Also by William J. Reynolds
The Nebraska Quotient
Moving Targets
Money Trouble
Things Invisible
The Naked Eye
Drive-By
THE NEBRASKA
QUOTIENT
WILLIAM J. REYNOLDS
Copyright © 1984 by William J. Reynolds
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by
Brash Books
PO Box 8212
Calabasas, CA 91372
www.brash-books.com
For Peg, who daily reminds me of the possibilities
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Epilogue
About the Author
CHAPTER ONE
The man with the bullet in him was lucky. Ordinarily he wouldn’t have found me up at 4:00 a.m. But that muggy July night I had been at the typewriter till past two, plodding away at The Book, and it had given me what the commercials like to call a nagging backache. A fitful hour or so in the sack did no good. So I got up and swallowed some little oblong capsules that Jen had left in the bathroom on her last whirlwind tour through my tiny one-bedroom apartment and my life. I was standing at the kitchen sink in my underwear and the dark, washing down the pills with cold, bitter coffee, trying to suck a breath of air through the screened windows over the sink.
That was perfectly pointless. On an Omaha summer night there isn’t enough actual air in the air to inflate a kid’s beach ball. There’s only heat and humidity, a perpetual sauna, a gray haze through which we slog from Independence Day through Labor Day. It’s a marvelous conversational icebreaker. It’s also a pain. My undershirt clung to my back like steaming gauze.
I slurped at the coffee, wished my backache away and listened to the traffic on the Radial whispering like lovers in the hot, moist darkness. The Northwest Radial Highway isn’t much of a highway really, but it slices down from the extreme northwestern end of Omaha and provides a jagged but quick shot to Cuming Street. From there it’s downtown, the I–80 and I–29 interchanges, then anyplace. Everyone in Omaha is on his way to anyplace. There’s a lot of traffic on the Radial, even at four in the morning.
Above the incessant wavelike rolling of rubber on asphalt I heard another, sharper sound from the small living room at the front of the apartment. I half listened for that sound all summer, every summer, for all the summers I lived there. Forty-fifth and Decatur isn’t the worst neighborhood in town, but it certainly isn’t the best. I figured that some sultry night when I left the terrace doors open in a futile attempt to coax some circulation through the place, someone would realize that screen doors, even when locked, offer about as much resistance to a break-in as smoke. This seemed to be the night: something clumsier and heavier than the neighborhood tomcat was climbing over the aluminum rail and onto the postage-stamp-sized slab of concrete my imaginative landlord called a terrace.
My eyes were adjusted to the dark, so I left the lights out and eased into the living room. Outside was enough of a moon to turn the sky a fuzzy, funny blue, and I could see a man, a very large man, silhouetted against that backdrop. He was making one hell of a racket getting up over the rail and onto the terrace, though it should have been an easy climb for someone his height—after all, it was only a second-floor apartment. His clumsy movements, grunting efforts and heavy breathing gave me the idea he was drunk or strung out or crazy or something.
I grabbed an electric steam iron from the board near my hip, just in case I needed a blunt instrument.
He tried the latch on the screen, found it locked, and hesitated.
Blood thudded in my ears like Clydesdales’ hoofbeats. I didn’t move, didn’t even breathe. In the pitch-blackness of the apartment I knew I was invisible to him. That could come in handy.
Then he ripped through the screens the way wet garbage rips through a paper bag. I had my mighty iron in striking position, but I didn’t need it. He wasn’t breaking through the screens, he was collapsing through them, ending belly-up on the floor, where he remained, sprawled, still.
I waited: nothing. Finally I put on a light.
He lay in a tangle of ruined wire netting. I stared down at him, recognizing without pleasure the big Semitic face that went so well atop the big lumpy body. His name was Morris Copel. A little more than six years earlier he had been my partner. I hadn’t seen him in that time, not since he had skipped town and left me with nothing but an empty office three months past-due on the rent.
Without setting down my iron I knelt to examine him. The summer suit he wore was old and cheap and ill-fitting. And soaking wet, as if he’d swum up the side of the building. It would take a lot of skillful pressing to put it back into anywhere near good shape. And that would be a wasted effort, because most of the left side of the coat was soaked through with sticky, shiny, red-black blood that leaked uncontrollably from his shoulder.
Besides putting a slug in him, someone with some expertise had also worked him over very conscientiously. His face—no work of art to begin with, being marred by acne scars and having a rough, lumpish look, like unsmoothed modeling clay—was a conglomeration of welts, bruises and lacerations. More than he’d’ve picked up going headfirst through a dozen cheap screen doors. More blood trickled from the edges of his wide, fleshy mouth than his split lip could account for. I thought he was surely dead. But the lead-colored eyes staring blankly at my ceiling registered when I crossed their field of focus. Copel worked his wrecked lips. A week or so later he managed my name:
“Nebraska …”
There was a significant gurgle on the last syllable. I felt a wash of guilt for all the hatred and all the times I had wished him dead. He was nearly there now, and he wouldn’t need a wish from me to help him along. “Damn you, Copel,” I murmured fervently. “You’ve finally done it.”
He hadn’t done it yet, though. His right hand stirred. I hefted my impromptu weapon a little to draw attention to it, to let him know that if he pulled a shootin’ iron my steam model would press his ugly face into the floorboards, regardless of his delicate condition. But instead he reached into the waistband of his sopping pants, down into his crotch, and dragged out a creased and crumpled brown letter-sized envelope, damp with humidity and the soaking he’d undergone and his perspiration and Christ knows what else. He pressed the envelope into my free fist. Then his arm fell back to the floor, as if the wire holding it had been cut. It fell hard, heavily, and something precariously balanced in the kitchen sink slipped with a thunk.
That thunk, I reflected, is the period they put at the end of your life.
Not too profound, I admit, but it was late. And the sentiment was valid enough, for with that thunk the selfness of him evaporated. Just like that. One minute—one second, one fraction of a second—a man; the next, a stiff. Looks the same, but takes on the vacant melancholy a home
acquires when you close the door on it for the last time and drive away. A home becomes a house, a man becomes a stiff.
My throat was dry. I went back to the kitchen and found a bottle of root beer, cut my finger trying to unscrew the convenient unscrewable cap, swore colorfully, ripped the cap off with a pliers and fixed my drink. Sucking on an ice cube, I flipped on the fluorescent doughnut over the sink and looked at the brown envelope. I didn’t care much for the thought of where it had recently been, but I couldn’t fault Copel’s logic: not too many men will frisk you very enthusiastically in, shall we say, the pelvic region. That Copel kept his little envelope through all he’d obviously gone through was sufficient proof of that.
The envelope was unmarked and unsealed, but dampness caused the flap to stick unevenly. I peeled it back and slipped out the contents: four strips of color negatives, four frames per strip, and two larger unmounted color transparencies, all glued together by humidity. I separated them and, in succession, held them to the light.
They were of a woman. She was young—late twenties, early thirties—nice-looking and blond. Blond all over. They were that sort of pictures. Feeling a lot like a 37-year-old dirty old man, I rummaged for and found an ancient chipped magnifying glass with which to study them.
From a technical standpoint they were awful—and that’s being kind. They were amateurish nudie shots is all, harshly lighted with a flash rather than a spotlamp, snapped in somebody’s living room rather than a studio. Hopelessly inept. I turned my attention to the blonde.
She wore only high heels and a worried expression. She displayed herself. She writhed on thick carpeting—blue, if you care—in what was probably not passion. She bent over, facing away from the lens, adjusting the strap of one shoe. Eyes closed, she caressed herself disingenuously. She exhibited herself in a lackluster fashion more pathetic than erotic. And the invading eye of the camera observed, unsympathetically, and recorded.
Posing hadn’t been the blonde’s idea. While she was beautiful enough for it—small-breasted, long-limbed, golden—she made no attempt at simulating the abandon, the idyllic postures affected by the girls in the slick men’s magazines. That was evidence enough of her unwillingness, I thought, but there was more—there was the look in her eyes, a look very much like the scared, sharp gaze of wild animals caught at night, surprised in the white glare of automatic flash cameras. Everything about the pictures suggested that the blonde was afraid not to appear in them, and that made them all the more repulsive—or, I suppose, titillating, depending on your persuasions.
And these even had an extra measure of degradation that I was certain increased their market value: the image of a man. He didn’t participate; he merely stood, fully clothed, his back to the camera, in each of the frames. Watching what the woman did—or forcing her, by his presence, to do it?—robbing her of any pretension to artistry, making her naked rather than nude, making her an object.
These were dirty pictures in any number of senses.
I studied the woman’s face carefully, trying to decode the psychedelic wash of jumbled colors, then, reluctantly, checked the unmounted slides. I was afraid of that: I knew her.
Rather, I recognized her, knew her only slightly and from long ago. Her name was Adrian Mallory, and she was the daughter of the Honorable Daniel G. Mallory, senior U.S. senator from the state of Nebraska. I had worked for Mallory briefly, back when I was but a callow political science student at Omaha U., now the University of Nebraska at Omaha. That was some eighteen years ago, when state senator Mallory had decided the political climate was conducive to taking his liberal ideas from the unicameral, where they were in danger of dying from loneliness, to a national setting. He was right. Though the state is, or is thought of as, a typical Midwestern conservative stronghold, Mallory was saying all the sorts of things that people—particularly young, idealistic people like me—wanted to hear in the early 1960s. Better, he was shrewd enough to get in and shrewd enough to stay in even when the political winds shifted, as they had. Now standing for his fourth term, Mallory was considered only a slight favorite: the New Right or somebody had “targeted” him for defeat that year. It was shaping up to be a tough campaign, but so was his first.
I knew Adrian Mallory because my role on Mallory’s staff during that first race pretty much boiled down to keeping her name out of the press. That was a full-time job. Left to herself, the little monster would’ve been in the news more than her old man. She was forever getting picked up on a liquor violation, swiping something worthless out of a Ben Franklin’s, taking off for Mexico with a bubbleheaded boyfriend and getting about as far as Lincoln, setting fire to a schoolmate’s locker or some damn other thing. I didn’t much like the job of picking up after her, of sweet-talking shop owners and principals and harried cops into chalking it up to youthful exuberance. But I liked Mallory and what he represented, so when he took me down to the corner and bought me a couple beers and told me how tough it was for poor little Adrian, growing up without a mommy and hardly a daddy, and said he’d consider it a personal favor if I’d do what I could to see they didn’t work the poor sweet baby over too badly—well, you get the picture. I bought it like a used car, put up with it until Mallory was safely elected, then cut out and made it somebody else’s headache. And a headache it surely was for that somebody, thanks to Adrian’s uncanny knack for acquiring the wrong sort of friends.
I hadn’t seen her in eleven or twelve years and hadn’t even heard about her for four or five, but it looked like she hadn’t lost the knack.
It also looked like I had more in my hand than dirty pictures. Dan Mallory was an important man in the party, a standard-bearer, as they say, and there was some talk of standing him for vice president the next time out. How many points in his career would be better made for blackmail?
I wiped the pictures dry, put them back in their envelope, put the envelope under the Rubbermaid cutlery tray in a drawer in the sink cabinet. Then I went back to the living room to see if Copel was comfortable.
He was about as comfortable as you get. I searched him and came up with the usual assortment of stuff, including a phonied P.I.’s permit and an expired Conoco card. Nothing else, except damp lint. Whatever brought him to me, whatever he was involved in, whatever he might have had to say would go unsaid—unless the woman in his pictures, however they entered into things, was talkative. As I hoped she’d be: although I was trying hard to make my living as a free-lance writer, the magazines hadn’t been overwhelmingly generous lately. I had a few checks “in the mail,” as the litany goes, but in the meantime I figured it was a good idea to swallow the principles that said I was now a writer, no longer a private investigator, and see if Adrian Mallory could be convinced that she needed my incomparable professional services. With the end of the month approaching, I knew my landlord would appreciate the effort.
But first there was the little matter of the corpse in my living room, and the Omaha Police Division.
OPD is, by and large, made up of a pretty good sort of cop in a city just big enough to be bitchy, a city with more than its share, per capita, of the kinds of inhabitants that Chambers of Commerce don’t brag about. I’d been a private detective, a newspaper reporter, a security cop and a few other things in Omaha, and I never had too much trouble with OPD, even when I wouldn’t blame them for giving me some. Still, you’ve got to expect even the most easygoing of cops to have a question or two to bounce your way when you call at 4:30 in the morning to have them come collect a body from your living room floor. In fact, under those circumstances, things can get pretty uncomfortable for you pretty fast. Fortunately, it turned out that I knew the homicide detective in charge fairly well, from the old days.
His name was Ben Oberon, he was maybe forty-five years old and he comported himself gingerly, as if perpetually afraid you were going to try to sell him something. Lieutenant Oberon was tall and thin—skinny, more accurately—but his skin was curiously
loose and baggy, fitting him about as well as his clothes usually did. Tonight he wore a gray three-piece number that he must have been melting in. The point of his tie peeked from below his lowest vest-button.
We shook hands.
“It’s been a while,” said Oberon. “I was a little surprised when the call came in, in fact. I thought I’d heard you’re out of the business.”
“More or less. But in this case I’m strictly the innocent bystander.” I pointed with my chin at the body on the floor not four feet from us. “Remember him?”
Oberon went over and knelt near Copel. At about that time the coroner’s people started infiltrating the cramped room. I imagined the mercury climbing another quarter-inch or more.
“Not pretty,” Oberon said blandly. “Your partner, isn’t he? Now, what was that name?—Cohen? Coppel?”
“Copel. Morris. And he was my partner—with emphasis on the ‘was.’ ”
Oberon’s fingers tested the dampness of Copel’s lapels, as if he were thinking of buying the suit, but his face was aimed at me. His eyebrows went up and his mouth went down, bracketed by flabby parentheses, but he said only, “Yeah?”
“Yeah.” I explained the bit: that I knew Copel slightly when we were both rent-a-cops with Greater Omaha Security Service. That he seemed all right, so I listened when he started talking about wanting to set up a little agency of his own. I was looking for something else, too, and while neither of us alone had enough of a bankroll to do anything, together we could just about swing it.
The catch was, Copel had come into his bankroll by dint of some rather foolhardy arrangements with local representatives of Cosa Nostra. “First thing you know,” I told Oberon, “I come to the office one morning to find that everything except the roaches in the john has been cleared out. Presumably in lieu of payments on something. Copel’s gone too.”
Oberon pulled a sympathetic face.
The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1) Page 1