“Mine too . . . Now.”
That got his attention as I had intended it to and he began chomping vigorously on his cigar.
“Listen, Milton,” I said, pressing his seat back, “we can do this hard or easy. I’ve had enough hard for one day. What do you say to easy.”
“I like easy.”
“Good. Drive me to the border.”
I made him give me his coat and the cap he kept on the seat next to him. I took twenty dollars and vowed to get it all back to him, the money with interest. He said that wouldn’t be necessary. When we were several miles out of Riversborough, I pulled my fist out of the vinyl seat and pretended to put the phantom gun in my pocket.
“Pull over,” I ordered. “I’ve gotta take a piss.”
He really started sweating now and I hated to do it to him, but I was in a tough spot.
“Please, mister, don’t ki—”
“Calm down and pull over.”
He did as I asked. I got out of the car and walked far enough away to give Milton the confidence he could leave without me being able to catch up or to shoot him. From behind a group of rocks, I watched and waited, hoping he would jump at this chance to escape from the crazed killer I let him think I was. Like any sensible man, he seized the moment. The back end of his old Impala fishtailed like mad on the icy road as he sped off. Now all he had to do was tell the cops I was headed across the border.
It only took me ten minutes to flag down a semi going back toward town. I told the driver my jeep was stuck in a snowbank on an access road about a half mile from where he picked me up. He didn’t seem to have any trouble believing it. And between MacClough’s turned-up shirt collar and the hood of Milton’s coat, I did a good job of hiding my damaged face. Everything was going fine until the trucker moved to turn on the radio.
Maybe I was just the slightest bit tense, but I couldn’t help thinking he might reassess his faith in my story if he heard about Kira’s murder on the news. One good look at my face and I was finished. Unfortunately, I could not think of single good reason for him not to turn on the radio nor was I in any position to play tough guy with the driver. He had forearms the size of my thighs and a neck like a tree stump. In any case, my plan rested on my ability to get back into Riversborough without attracting attention.
We listened to a few minutes of commercials, one for a Canadian grocery chain. The jingle mixed French and English lyrics. I hummed along, but the sweat had already begun to seep through my shirt. When I noticed that all the ads were for Canadian products, I relaxed some. There was a weather report, a traffic report. I got downright comfortable. Then, there was a news bulletin.
“This again,” I spoke loudly enough to drown out the announcer.
“What’s that?”
“You didn’t hear? There was a big fire up at the Cyclone Ridge ski resort just outside of Riversborough. It took fifteen fire companies to fight it and I don’t think even that many got it under control.”
“Jesus. Anybody hurt?”
“They didn’t say,” I answered.
“Probably a little man-made lightning,” the driver said, winking at me. “That place’s been a white elephant since the new owners spruced it up about five years ago. I don’t think they ever got to full bookings in that whole time. Where’d you say you was from?”
The bulletin was over and I didn’t like turn the conversation was taking. Besides, we had already entered Riversborough’s city limits.
“This is fine,” I said, picking a spot arbitrarily. “Thanks. Drive safe.”
The air brakes whooshed and the wheels squealed as we came to a stop. I was down and out of the semi’s cab before the trucker could question my sanity. I waved bye as he pulled away from the curb. The sun was up, though I couldn’t see it through the clouds and blowing snow. I knew about where I was and figured it would take me about an hour of walking through back alleyways to get to where I wanted to go.
There were more customers in the shop than I had suspected would turn out in such awful weather. That unnerved me a bit, but no one had cause to pay me any more mind than the next browser. Mostly everybody in the store still had his or her hood or hat on. I just tried harder than anyone else to stare at my shoes as I searched for the man I had come to see. And when I approached him, there was nothing in his demeanor to indicate that he recognized me. To the casual observer, he treated me as he might’ve treated any customer coming to enlist his aid.
“I need your help,” I said in a voice as flat as Kansas. “I’m looking for the true crime section.”
“Come this way, sir.”
Rajiv Gupta, the man I was betting my life on was Guppy, led me to a dark corner of the store.
“Here we are, sir. The section is pitifully small, but we don’t have strong demand for this sort of thing in Riversborough. Our clientele are mostly students from the college. I’m afraid they tend to be preoccupied with more scholarly works or trendy periodicals.”
“I guess I’ll have to make due.” I knelt down and gestured toward a book I picked out at random. “What do you think of this?”
Kneeling down beside me, he removed the book from the shelf and handed it to me: Crimes of the Ancient Mariner. Great! It was the recounting of the gruesome rapehomicides of several young prostitutes by a phony sea captain. It was an unfortunate choice.
“It is not this author’s best work,” Gupta explained for the benefit of a woman standing only five or six feet away. “We are out of his other book. Let me write the title down for you and maybe you can pick it up at one of the larger chain stores.”
He removed a business card from his pocket and began writing furiously on the back of it. He handed it to me, giving me only several seconds to digest what he’d scribbled. There was an address on Oneonta Place, that was clear. He had also written down: “Blue Subaru, broken windshield, Bracken Street, 2 lunchtime.” I had barely finished reading when he snapped the card out of my hand and shredded it. He shoved the pieces in his pocket.
“Excuse me,” he apologized, “I’ve gotten my authors confused. That was not the title at all.”
The woman in the aisle with us turned and moved into the next row. Gupta pulled his hand back out of his pocket and threw something down that clanged when it hit the floor.
“You’ve dropped your keys.”
“So I did.” I retrieved the lifeline he had tossed me. There was a Subaru ignition key on the ring. “Thanks.”
“No bother. Should I fetch you the title of that other book?”
“No,” I said, “that won’t be necessary. I think I’ve gotten what I need.”
“Very good, sir,” Gupta bowed slightly and moved on.
I lingered, pretending to study the dust jackets of one or two books. When I thought enough time had passed, I started for the store exit. So close to refuge, I was more nervous now than at any other point during my flight from the law. I could not force myself to focus and I paid for my sloppiness. At the end of the true crime aisle, I stumbled right into the woman who had been standing with Gupta and me during the better part of our charade. Her head hit my cheek.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she apologized, staring directly at my face. “You’re cut.”
“That’s all right, it’s nothing.”
But even as I rushed by her, I could see that her mind was working overtime to try and explain how a relatively mild impact had caused the scratches on my face. I didn’t bother to try and help her thought processes along. What would I have said? “Forgive the scratches, I was attacked by a snow leopard on my way out of the house this morning.” I’m afraid not. I simply moved on quickly, forcing myself not to bolt.
Around the corner from the store, I could no longer control the panic and ran for the Subaru. Luckily, there were only four cars parked on Bracken street. The snow had rendered the four unrecognizable. I found Gupta’s car on my second guess. I listened to the radio as I drove. I was big news in the little town and my worst fears had been confirmed.
Having discovered copious amounts of tissue, blood, and some clipped hairs under the victim’s fingernails, the police were postulating that my face had been scratched deeply. Now I had to find Oneonta Place before the woman in the book store found the knob to her car radio. Although it was probably my best bet of finding Gupta’s house in a hurry, I didn’t think stopping to ask directions was a terribly prudent idea.
Buddy Holly
There were unattractive areas in Riversborough, Oneonta Place was proof of that. It was an ugly street even under a frosting of virgin snow. Snow couldn’t hide the boarded windows on every other L-shaped ranch. Snow could not hide the for-sale signs, the foreclosure notices posted on the lawns. Decay has a nasty habit of defeating the best camouflage.
Number 74 Oneonta Place was unremarkable as seen from the street. Half the slats were missing from the picket fence that surrounded the lot. The house itself was a faded gray, but it had been patched in various spots with asbestos shingles that neither matched one another nor the shingles that covered the remainder of the ranch. There were two headless lawn jockeys, half buried in snow, holding plaster lanterns on either side of the pink front door.
I pushed the button on the remote garage door opener as I pulled into the driveway and, much to my surprise, the thing actually worked. The light in the garage stayed on as the door closed behind the old Subaru. I could breathe again. The light popped off, but I stood there in the semidarkness for quite a while. Soaked with sweat, my body shaking beyond my control, I thought of Kira, the woman, not the victim, for the first time since I’d run from my room. It didn’t take any courage to cry now.
I entered the house through a door in the garage. The house was neater than I would have expected. The furnishings and carpeting were old, but clean and dusted. All the shades were drawn, so I could move about freely without having to crawl by windows and doors. There was an eat-in kitchen, a big living room, and three bedrooms with one full bath at the end of a long hall. Only the smallest of the three bedrooms seemed to function as a bedroom. The middle-sized bedroom was set up as an office. There was a writing desk with an IBM Selectric typewriter on it, diplomas on the walls—a B.S. from Cornell, a Masters degree from MIT. There was no Ph.D., but there was a rectangular spot on the wall where another diploma might once have hung—a three-year-old calendar and an oil portrait of a breathtakingly exotic woman in traditional Indian dress. The gold accents and the vibrant reds and blues in her clothing flowed in stark contrast to her deep brown skin and pitch black hair. Her lips were simultaneously shy and inviting. And the artist had given the dark beauty a sense of motion I could not accurately describe. I could not say that her hair blew in a painted breeze. I could not say that her eyes followed me or that her mouth smiled when I turned my head a certain way. It just seemed so to me.
What would have been the master bedroom served as a storage area and library. If he had read half the books in the room, he had read twice as many as I had. Apparently, he also spoke several languages. But what I liked best was that he owned both the English hardcover and Chinese paper-back editions of Coney Island Burning and They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee. It took the translators quite some time to convert the Yiddish slang into proper Mandarin.
So, I thought as I turned out of the doorway, with the exception of the woman’s portrait, the interior of Guppy’s house was as unremarkable as the exterior. Then it struck me that there was no computer in sight, not even a word processor. And I felt confident Guppy hadn’t built his legend on an old IBM Selectric. I didn’t like it, not at all. I ran to find the stairs to the basement.
No sign of a computer there, just a line of bare bulbs with pull chains and the oil burner. There was a washer and dryer, a slop sink and a small shop. My head filled with maybes. Maybe Guppy’s myth was just that, myth. Maybe he used a laptop, a notebook. Maybe he rented an office someplace. Maybe he used someone else’s equipment. Maybe I was being set up like Humpty Dumpty to take a great fall. Maybe, maybe, maybe . . .
What I liked even less than the computer whiz with no computer that was down in his basement I was getting that same eerie sensation I had had twice in my hotel room, only stronger this time. There was somebody else here or there just had been. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to turn a corner and find a lit cigarette burning in an ashtray. But there were no corners I hadn’t turned. The closets upstairs were mostly filled with air and there wasn’t any spot in the cellar I couldn’t see well from where I was standing. Like I said before, alcohol didn’t work for me, but I needed a drink.
I stripped down, threw my collection of other folks’ sweaty clothes in the wash, and went upstairs to shower. I stopped at the fridge—stocked better than any single man’s refrigerator I had ever seen—and grabbed a bottle of Brighton Beach Brown Ale. I froze in my tracks. Brighton Beach Brown Ale, or Triple B as its devotees called it, was a gourmet microbrewed beer from Brooklyn. It wasn’t widely distributed even in the New York City area. How did Rajiv Gupta come to have a six-pack, I wondered? It was as if I had been expected. This feeling like I was caught in the middle of a Twilight Zone episode was getting pretty tiresome, but I was nude and confused and had nowhere else to turn. I drank the Triple B in two gulps and took a shower that used up all the hot water the washing machine could spare.
I stepped out of the shower. I grabbed for the towel I knew I had left atop the hamper, but it was not there. The steam, thicker than London fog, conspired with the bright bathroom light to blind me. I would not have been able to see my own reflection in the mirror. I could not find the mirror nor could I find the hand I held up before my face. I did not panic. I pressed my palms to the wet tile and felt for the door. It was a tiny bathroom, not much bigger than an old-fashioned phone booth, but the walls were seamless and had swallowed the door whole. I dropped to my knees to feel the floor. The floor was mud and grass. I could see and smell down here. The root ends of tulips—I don’t know how I knew they were tulips—stuck up in the air. The fine root hairs waved in a wind that blew only close to the ground.
I put my face to the earth and stretched out, my legs seeming to extend into infinity. I closed my eyes and prayed to sleep. My feet flapped in the wind like the points of pennants. I was warm from the inside out, but only for a moment. The tulip roots grew around my limbs, pulling me down into the earth. I could not breathe. I tried to move, but was frozen. Somehow, my left arm was free and I latched my hand onto the bathroom sink. Pulling myself up, I noticed I was floating. I willed myself to come down. My feet landed on cold tile.
Though the steam was still thick, it was cold on my skin like a marble shroud. I could see the mirror and myself in it, covered in mud. Someone was there with me in the cold steam. It was a woman. The scent of her raw patchouli filled up my senses, but I could not see her. I felt her hands surround me, spin me, stroke me. I was faint. I felt her lips pressed to mine. I heard the rustle of fabric. I opened my eyes and she was there; the woman in the portrait. Her tongue tasted of honey and fire. Her hard nipples pressed through her sari into my flesh. We spun as we kissed, faster and faster. I was dizzy with her scent, her kisses, the spinning. She bit into my tongue and the spinning stopped.
I heard her laughing from very far away. A hand pushed me through the shower curtain and I fell through the bottom of the earth. I did not fall through air. I could breathe well enough, but it was like falling through black tar that restricted me without adhering to me. A door opened somewhere in the universe and the tar let go. The ground rushed up to greet me. I landed so hard the air exploded out of me. I felt skin beneath me. Kira’s body had broken my fall. Her dead eyes looked up, accusing me. An icy cold hand shook my shoulder. I rolled over.
“Mr. Klein. Mr. Klein, are you quite all right?”
I was looking up from the living room floor at Rajiv Gupta, his coat sprinkled with snow.
“I’m not sure what all right means anymore,” I said, picking myself up.
“You were dreaming?”
/> “That was no dream.”
“No,” he agreed, “in your circumstance, I don’t imagine dreaming is what a man does in his sleep.”
“What time is it?”
He looked at his wrist. “Two twenty-seven in the afternoon.”
“Lunchtime. “ I wiped the sleep from my eyes.
“Normally, yes, but because of the weather, I am finished for the day.”
I put my right hand out. “Thanks for saving me. Maybe we can talk about why you did it a little later.”
“We can do that.” He shook my hand. “Are you hungry?”
“For answers.”
“You and the police. That woman at the end of the aisle heard a news report on you when she arrived back at her flat.”
“I was afraid of that,” I confessed. “Were they rough on you?”
“Not at all.” He laughed. “I played the frightened immigrant, waving my hands and praising God. I’ve perfected it over the years. It’s gotten me out of a number of fixes. That day I met you in the coffee house, I was doing a variation on the theme. The wise Eastern philosopher, full of vague platitudes for anyone who will listen.”
“Who is the woman in the portrait?”
“Has she gotten under your skin already?” He smirked, then remembering the scratches on my face and the reason for my being here, he apologized. “That was unforgivable.”
“Forget it. Who is she?”
“No one, really. An ideal woman. She has come to me in my dreams for years. In exchange for some help I gave a friend, she painted that portrait from my description. It is quite good, that painting.”
I agreed. “Amazing.”
“I know she exists somewhere,” Guppy explained, tapping his heart. “She may look nothing like the portrait, but I will recognize her spirit.”
“I believe you will. So . . .”
“So?” he puzzled.
“Where’s the computer? And please, don’t wave your hands around and praise God. I don’t give up so easy as the Riversborough Police.”
They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee Page 12