—
With the rush of affluent tourists in the 1960’s, the mountain West had suffered a blight of shoddy motels, built, like mining camp saloons and whorehouses, strictly for profit. Cheap and fragile lodgings, buildings just waiting for the rumor of another strike to collapse into permanent vacancy and decrepitude, instant ghost towns, as frail as dead neon signs.
But the Riverfront Motor Inn had obviously been designed in protest, in the vague hope of permanent opulence. The carpets were thicker and the furnishings ached to be tasteful, but the cedar shakes and natural wood and stone trim covered the same old plywood and profit motive. When credit cards slipped through their imprinters, they came out shaved, like crooked dice. The dining room had an elegant menu; the bar, fancy drinks; but the food was tasteless and the liquor spurted niggardly from a speed gun. They did a fine business in tourists, but the local people, except for lovers on an illicit tryst, stayed away.
Rumors persisted, too, that the Riverfront had been built with Syndicate money and was used to wash money skimmed from the gambling tables of Nevada, rumors aided and abetted by the fact that a local Italian, Nickie DeGrumo, had returned from World War II with an Italian bride from New Jersey, an ugly, hawk-faced woman who came West with money from unidentified sources, money that had started him in the bar business that had culminated in the Riverfront Motor Inn complex. This in spite of the fact that everybody in town knew him to be the worst sort of fool about business, the sort who leapt into each new venture at exactly the wrong time and wrong way. He built a drive-in movie just in time to be ruined by television, a pizza place that lasted a year before the franchised pizza companies moved into town, and a putt-putt golf course so easy that even the children were bored with it. He bought a fleet of soft-icecream trucks before the machinery was perfected, and he only missed an Edsel dealership because his wife refused him the money.
It became apparent that she and a series of cousins from the East ran the business, that Nickie was just a name on the liquor license, a local front tethered by a small allowance like a child. He was the only bar owner in town who never set up a round of drinks when he visited other bars, and his the only bar in Meriwether that never bought its regular patrons a drink. Like Simon, Nickie always seemed to have a drink in his hand that somebody else had bought. Around town he was known for being slow with his wallet but quick with his mouth. “I’ll get the next round, boys,” he’d say, but he so seldom did that the drinkers around town tagged him Old Next Round, and called him so behind his back and to his carefully smiling face.
—
Just after midnight, I parked in the nearly empty lot next to the dining room and bar, then poked around the few cars until I found one with an MSC faculty sticker, a battered blue Ford station wagon, paint so faded that it didn’t even glisten in the rain, looking more abandoned than parked, listing on ruined springs like a tired horse, but it was registered to Elton and Martha Crider, so I opened the hood and lifted the rotor out of the distributor, slipped it into my pocket, then wandered into the Riverfront lobby—tired, lonesome, sodden as a drowned cat.
The building was fairly new but badly maintained. The ornate metal handles of the double doors showed the effects of pushing hands, the red carpet the marks of passing feet, and the night clerk, in spite of his razor cut and nifty gold blazer, had the sharp feral face of a cornered rat. His beady eyes, which checked the empty lobby around me, weren’t happy; he had lost his last job because I had bribed a look at his guest register, then made a large fuss when I kicked down a room door to take pictures.
“I’m sorry, sir, but all our rooms are taken,” he said in a new voice, warm and rich, the split ends trimmed. Then he glanced around the lobby once more, and added in his old voice, “Get the fuck outa here, Milo.”
I bared my fangs; he subsided into a whine.
“Any trouble, man, I call the law.”
I had stopped to consider what sort of trouble to give him, when Nickie came bouncing out of the darkened dining room. Nickie bounced because he affected expensive cowboy boots, but even with low walking heels, his heels bounced and his soles flapped against the carpet. On a hard surfaced floor, Nickie’s walk sounded like slow ironic applause.
“Milo, Milo,” he greeted me, glad hand extended and inane smile pasted on his face. “How’s the boy, Milo? How you been? It’s been too long. What’s happening? You’re looking great. Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”
I shook his hand and mumbled something before he flayed me with clichés.
“Business or pleasure? Business or pleasure?” he asked, pumping my hand. His sun-lamp tan failed to cover the drinker’s flush of his face, just as the expensively tailored Western jacket refused to drape his paunch. His thick black hair hadn’t grayed, but it looked painted on his round head.
“A drink,” I answered, trying to move away from him, but he followed me toward the bar.
“Let me buy you the first one,” he said.
“That’s okay, Nickie. You got the last one. I’ll get this one.”
“Sure, Milo,” he said, clapping to a halt. “I’ll get the next one.” His face colored—anger, perhaps, or shame—then he looked very tired and gray when the flush faded, standing in his wife’s lobby like a clown whose antics have failed to cheer the crowd, and rubbing his chest beneath his string tie.
“Sure,” he said again, trying to smile.
“Vonda Kay tending bar?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“Is Vonda Kay tending bar?”
“Oh, yeah.”
“I’ll tell her the first one is on you,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. “You do that.” A hard nervous edge sharpened his voice, as if he wanted to pick a fight with me, which would have been funny if it hadn’t been sad.
“Thanks,” I said, ignoring his uneasiness, then walked into the dimly lighted bar.
Like the parking lot, it was nearly empty. Sunday night was for hard-core drinkers, and they didn’t care for the California cocktail lounge décor of the Riverfront. The prices were too high for the serious drinker anyway. Their clientele that night was made up of occasional drinkers and refugees from love. In a corner booth, a drunken foursome mauled each other at random, two middle-aged men waxing prosperous, two middle-aged women waning, chipping and putting and hacking at lust, replacing divots in their chests. Another couple sat at the rear of the lounge, holding hands across the table and whispering seriously above watery drinks—a younger couple, who, when they troubled to glance around the empty room, did so with lovers’ disdain.
Vonda Kay, who had the biggest breasts and the sweetest disposition west of the Big Muddy, stood behind the bar as peacefully as a saint, working slowly at her nails, a serene smile lighting her face. Her only bar customer sat hunched on a stool, as lonely and wasted as a man who has just discovered how bleak the shank of his evening. When he raised his glass to his mouth, his Adam’s apple rose, then fell with the trickle of whiskey.
Elton Crider, I guessed—taller but as angular as his wife. He might have been her brother, but her bones were hickory, his rubber.
When I stepped up to the bar and ordered a Canadian ditch from Vonda Kay, the tall man turned toward me with a bright smile as phony as that of a trained horse, a forced grin so desperate that it went beyond the sexual domain, into that desert where any sort of human contact—the touching of fingers over coins, shoulders briefly wedged in a doorway—stood like a distant, shimmering oasis, the burning green toward which he loped, dry and sore-footed.
He should have been looking at Vonda Kay, who, if she was between boyfriends and if she felt sorry for a man, was the most comfortable one-night stand in town, as warm as freshly baked bread, as loving as a puppy. But it seemed obvious that he wanted something more, something spiritual and clean as a blue flame. An undying love, perhaps, a consummation of souls. Feeling sadder than I wanted to be, I remembered his wife framed in the wan light, twisting the frayed cord.
; Vonda Kay handed me the drink and heaved her breasts on the edge of the bar like a man loading sacked feed. She took my hand in hers, said kindly, “Long time no see, lover.”
When it rains, it pours, just like they say. I wished there were a mirror over the bar so I could look at my face to see if it was bright with love or lust or desperation. But there was no mirror, just Vonda Kay’s shining eyes.
“How’re you doing, lady?”
“Without, Milo, without,” she murmured. “I’ve just worn out another occupation.”
“What this time?”
“Rock-’n’-roll singers.”
“Where the hell did you find a rock-’n’-roll singer?”
“Where the hell do I find anybody?” she said, glancing around the bar.
“What’s next?”
“Old friends, I hope.”
“All right,” I said. Even a man of stone can be tempted to get out of the rain. “You’re on, lady.” As we laughed together the tall man down the bar coughed loudly. “Who’s your customer?” I asked.
“Don’t really know, Milo. Comes in now and again and drinks till closing time. Never says much. What happened to your face? Looks like somebody slapped you good. Now, who would do a thing like that?” she said, teasing, touching my cheek with her hand.
“A chance encounter,” I said, “in a dark alley.”
“Sure.”
“What’s he do?” I asked, nodding toward her customer.
“Don’t know. Somebody said he teaches out at the college.”
“Sure,” I said loudly, “I thought I knew him.” Then turning down the bar: “Aren’t you Professor Crider?”
He nodded hesitantly, as if he didn’t want me to know, then grinned so widely that I thought he was about to whinny.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t seem to remember your name.”
“Milodragovitch. We met at a party a few years back,” I said. He looked confused, like a man who had good reason to remember every party. “Can’t remember where, though. I remember talking to you. Aren’t you from the South?”
“Tennessee,” he offered slowly.
“Right. Didn’t we talk about Nashville and the Opry? I told you about the time when I was stationed at Fort Bragg and a bunch of us drove over to see the Opry but got so drunk in the Orchid Lounge or whatever that place is called that we never made the show.”
“You did?” he asked, wanting to believe, to establish contact even with my lie. “Must have blanked it. I did go to school in Nashville—Vanderbilt—but we never went to Ryman except to watch the rednecks queue up in the afternoon…”
“Right,” I interrupted. “You told me about the Jesus Christ fans and the women standing there in flats, holding their high-heels in one hand and a drumstick in the other.”
“That’s right. How did you know that?”
“You told me, remember?” Actually, it came from my second wife’s first husband.
“Oh…yes…I seem to have some faint memory…certainly. It was at Frank Lathrop’s spring bash two summers ago. Of course. Oh Lord, was I loaded that day. That punch he made, my God,” he wailed, gleefully recalling the day, locking the false memory into his mind so tightly that I’d have trouble convincing him it was a lie.
“That’s right,” I said, wondering who Frank Lathrop might be.
“Oh Lord, Ryman Hall. I haven’t thought about it in years. Of course, I never cared much for hillbilly music, or Country and Western, or whatever silly name it goes by today. Always seemed too shrill to me. And distressingly mawkish…”
He went on about Country music, now that we had shared experiences, occasionally shifting his hips on the red stool as if he were about to slide gracefully across the three that separated such good old friends. His accent was Southern-educated, genteel and effete, so languid that he might have brushed his teeth with sorghum molasses, but beneath it rang the sharp bite of a nasal hill accent, so much like his wife’s that he sounded like her echo, and it crept under his assumed accent like a whining hound beneath a ratty porch. He was so damned snobbish about Country music, holding it up in such contempt, wrinkling his long nose as if he held a dirty diaper, that even though I wanted to pump him about Raymond Duffy, I nearly started to argue with him. So I bought a round of drinks instead, invited him to the stool next to me, hoping he would stop. He didn’t.
“Say,” I said, breaking into his spiel, “don’t you teach history?”
“What? Yes, I do. Why?”
“I used to have a good buddy who was a graduate student in the history department and I haven’t seen him in a long time. Maybe you knew him? Raymond Duffy?”
His eyes narrowed, and he looked at me in a frankly sexual way, thinking perhaps he had found a kindred soul, but he couldn’t make himself believe it.
“No, I don’t believe I know the name,” he said carefully. “I don’t teach graduate courses very often. Would you excuse me?” he said, pushing away from the bar.
“Hey, buddy,” I said. “You haven’t finished your drink.”
“I’ll be right back. I’m just going—to the john,” he answered, pawing at the carpet with a scuffed loafer.
“Hope everything comes out all right,” I said heartily as he reared past me, blushing so hard that tears came to his eyes.
“Okay, Milo, what’s going on?” Vonda Kay asked as Crider lurched toward the rest rooms.
“Working, love, working.”
“We don’t need that kinda business in here, Milo.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, standing up to go after him. I had gotten coy and lost him, so we would have to talk in the john. He looked as if he might have some experience with toilet communications.
“This is a good job, Milo. I don’t need trouble.”
“No trouble, love, no trouble at all.” I gunned my second drink and went after Crider.
The rest room looked more like an operating room—white porcelain, beige tile and a soft green carpet. Crider was manfully trying to make water and ignore me. Thanks to modern technology, there was a hot-air blower instead of paper towels, so I jammed the swinging door with my handkerchief. Nobody was going to come in, and Crider wasn’t going to get out quickly. He had a tall man’s reach and thick wrists, and I wanted to immobilize him quickly. I stepped behind him and jerked his faded windbreaker over his shoulders to pin his arms. He reacted violently, not to get at me but at his fly to zip it up, and the London Fog gave up the ghost, splitting right up the middle of the back.
Zipped up, he spun around, anxious and confused, his teeth chattering and his lower lip trembling. “Hey,” he stammered, “hey, what’s, what’s happening, whatcha do that for?” He held up the two halves of his windbreaker. They dangled from his wrists like distress flags. “Dammit, I’ve had this jacket since college, dammit, why, what…”
“It seemed like a good plan,” I said calmly.
“What?”
“I didn’t want you to get excited. See? You’re excited now.”
“What?”
“Now, don’t get excited. I want to talk to you about Raymond Duffy.”
His eyes grew wide and wild, but I didn’t hit him because they also filled with tears. I knew I could handle him, and he knew it. After the brief spurt of anger, his shoulders slumped like a man ready to take a beating. He looked as badly used by life as his wife, and somebody was huffing outside the door, so I shouldered the door and jerked my handkerchief out. Nickie, red-faced and breathing hard, came rushing into the rest room, saying, “Goddamned door. Hi, Milo. Wonder what the hell’s wrong with that door? You have any idea what those goddamned things cost?”
“No, Nickie, I don’t,” I said, then walked out, went back to the bar to have another drink.
“What was that all about?” Vonda Kay asked as she handed me the drink.
“I don’t know. Did you send Nickie back to the john?”
“Are you kidding, Milo? I don’t send Nickie anywhere. He’s useless as tits on a boa
r hog. Anytime there’s trouble, I holler for one of the bar managers, then there’s no more trouble.”
“Hard-asses, huh?”
“Nope. Just quiet and mean as hell. They even scare me,” she said, then laughed as if she weren’t really afraid at all.
“See you later,” I said as I finished the drink.
“Want one to go?”
“Sure. Why not.”
She made one in a go cup, then said, “See you about two?”
“If I can make it.”
“It’s too cold out for maybe’s, Milo.”
“Best I can do, babe. I’m working.”
“Then come back some night when you aren’t.”
“You know me, love, I work twenty-five hours a day.”
“That’s not what I hear,” she said, but I didn’t laugh.
—
Outside the rain had eased to mist, which shifted dully across the black gleaming asphalt and the empty cars. Elton Crider was hunched over his engine, busy with a flashlight. I walked up behind him, took the rotor out of my pocket, and said his name. He didn’t hear me, so I said it louder.
His head whanged against the open hood as he stood up and dropped the flashlight. The lens broke and the light went out when it hit. It rolled across the asphalt, and I stooped and picked it up. He rubbed the back of his head and moaned.
“Is it broken?” he asked. He had taken off the pieces of his jacket and disposed of them somewhere. His shirt was soaked, and he looked so pitiful that I almost offered him my jacket.
“Looks like it,” I said.
“Damn. That was a new bulb too. Damn. What the hell have you got against me,” he groaned. “What do you want?” Beneath the thin white shirt, his bones thrust out of his flesh like those of a concentration camp prisoner. “What do you want?”
“To talk to you about Raymond Duffy.”
“He’s dead. Don’t you know that? It was in the papers. He’s dead.” Then he began to blubber.
The Wrong Case Page 11