Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  “Fact of the matter, he’s kind of a weenie. He’d let those little bastards who said they was his friends call me a whore and boss him around.”

  “What little bastards would those be?”

  “Those goodie, goodie kids, church kids, 4-H kids. Them.”

  I thought about the three bodies on the floor of Lottie’s trailer and the testimonies to their goodness I’d heard at their funerals.

  “If somebody told him to shoot some goodie kids, would he do it?”

  The question caught a forkful of omelet halfway to her mouth. She stared into the air between us and thought about it for some time. Her mouth closed. What looked like a tear glistened in one eye before she blinked it back, took her bite, and chewed. She shook her head indifferently, not so much to tell me no as to tell me she would not answer.

  “He take your car?”

  “A set of keys is gone. Nothing else. Has to be him, don’t it? I can’t think of anybody else.”

  “Where would he go?”

  “With a car? South, I ’magine.” She didn’t hesitate; she’d already thought about it. “He thinks his daddy’s down there. Promised him once they’d see mermaids.”

  “Mermaids.”

  “Place called Weeki Wachee,” she said. “Florida. They’ve got some damned show where girls dress up like mermaids, breath through tubes, swim.”

  “You tell the cops that?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is that where his father is?”

  “Who knows. That was 10 years ago, last I heard’a that sorry son of a bitch.”

  She wiped her mouth with a pinch of her thumb and index finger and hauled herself out of the booth with a grunt.

  Looking down at me, she said, “I give them their names, but I don’t take their money.”

  I was confused. I didn’t recall saying anything about money.

  “The fathers,” she said. “I don’t take their damned child support, nothing.” Her eyes drifted away. “I see it on your face, too. I ain’t a whore.”

  After breakfast with Marlene, I presented myself at the high school and asked a particularly unpleasant and prying secretary if I could purchase the most recent high school yearbook. She remained seated at a desk facing the counter and did not care to raise her eyes from the work spread there. Petulant self-absorption apparently was contagious in a place full of teenagers.

  “What do you want it for?” she said.

  “I collect yearbooks wherever I go,” I said with a chipper lilt. “I believe they are the clearest evidence that we in America have the best students and the best schools anywhere in the world.”

  She looked up for an appraisal. Administrators and school board members talked like that for public consumption, so she didn’t know whether I was shitting her or not. That only made her more hostile.

  “What’s your name?”

  “How much is the yearbook?”

  “I can’t sell it to you without your name?

  “You won’t take cash without questions?”

  “No.”

  “Let me ask you a question.” I said. Do you consider a yearbook to be like a history of this school?”

  “Well, yes.”

  “And would you agree with me, then, that if it’s a history it’s like a record of the activities of the school?”

  She hesitated, not knowing where this was going to go. “Well, I suppose.”

  “In fact, it is a record in photographs and words of what went on at this school during a particular school year, is it not?”

  She already admitted that it was and hadn’t been harmed by doing so. “Of course,” she said with confidence.

  “And as one who works in the administration office of the school, you probably have some familiarity with the laws of the state and what they have to say about how school districts operate, don’t you?”

  A wary look passed again across her face with the change in direction, but she wasn’t the type to admit ignorance, regardless of how stupid she might be. “Certainly,” she said and cocked up her chin.

  “Well, then you probably know that under the state’s open records law you are obliged to disclose to me as a citizen most records of the school, including a yearbook, regardless of what my name is or what I want it for.” I let a little edge into my voice. “Now, you going to sell it to me or not?”

  “What are you?” she asked. “Some damned sort of lawyer?”

  An older man in a short-sleeved striped shirt and knit tie with a knot the size of a fist had been stuffing mail slots at the back of the office and listening to the exchange.

  “Sell him the yearbook, Marjorie,” he said. “He no damned lawyer, he’s a damned reporter.”

  “Sir, please,” I said. “Your language. What kind of example do you set for our youth?

  He rolled his eyes. At his age, he’d already set all the examples he intended to.

  When I had given Marjorie my money and she had nearly shredded the book tearing out the receipt I asked for, the man came to the other side of the counter and introduced himself as the vice principal and school guidance counselor. He struck me as was one of those calm, steady, capable guys temperamental top dogs can’t get along without.

  “Been expecting you,” he said.

  “I take it the cops have been here?”

  “A skinny state police detective asked me a lot of questions about one of our students.”

  “Jake Danvers?”

  He ignored the question. “The detective said you’d be along.”

  “You mean press.”

  “No, you. He said there was a fat, nosy, persistent son of a bitch who’d worry this thing to death.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

  “I wouldn’t. I’m going to ask you to leave now.”

  “I’d like to talk with some of your students and teachers about Jake Danvers.”

  “Can’t. Privacy laws. You understand.”

  “Sure, I understand, but I don’t care.”

  He’d dealt with smartasses all his professional life and wasn’t about to mess with the likes of me. He gave me a wry smile and shrugged his shoulders.

  “Well,” he said, “let me do a little lawyering here. I’ve asked you once to leave and you haven’t. So now you’re trespassing. Here’s your last warning. If you don’t leave now or if you leave and come back, I call the cops.

  “I consider myself educated,” I said and left.

  I drove around the school in widening loops through the surrounding neighborhoods until I spotted a couple of fast-food restaurants and a little grocery located in a yellow house about three blocks from the school. I stopped at the grocery for some supplies. When I saw all the cigarette butts scattered over the trampled patch of grass and dirt between the sidewalk and the steps, I thought I might be onto something.

  The first floor had been converted into one large room for the store. Along the back wall, the refrigerator case held some milk and bologna but mostly soft drinks and juices in all colors. The rest of the place’s inventory seemed to consist of mostly of bread, jerky, snack cakes, cookies, candy, chips, and crackers. My kind of place. I gathered up an assortment of jerky bits, M&Ms, and Twizzlers. Call it trail mix; I thought I’d camp out for a while.

  A woman in her fifties with short, shoe-polish black hair and a deeply lined face sat behind the counter nearly hidden by cigarette and cigar racks. She had watched me suspiciously through a haze of cigarette smoke the whole time. She relaxed her vigilance only when I dumped my purchases on the counter in front of her.

  “Looks like you’re lunching early,” she said in the raspy, corrugated voice of a woman who’d sucked down a lot of smoke in her day.

  “Not many places left where you can smoke in a grocery store,” I said.

  “My place, my sm
oke,” she said.

  “Guessing from what you sell, you get a lot of students from the high school in here, particularly at lunch.”

  She stopped in the middle of ringing up my booty.

  “You health, excise, or school?”

  “None of the above.” I laid my press card on the counter.

  “You writing stories about old ladies trying to get by in the grocery business?”

  “Not today.”

  She shrugged. No harm in talking to me then.

  “Don’t get ‘em like I used to,” she said. “They’re supposed to have a closed campus now.”

  I repeated to myself what she had just said.

  “But you still get some. What? Skippers?”

  She shrugged again.

  “They don’t take attendance at noon, just lock the doors. You got a friend who’ll let you back in or you put a little wedge in a door, say the door of the football locker room, which nobody pays any attention to at that time of day, you can have a little pop and a smoke. You didn’t hear that from me, ’course.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Since she was in a talkative mood, I said, “I’ll be right back.”

  I went to my car and brought back my hard-won yearbook. I looked up Jake Danvers’ name in the index and turned to the page with his picture on it.

  “This kid ever visit you?”

  She reached under the counter and took out a pair of wingtip glasses, which she put on to examine the photo more closely.

  “Some,” she said.

  “Know him personally?”

  She shook her head.

  “Any of his friends visit you?”

  “There’s a pimply, blond-haired boy he usually shows up with. Pimply smokes, but he don’t like to ask me for cigarettes. Might ruin his grade point. Underage. Like the rest aren’t or I’d give a shit. Lets the other kid do it. I see Pimply giving him money out on the walk before they come in.”

  “What’s his brand?”

  She said Merits.

  “Funny thing,” I said. “That’s mine, too. Give me pack, will you?”

  She just stared at me.

  “All right,” I said. “How about if I hang out and see if Pimply shows up?

  She thought about that.

  “Wait in your car and don’t bother none of them until after they been in here. I don’t need you scaring off customers. I make damned little off the little thieves as it is.”

  She reached up and pulled the cigarettes I’d asked for from the rack over her head. Who says you can’t find an entrepreneurial libertarian when you need one anymore?

  In 1994, when all this took place, Failey lived on the outer rim of cell phone civilization. We knew about mobile phones, but they weren’t common, being as they were expensive to own and victims of signals that were weak and wavering.

  Since the paper wouldn’t pay for a cell and I needed a phone to do my job, I kept an eye out. When I arrived, I’d instinctively noted the pay phone attached to the house on the alley side. It was obviously well used, the ground around it covered by cigarette butts, candy wrappers, and perhaps a wasteful roach or two. Since I had time to kill before the lunch hour, I took out the phone card I paid for myself and began what had become daily routine, trying to find Aunt Lottie.

  Wood Modine wearily confirmed yet again that Aunt Lottie was in fact alive, that she was recovering satisfactorily from her injuries, that the authorities had hidden her until they had apprehended her assailants, and that he was goddamned tired of answering the same goddamn questions every day.

  “Tell me where she is or let me talk to her on the phone and I’ll stop,” I always said.

  “Forget it, Clay,” he said.

  “All right, any arrests?”

  “No.”

  “Any new leads?”

  “We’re following all leads.”

  “Any new ones?”

  “I can’t discuss the investigation with you.”

  “Sure you can, you just won’t.”

  “True.”

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to call you again tomorrow. Let’s try and have some different answers ready.”

  Wood hung up without saying goodbye.

  I then called Orlo and assured him yet again that Lottie was alive and recovering, although still in hiding. I called him every day because: I liked him, he was genuinely concerned about Lottie, he was watching her place as a favor, he seemed the most likely person to be in touch with Lotty, he wasn’t the smartest guy in the world, and he might tell me where she was if he knew.

  The incongruity of it all sometimes gave me pause, but I learned long ago Fitzgerald was right. Diametrically opposed thoughts are merely the mark of a first-rate intelligence. They pose little or no risk of insanity.

  “Know where she is, Orlo?”

  “No.”

  “Would you tell me if you did, Orlo?”

  “Not if she didn’t want me to.”

  “Does she want you to?”

  We were getting to know each other pretty well. He was going to think about that one for a moment.

  “I think you’re trying to trick me,” he said.

  “Have you talked you her, Orlo?”

  “No. You going to call me tomorry?”

  “I am.”

  “Well, then,” he said. “Goodbye.”

  I had already called the utility companies to see if they would tell me where they were sending her bills. Normally, they are pretty closed mouth about account information, but in this case, they were only too happy to tell me they had been directed to send all future bills to the sheriff’s office. Same with her bank. All inquiries were directed to the sheriff’s office.

  Lottie had no family and few close friends. Since she’d never married or lived in town, she did not hang out with the flocks of widows who descended on the fast-food restaurants at 4 or 5 each day for company and to look out for each other.

  I was down to the telephone book and a county map. For the past week, whenever I had a little spare time, I called a neighbor or two, widening the search out from the double-wide. As a pretext, I told the people I called I was doing a profile of Lottie. It was thankless work; they either hung up on me or told me things I already knew. For example, I already had a pretty clear picture of Lottie as fiercely independent, as someone who did a lot for others, but allowed others to do only a little for her.

  Lottie’s careful cultivation of her privacy led me nowhere, but it worked well for her. The people who would talk to me said they sure wished they did know where she was. They’d like to help her.

  Billy Masters was what my surly, adolescent, racially deaf nephew in Chicago disdained as a wigger, a white kid trying to pass as a gangsta. He was short, chunky kid with bleached blond, spiky hair and freckles enough to make him look age ten for the rest of his life. The kid had money judging by the Tommy Hilfiger labels on his baggy jacket and jeans and $150 hightops. I could hear the rap music spilling out of the headphones he wore. In a small, white town like this one, the whole package probably drove his parents and their friends nuts, which was, no doubt, the desired effect.

  Kids had been coming and going for a half hour or more, but he was the only one who slumped up to the store and stopped outside, shuffling his feet and screwing up his courage. Fear and guilt were rare qualities on display among underage thugs dredged up in Chicago. I took this kid’s discomfort accordingly as a measure of how insular these little towns are. It was also refreshing and more than a little helpful.

  Billy jumped when I put a hand on his elbow, then cocked his head twice like a damned bird when I tried to introduce myself. Since it was obvious he wasn’t going to turn down the music, I hooked a finger under the headset and flipped it back onto his neck.

  “You know Jake Danvers?” I asked him. />
  “I asked you who’re you?”

  “No, you didn’t. You just cocked your head.” I told him who I was anyway.

  “Fuck you,” he said. “I already talked to the cops.”

  I folded my arms and leaned back against my car. He didn’t seem impressed that my weight rocked it, so I tried another tack. For all the attitude, I figured this kid still didn’t like trouble.

  “How about I call that guidance counselor at the school, the old guy with the fat knot in his tie, and tell him you skipped out at lunch to buy smokes? How about I tell him about the trick with propping the football locker room door? Maybe that ruins the deal for everybody else who skips and they get pissed off at you. Maybe it shows up on your record and you don’t get into Harvard.”

  His eyes widened, a good measure of the effectiveness of the verbal stick. But then how hard is it to intimidate a kid who’s afraid to buy cigarettes?

  “Or,” I said, “how about you have a couple of smokes.” I took the Merits out of my pocket and put them in his hand. “And tell me about your boy, Danvers.”

  “You going to use my name?”

  “Let’s see what you have to say first.”

  He said he wanted to get away from there so the other kids didn’t see. I said I wasn’t about to drive away with an underage boy in my car.

  “My experience has been that it’s better to hide in plain sight,” I told him. “What secrets’re you going to tell when everybody else can see you? Tell ‘em I’m your Uncle Clay come for a visit.”

  “Yeah,” he said in a tone that made me want to smack him.

  Turned out, Billy’s opinion of Jake was not much different from that of Jake’s mother. He used to like Jake, but not anymore.

  “Sumbitch,” young William said. “Sumbitch tried to set me up.”

  “How’d he do that, exactly?”

  “Wanted my stubs, man,” Billy said.