I continued my circuit. Nothing to the sofabed but coarse sheets. A cheap clock radio on the windowsill near the bed had the correct time. On the wall near the door was a grime-caked rotary telephone, and next to it was one of those laminated cards on which messages can be written in crayon and wiped away. Superimposed on the remnants of old messages, one remained in a greasy scrawl:
CRZ AL
GEO BAR
7TH 10:30
I took out my notepad and copied it line for line, letter for letter.
If the last line referred to the seventh of July, it, plus the newspaper in the chair, plus what Marcie had told me, indicated that Eddie Bell had indeed disappeared—from this apartment, at least—a little less than two weeks ago. I put away my pad and went on with the breaking and entering.
Behind an unpainted door on which was tacked a poster of John Lennon with orange and purple swirls in his glasses instead of lenses, was a narrow, shallow closet. Two pairs of blue jeans hung on wire hangers alongside three short-sleeved sport shirts. Two empty hangers hung there also, waiting. At the back of the closet was a four-drawer cardboard dresser; it held some T-shirts, underwear, one necktie and a rubber-banded bundle of papers—letters from his sister, birth certificate, draft card and the like. On the closet’s overhead shelf was a battered brown suitcase. I took it down, put it on the bed and opened it.
It held a large Hush Puppies box and a Minolta 35mm camera, with flash, in a case.
The box contained a few dozens strips of negatives, fifteen or twenty prints, and a folded sheet of lined paper on which someone had laboriously printed the names and addresses of what sounded like sex shops, adult-book stores and theatres.
I had a sudden, if in retrospect obvious, gestalt, and excitedly began holding the color negatives to the light of the dirty windows. They were pictures of the sort Adrian Mallory had posed for. That, then, had to be the game: Eddie Bell was in the dirty-picture business. He apparently had several women besides Adrian posing for him—whether they cooperated as reluctantly as Adrian I couldn’t say—and, judging by the list in the box, hawked the finished product to local dealers. The prints were perhaps samples—or favorites that Bell kept for his own use. Photos of Adrian were not to be found, either as prints or negatives.
Which didn’t mean none had ever been there. I reminded myself yet again that Copel had had a key to this joint. I couldn’t assume he hadn’t been here before me—though I’d come across nothing that suggested the place had been disturbed since its tenant left it—hadn’t found the photos of Adrian, hadn’t taken them. In fact, given the events of the previous night, it seemed possible that Copel had done just that.
But why? What was he doing with them—or going to do with them before his plans got changed? And who changed those plans for him, and why?
I was learning something about this investigation: no matter how many different ways I found of phrasing the same old questions, no answers jumped out at me.
The photos went back into the box. I picked up the camera and peeled the case away from it. It was loaded. I took some shots of the inside of the lens cap to finish the roll, unloaded the camera, then replaced it in its case. I put the camera back into the suitcase, put the suitcase, now lighter by the weight of the shoebox, back into the closet.
Shutting the closet door, I leaned against it and thought a moment. There was something out of synch here, something, or things, that didn’t seem to fit together properly. I couldn’t get a handle on it, so, nettling though it was, I let it go and left.
My girlfriend’s music was still playing down the hall, but I saw no sign of her as I left the apartment, weaved down the creaking stairs and through the ancient odors, and on out onto the steaming pavement. There was no sign, either, of the bulldog: perhaps the shrill woman made good on her threat. I locked the shoebox in the Chevy’s trunk, started the car and went looking for a phone booth. There had been no telephone directory at Bell’s. A certain irony there, I thought.
Neither was there one in the first booth I tried. The second booth lacked a phone, but the book was intact. I checked the taverns listed in the Yellow Pages: no George’s Bar or any other name that resembled the geo bar scribbled on Bell’s wall.
I went back to the car and dug out the prints and address sheet. The sheet listed seven establishments, all with names like The Body Shop and Eros and Studio 69. Most were located in a depressed slice of downtown, not far from where I was. I put the car in a public lot—it was after five so the meter was free, which is one of those little things that just impress the hell out of clients—and with the prints and the list in my pocket hiked over to the nearest address, a “XXX-Rated” theatre called Studio 69.
Of course, it wasn’t a true theatre. When I was a kid, it was the best barber shop on Capitol Street. Now its big window was whitewashed over and festooned with sophisticated marketing slogans like NONSTOP HOT ACTION and ADULT ENTERTAINMENT and SEXPLICIT BOOKS ’N’ MAGAZINES.
I went in nevertheless.
The place was divided into halves. The first half, the “lobby,” sold the promised sexplicit books ’n’ magazines, as well as 8mm and Super-8 films and still photographs. The photographs were attractively displayed in two cardboard boxes atop an uncertain-looking card table to which was taped a handwritten sign: $2.00 EA. Beyond the table was a windowless door through which came amplified moans and the steady click-click-click of a projector. The “theatre.”
A fat old man with jet-black hair on his head and gray hair on his arms and neck, sitting in a chair tilted almost to the point of no return, watched the place. He was reading a magazine whose cover lines were in Swedish. Two other men—one probably underage, the other about my age—browsed through magazines and books, respectively. There was no telling how many, if any, the theatre held.
“Dollar to look, five dollars for the movie,” the fat man recited without looking up from his literature. I gave him a buck, which he deposited in a strongbox on the cobwebbed radiator next to his chair. When he reached across I saw the butt of a gun under the tail of his untucked sport shirt.
“You seen Eddie lately?” I asked casually.
He looked sourly at me. “I don’t know you.”
“Of course you don’t. Eddie always handles this end of the business.”
The fat man went back to his magazine.
I leaned over him. He smelled of bay rum and old sweat. “Look,” I said in a confidential tone. “There’s no problem. Eddie—Eddie Bell—he’s my partner. We make pictures, y’know, like those over there. Like these here.” I took the prints from my coat and spread them out for him like playing cards.
He didn’t say anything, didn’t even move, except for the eyes. They swiveled like ball bearings in oil, away from the naked adolescents on tandem bikes and toward the pictures of naked women posing alone and in pairs. His pupils dilated. A man who loves his work, I thought.
“Anyhow,” I was saying, “I take care of the … creative side”—he looked up and I winked—“and Eddie takes care of the business side. Only Eddie skipped out on me, and he owes me some money. So I’m looking for him. I got his list of contacts and this place is on it. I figure he’s probably still selling our stuff—my stuff—and pocketing my share, too. Maybe he’s been by.”
“Maybe he has,” said the old guy. “I’m not the boss here.”
“Who is the boss here?”
He went back to the magazine.
I put away the photos and took out my wallet. He eyed it furtively over the top of his reading, then locked his baby blues resolutely onto the page, like a bluenose avoiding the near occasion of sin. Sort of.
Sighing, I pocketed the wallet. “You mind if I look through those boxes to see if there’s any of my stuff there?”
“You paid your dollar,” he said, wetting a pudgy forefinger to turn a page.
So I waded through a coupl
e million dirty pictures. Black-and-white, color, instant, prints, competent, hopeless, boring, titillating, disgusting. In the grand scheme of things I suppose they averaged out to be pretty tame. Still, I felt vaguely soiled by the time I finished sifting through the second box. I couldn’t tell you if Eddie Bell’s craftsmanship was represented. I didn’t give a damn about that except insofar as Adrian’s pictures might’ve been concerned. In that place, at least, they weren’t.
However, I had been hired not to find pictures of Adrian, but the man who took them. I grabbed a half-dozen prints at random and took them over to the jolly old fat man.
“He’s been here, all right, the bastard,” I said, waving the pictures.
“Two dollars apiece,” the fat man said lethargically.
“Sure, why not? I’ll take it out of that crook’s hide when I find him.” I handed over a bill.
“Don’t you got it exact?” he complained.
“Just the twenty.”
Annoyed, he reached for the strongbox.
“Say, you don’t happen to know a guy named Morris Copel, do you? Might’ve been Copel who brought in the pictures.”
The old guy gave me a five and four ones—my browsing fee generously returned on the purchase—that looked like they’d been printed during the first week of the Second World War and carried in someone’s shoe since then. “I told you,” he said gruffly, “I only work here. I don’t know nobody and I don’t know nothing.” Up went the magazine like a drawbridge.
I pocketed my change and left.
It was still early—about six-thirty—and the next place on my list was only a few blocks over. I deposited my purchase in a blue-and-white Keep Omaha Beautiful receptacle and walked up Fifteenth Street.
In the next couple of hours I repeated my stellar performance six more times—once in each place on Bell’s list, places like the X-tacy Connection and The Retreat, places with bookstores or theatres or peepshows in the back, massage parlors and God knows what all else upstairs or downstairs. I came away feeling very grimy, very tired, and not very knowledgeable. My reception in each establishment was about the same as it had been in the first, as were my results: zip. A curious thing, however: in none of the shops did I come across any photos of Adrian, though I did spot copies of most of the prints I took from Bell’s, as well as some others that I was certain, judging by the style—if that’s the word—Bell took. The absence of Adrian Mallory’s shocking pink epidermis in any of Omaha’s more sordid pleasure palaces only reaffirmed my original belief that the photographer had in mind another purpose—namely, blackmail, either of the woman or, more likely, her father.
Which did me a lot of good. I hadn’t turned up anything that Adrian didn’t already know when she tossed me out on my ear that afternoon. There existed the slim possibility that, if I returned and told her I knew now pretty specifically what her situation was, she’d break down and let me try to help her figure a way out of it. But was it worth the effort?
Besides, I reminded myself, I had a client, one to whom I had so far nothing to report. In fairness to the one picking up the bills, I decided, I should concentrate on that matter and give the other one a rest.
What, then, to do about Eddie Bell, who seemed to have vanished off the face of the earth, or at least out of that burg? My best next step appeared to be one that would have been my first step if circumstances had been different. I decided to drop in on OPD and see what they could tell me about Bell. There were other fish in the sea—or on the force—besides Oberon, and at this stage of the operation no one needed to know of the connection between Bell and Copel. I remembered a sergeant in Missing Persons, Grier, who used to make a habit of staying late. Since I was already downtown, I’d see if I could catch him.
By now the shadows would’ve been getting long—if only there were any shadows. The peculiar thing about these humid days is that, bright as they are, there isn’t really much in the way of sunshine. Plenty of heat, however. That, absorbed all day by the asphalt, came up through the soles of my shoes as I crossed the parking lot under those pinkish gray skies.
Only a couple cars besides mine were left in the lot. I paid no attention until, when I was perhaps twenty-five feet from the Chevy, doors opened on a dark green Fairmont parked two slots down on the opposite side of my car. All the little warning lights and buzzers in my head went off at once. Two very large, solid, imposing types unfolded themselves from the Ford.
I checked the impulse to run. The two would be on me before I reached the Chevy, if I chose to run that way. And if I ran in the opposite direction, I had little doubt that they were prepared to pursue me—about as much doubt as I had that they could catch me. I know a little karate that a guy in the service showed me, enough to put on a show and, usually, scare off someone who’s more bluff than backbone. Neither of these two trees seemed to fit that category.
My ultimate course of action—to keep walking as if I hadn’t noticed them—might appear very brave. In actuality, it was the only option left.
Lew Archer or Philip Marlowe or some other high-powered sleuth would by now be surreptitiously adjusting their clothing in order to quickly draw their .45s or whatever, and drill the opposition into submission. Me, I don’t like guns much. They smell. They’re greasy. They make a lot of noise. People who hang around them seem to end up with new orifices in them. Oh, I know my way around them okay—I carried all sorts of big, bad things in Vietnam—and I own a couple handguns. Had one with me now, in fact. Locked safely away in the glove box of the Chevy.
I was armed only with my sunny disposition.
And so I walked.
The car keys were already in my right hand. I furtively manipulated them so that two jutted out between the first and second fingers of my fist, two between the second and third.
One of the imposing men—a big, square black man who looked like he could play for Nebraska—stayed close to their Ford. The other—who but for color might have been the first’s brother—rounded the front of my car, not accidentally putting himself between it and me.
I made myself stroll as if he weren’t there. I heard the blood in my ears, imagined I felt the adrenaline being dumped into my system, fought to keep my knees solid.
And I walked.
At a distance of about eight feet the white man held up a hand the size of a frying pan. “Are you the owner of this car?”
I stopped and stared him down. It’s like they tell you about dogs: don’t show your fear. It’s all very psychological and stuff, and probably more effective if your legs aren’t made of Silly Putty.
“Me and the Omaha National,” I said—casually, I think. “Why? You want to buy it?”
He ignored that and said, over his shoulder, to his companion, “It’s him. Call the Lieutenant.” He rotated his two hundred pounds back toward me as he reached into his coat pocket. He flashed the badge. “Oberon wants you.”
My stomach unknotted and turned nauseated on the excess of unused energy it now had to absorb. “Christ,” I breathed fervently. “Don’t any of you guys wear uniforms anymore?” I took a couple breaths. “What’s Oberon’s problem? What’s so hellfire important he couldn’t’ve left a message on my machine?”
“I wouldn’t know. The word just came over the air that we should keep an eye out for this vehicle”—he gestured vaguely toward the Chevy—“because Oberon wanted to talk to its owner. My partner and me were just coming back from a call when we spotted it here. We figured you’d come back to it pretty soon, since ’most everything closes down here at night.” He shrugged halfheartedly. “Sorry if we upset you.”
“Next time try a note on the windshield, okay?”
The other one came out of the unmarked car. “I talked to Oberon. He wants to see the gentleman right now.”
“We’ll run you over there, sir,” my cop said preemptively.
“Thanks, but it’s j
ust not as thrilling when you don’t have the bells and whistles and the little gum machine on top. Besides, it’s on my way anyway.”
He was unconvinced.
“Look, if I bolt, Oberon’ll just send you guys looking for me again, right? Give me a little credit. Besides, there’s no charge against me; I’m not under arrest—or am I?”
They talked it over between them with their eyes, the way people who work together a great deal can. “We’ll tag after him,” the black cop said.
“Wonderful,” I said, “a police escort.”
CHAPTER FIVE
OPD Walnut Hill head-quarters on Fortieth Street is a graceless block of dark red brick, wired-glass windows and steel doors, all half hidden by towering walnut trees. It was perhaps a ten-minute jaunt from where I was, and my official chaperones dogged me the whole distance. Kids were still out—it was only about nine, even if my body thought it was midnight—and they played on bikes and skateboards in the street, but listlessly, wilted by the heat. I parked a half-block from the station and, under the watchful eyes of my guardian angels, negotiated the buckling sidewalk.
Here was none of the noise, commotion, drama and glamour of a big city’s—or a television series’—precinct house. Walnut Hill, at least at that time of day, reminded you more of a dilapidated office building, or of a business that was about to go under for the second, maybe third, time. Perhaps a half-dozen people loitered in the halls. The place was almost as exciting as the county morgue at 2 A.M.
The desk sergeant nodded knowingly when I told him my name and my business. He had me sign in, then gave me a visitor’s tag and directions to Oberon’s office.
Cubicle, more like it. It was one of those partitioned affairs, no doors, pressed-wood walls that start a foot above the floor and come to about nose level and are topped off with eight inches or so of frosted glass. Oberon’s cubicle, at the end of a narrow, dusty corridor lined with identical offices, was about as roomy as a good-sized broom closet. Into it was crammed a steel desk, a desk chair, visitor’s chair, coat rack, chipped green two-drawer file and two of those brown cardboard boxes you use when you’ve filled your cabinet. And, of course, Oberon. All the trappings of power.
The Nebraska Quotient (A Nebraska Mystery Book 1) Page 5