a metal recycling operation across the street and a gas station further down the gentle hill, a cafe and a truck lines and a factory or plant or something beyond that. The state pen wasn’t too far away, either, as I recalled, just over the rise to the north. The pink building hadn’t been intended as a residence, either, or at least not exclusively so. It looked like it had begun life, forty or fifty years earlier, as a service station with an apartment on the top floor. The lower level still featured two overhead doors facing the pocked street, one of normal height and one tall enough to admit a medium-sized truck. A slab of concrete in the barren yard probably marked the spot that once had been taken up by gas pumps. It was in about the right location with regard to the building.
But no commerce was carried on there these days. A rusted-out, cannibalized, thirty-year-old Chevy pickup, dark green and bulbous, lay in the weeds alongside the joint. In the crumbling, weed-sprouting driveway, a fifteen-year-old Ford wagon in not much better shape stood waiting. The front end looked as if it had had an argument some time ago with a power pole. The car lost. Litter and garbage, cans and bottles and old papers, were strewn everywhere, the latter flapping damply in the steady breeze that came from the direction of the river. The weather here was similar to that down south, but chillier and windier.
I let up on the brake pedal and the car rolled down the hill forty feet. Then I pulled the wheel and circled the car around against the opposite curb, in front of the pink building.
A long, steep set of wooden stairs on the east face of the building led up to a small landing and the apartment’s front door—only door, unless there was an exit through the garage bays below.
I locked the car and climbed the stairs.
The door at the top of the shaky stairs had an opening for a window, but the opening was currently covered with a piece of unpainted plywood, nailed on from inside. There was no bell. I rapped on the plywood. After a while the door was opened by a slovenly woman in a dirty, red T-shirt and tattered blue jeans. She had matted, gray hair and dirty, gray skin, and rolls of fat, and her huge, sagging breasts jiggled under the T-shirt when she fought the door open. The sour stench that escaped from the apartment, and her, strongly suggested that it had been many weeks since either had been anywhere near anything that might accidentally have cleaned them. She stared at me blearily. “Whattya wan’?”
“Mrs. Cott?”
“Whattya wan’?” she said again, and belched.
“Are you Mrs. Cott?”
She looked at me as if just noticing me. “Martha Cott,” she said drunkenly. “Whattya wan’?”
“I want to talk to you about your son, Thomas …”
Again she stared. Then she looked away and teetered. “Got no son,” she mumbled. “Go ’way.”
Martha Cott went to slam the door on me but she was too lit. She lost her balance and instead of slamming the door she ended up on her keester inside the apartment, looking confused, as if she wondered how she’d got there.
I said, “I know you have a son, Mrs. Cott. I know his name is Thomas, and that he dropped out of Washington Senior High School twenty or twenty-one years ago, after his girlfriend was killed in a hit-and-run acci—”
“Who the fuck are you?” the woman bellowed. She rolled onto her side—she didn’t really have a side, being mostly round, but she rolled onto what should have been her side and struggled to her feet. A litany of half-intelligible verbiage, much of it obscene, dribbled from her. “Who the fuck’re you,” again, and, “Wha’re you doin’ here,” and, “Whattya wan’,” and some more that I didn’t catch, a senseless, drunken stream of consciousness that Martha Cott probably didn’t even know she was spewing. In time, and with much effort and no little huffing and puffing, she got to her feet and teetered farther into the small apartment, making her unsteady way to a couch whose age was showing, not to mention its stuffing and springs.
Going in there was the last thing I wanted to do, but there seemed few options. I took in some fresh air—there was no telling when I’d get more—and entered, leaving the door as it stood, open.
The grotesque woman had seated, or sprawled herself on the couch. Breathless, she sat for a moment, her back to me, lost in her own drunken reverie. More unintelligible talk leaked out of her. I couldn’t make sense of it, but it seemed to be a kind of lament. The last word she spoke sounded like “Tommy,” but it may have been “thirsty,” because as soon as she had spoken it she put a grubby hand around the neck of a bottle of cheap bourbon and took care of what remained of the contents. It seemed to surprise her that the bottle was now empty. She looked around the room, as if trying to determine where the liquor had gone. The room was small and square and was both kitchen and living room. The furniture, what there was of it, was old and in bad shape. A banged-up console TV guarded one corner of the room. The carpet was stained and threadbare, worn clear through to the padding near the door, and probably accounted for much of the stench. Plates with the remains of long-gone meals and dirty glasses and beer cans and empty bags and bottles and wrappers were everywhere.
The drunk woman’s search eventually brought her to me. She looked at me—I was standing just inside the doorway, where the oxygen content of the atmosphere seemed higher—then looked out the open door, then looked back. I was afraid she was going to tell me to close the door. Instead she said, “I’m thirsty,” and looked out the door again.
I took her meaning, and I was glad of the chance to get out of that place. I went down the rickety stairs and down the hill and across the street to the cafe. They had a “lounge” there, as they called it, and an off-sale license. I bought a fifth of Jack Daniel’s. I knew the good stuff would be wasted on Martha Cott, who wouldn’t have cared if I stopped at the gas station next door and brought her back a bottle of Heet, but there was the chance I might be called upon to drink too, and I have more respect for my innards, especially when I’m on expenses.
I needn’t have worried. Bearing gifts as I was, I was welcomed back a bit more cordially, but no effort was made to invite me to partake. Still, I noticed, Martha Cott had changed her top, to a lime-green polyester shirt with long sleeves and white top-stitching, and had somehow managed to coax a comb through her greasy, knotted hair. The effect was negligible and did nothing for the foul odor of the dirty little apartment. Still, I suppose I should have appreciated the effort. She even had a glass for herself, a slightly used twelve-ounce glass with the Peanuts kids on it.
I let her get a couple of swallows down her. Then I said, “Mrs. Cott, I’m a detective. I need to ask you about your son.”
“Tommy,” she wailed softly.
“Yes. Where is he? What happened to him after he left school?”
“Dead,” she spat with that odd, quiet belligerence that only a drunk can manage. The hair on my neck went up. But then I remembered that “Tommy” wasn’t dead—Tommy Cott might have been, but he had been reincarnated as Thomas Wayne—and then she said, “Never had no son.”
I sighed, inwardly at least. I had tried getting information out of chronic, terminal boozers before. Usually it was a waste
of time. No one makes very much sense when he’s drunk, but the hardcore incurable alcoholic makes no sense ever, drunk or sober, because he’s never sober. The stuff has corroded his brain and his mind and blurred forever the distinction between fantasy and reality, if in fact there is any kind of reality for them, to the point where it’s no use your trying to separate truth from fiction in what they tell you, because there’s no difference to them.
Still, a guy likes to be a sport, and I had a powerful itch to try to get at the connection between the boy and his erstwhile teacher. As if speaking to a child, I said, “Now, Mrs. Cott, you know that’s not right. You have a son. Tommy. Remember?”
She was on the couch again, the bottle in one hand, propped on her fat thigh, the glass in her other hand, resting on the other fat thigh. She craned her neck to look at me.
“Tommy,” I said.
“Tommy.”
“What happened to Tommy?”
She had to think, and that required liquor.
“Dead,” she finally decided.
“How did Tommy die?”
That took more liquor.
“Dead,” was her answer.
“Yes, but how did Tommy die?”
“Tommy,” she said again, and started blubbering.
At that moment a door at the other end of the room opened and a tall, broad man loped into the four-foot-long corridor at the back of the living room-slash-kitchen. He was a Native American with long black hair parted in the middle and pulled back behind his head. He wore a dirty athletic-style undershirt that did a lousy job of covering his pot belly, blue jeans, no shoes or socks. He regarded me without interest and ducked through a doorway at a right angle to the one he’d just come through. The latter looked like a cramped bedroom, the former I supposed to be a bathroom. The guess turned out to be right: I heard running water, as the novelists euphemistically put it, a second later.
The woman had forgotten what she was crying about and was entertaining herself again with the Jack Daniel’s. I felt like I was in one of those episodes of The Twilight Zone, you know, where someone keeps wandering around bumping into people who don’t act at all the way people should act, and then at the end you find out it’s because they’re all department store mannequins come to life or something.
“Mrs. Cott,” I said, making an effort to hang onto my nerves because I figured one of us should. “When did Tommy die?”
She looked at me and smiled. “Cheers,” she said. It sounded like jeers.
The man came out of the bathroom. He walked into the room with a slow, long-legged, easy gait, popped open the fridge and liberated a can of Pabst, and went back down the hall and into the bedroom, closing the door. If he gave us so much as a glance, he did it when I blinked.
I looked down at the drunken woman and decided to try another tack. “Mrs. Cott, Tommy had a teacher, in high school, a math teacher. Mrs. Cott, are you listening to me?” She looked up, in increments, a silly, distracted little smile on her face. “Tommy had a high school teacher. His name was Alexander Wayne—”
Vera Kjellsen was reasonably sure that Tommy Cott had had Wayne for a teacher, and I was reasonably sure that Vera Kjellsen was right, but Martha Cott seemed to have some objections. She yowled as if I had dropped something hot on her and threw her glass against the nearest wall, where it shattered into atoms and left a dark spot on the wall, and emitted a string of obscenities that would make Eddie Murphy blush. Among the tamest were, “Tha’ sonofabitch,” and “Tha’ stinkin’ cocksucker,” and sandwiched in there were, “Tha’ fucker killed my boy! Tha’ fucker killed my Tommy!”
She went to blubbering again, and wailing, and kicking up a fuss that even two or three applications of alcohol from the bottle couldn’t fix. I tried to calm her. I didn’t go over and put my arms around her or anything so unhygienic as that, but I did sort of say, “Now, now, Mrs. Cott, calm down,” and like that, but it didn’t seem to help. Just the opposite, in fact. She seemed to get more and more worked up, going so far as to haul herself off the sofa and waddle around the room, yelling in her confused, nonsensical way, knocking things over, swearing and crying over her Tommy and insisting that I leave.
It sounded like an idea to me, and I was in fact trying to get past her and over to the door without, you know, actually touching her, when the back room’s door opened and the man came out and took care of the problem. He grabbed me with one hand and grabbed the door with the other, opened the latter and threw the former into the great outdoors. I stumbled over the threshold and slammed into the wooden railing around the landing. The staircase affair was so decrepit that I was afraid my momentum would take the whole thing out, just peel it away from the side of the building and fall, taking me with it, to the ground a story below. But it didn’t.
No time for a sigh of relief, though. The big man grabbed me again before I had a chance to get either my breath or my footing. This time he flung me down the stairs. I tumbled down about half of them before I managed to grab hold of the railing and bump to a stop. The stairs were very hard and I was very sore, though not as sore as I would feel after the new bruises got a few hours to settle in.
I got to my feet and, with as much dignity as possible, went down the rest of the stairs and across the yard and into my car. Where I sat and probed for broken bones and contemplated my next move.
It was past six. I had hoped to wrap up whatever it was I had intended to accomplish here in a single afternoon and head back to Omaha, but that was premature. I still wanted to know more about Tommy Cott aka Thomas Wayne, and the forces that brought him and his “father” together. Murder, or … ? I was strongly convinced that that relationship was at the heart of the matter, the most significant of the many things invisible in these two men’s lives, and the key to the murder of Meredith Berens.
It suddenly hit me that I may have been engaging in my favorite sport, conclusion-hopping, when I assumed that Wayne and Wayne were not father and son. Couldn’t it have just as easily been that Tommy was the illegitimate son of Alexander Wayne and Martha Cott? The “Mrs.” in front of her name may have been purely decorative, then, and the old man who had taken a powder may have been fictitious.
The idea required a little massaging, since the woman was thoroughly repulsive. But perhaps she hadn’t been nearly forty years ago and, hell, someone fathered the kid, presumably in the traditional manner.
Was it Alexander Wayne? That would explain a lot.
Now I definitely had to stay over, in order to check birth records when the county courthouse opened in the morning. Luckily for me and my 50,000-mile tires, which had over 60,000 miles on them, Sioux Falls was the county seat. I even knew, from previous visits, where the courthouse was. The record might or might not reveal anything of importance, of course, but it would have to be checked.
I looked back at the block building, dirty-pink against a dirty-gray sky, and briefly considered my chances of getting anywhere with Martha Cott on the subject of the elder Wayne. It was my mention of him that had set her off. Presumably because he took her son away. How would she know that, though, unless Wayne was the boy’s father. I mean, it didn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d tell a comparative stranger—“Hello, Mrs. Cott, I’ll be taking your son to live with me now.” It definitely didn’t seem like the sort of thing you’d tell your mother. But it would be a reasonable guess, if your kid disappeared, that he had gone to be with his father. A reasonable guess, that is, unless you were Donna Berens, in which case you couldn’t possibly consider the notion.
I turned away from the building and started the engine. There was nothing more to be learned there, unless I wanted to wait until Martha Cott had gone through an intensive detox program. And then see what, if anything, was left of her mind and her memory.
I put the car in gear and pulled away.
Towns change so much in so short a time, especially when they are fast-developing communities like this one. The city had boomed in the past decade, in no small me
asure owing to the arrival of several credit-card operations drawn by the state’s liberal usury laws and nonexistent corporate-income tax. The medical profession had been doing its share, too—the three drives I had taken across town just this afternoon showed that. The two major hospitals had sprawled and spawned innumerable “specialty” practices, one on every corner by the look of it. Great stuff for the Chamber of Commerce handouts. New people come in, and new businesses, and new buildings go up while old ones come down. The population becomes increasingly mobile. And none of it makes it any easier to pick up a twenty-year-old trail.
Well, no one at the Acme Mail-Order School of Private Detection and Locksmithing ever said it would be easy. As long as I was here, I figured, I had better put my time to good use.
With some small work, I would probably be able to find out where Alexander Wayne had resided when he lived here. There may be a neighbor, a landlord, somebody who would remember him from the old days. I didn’t know what I would say to such a person, exactly, but then I seldom did. In instances like this, you mainly follow your nose and see where it leads you.
Vera Kjellsen’s directions to Martha Cott’s home had taken me past a Holiday Inn downtown. Within walking distance of the Minnehaha County Courthouse, as it happened, which was a bonus. I found my way back and checked in for the night. I had had the foresight, for once, to throw socks, underwear, a clean shirt, deodorant, toothbrush and toothpaste, and shaving necessities into a battered canvas gym bag, anticipating the overnighter, so I was fairly well set. When I got situated in the hotel I went across the street to an army surplus store I had passed on the way in, and bought a pair of corduroys to replace the chinos I had torn on my way down Martha Cott’s stairs. Then I went back to my room and showered and dressed, and came down for dinner alongside the indoor pool, where I basked in the rejuvenating vapor of chlorine and overheated pool water. After the Cott place, it was like breathing lilacs on a spring morning.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 26