by John Lutz
But maybe I had no right to bitch. My much maligned and misunderstood profession kept the food and liquor coming in and a tin roof over my head.
Just as the diluted bourbon was achieving its soothing influence on my nerves, the girl at the airline reservation desk phoned back and said that she'd made a mistake and asked whether I would consider a later flight that laid over in Atlanta for an hour.
I agreed to that and took an antacid tablet.
3
My flight to Orlando, via Atlanta, took off on time into a sky resembling lovingly polished fine crystal. The ground that fell away lost movement, then detail, and became a well defined, multicolored quiltwork of neat, if sometimes unsymmetrical, patterns. It was all simple from up there, where I sat behind the wing. Too bad everything didn't fall into such simple, neat patterns. Or maybe everything did, from a distance.
I settled back in the comfortable padded seat and semislept, my scant knowledge of aerodynamics balancing out my natural queasiness at flying.
Two drinks and a sampling of Southern dialect was it for the Atlanta layover, then back on the 747 and it was Georgia's red clay falling away beneath the wing. They seemed always to be constructing something in Georgia, as if only for an excuse to lay bare acres of red earth.
The plane rolled slightly to the left, altering the stark pattern of sunlight on the wing, and we headed south, proceeding toward Orlando at what seemed to be a much higher altitude.
After landing at Orlando's sun-drenched airport, I collected my baggage and made my way to a Hertz desk, where I rented a shiny new green compact. The little car was good of its kind, but there was just enough room for me and my luggage, and I had to be on the alert for pebbles and bottlecaps on the road.
I took Interstate Four out of Orlando, turned south on Twenty-seven, then drove for a while and angled west on Thirty-two, toward the Gulf Coast. Layton was twenty-five or thirty miles inland, southeast of Tampa Bay. I made the ENTERING LAYTON-POP. 3,605 sign a few minutes before five o'clock.
There was a good fishing and boating lake nearby, and Layton was close enough to the coast to have some tourist appeal. The main street was lined with motels. Bat off to the left I could see what had to be Layton's main industry-a huge complex of low, dark buildings set near the crest of a hill, with half a dozen tall smokestacks looming over the town like guard towers.
Disregarding the garish signs near the street, I decided one motel looked about in a league with the other, so I pulled into the lot of one called the Clover Inn, which advertised fifteen dollars and up in sun-paled flashing neon.
"Up" turned out to be twenty-two dollars, but I stretched cramped muscles and signed the register anyway. The Clover Inn had several little flat-roofed cabins spaced far enough apart to guarantee quiet at night, and it featured a clean-looking, if plain, restaurant, the Clover Grill. Besides, I couldn't face the idea of climbing back into the little green compact with the big name.
I told the man at the desk, an old guy named Eddie, that I'd be staying a few days and paid in advance. He handed me a key chained to a plastic clover engraved with a numeral. Leaving the car where it was parked, I got my luggage and carried it to Number 5.
Cool air hit me when I opened the door to the boxy stucco cabin, and it felt good. I stepped inside, kicked the door shut behind me and my three-suiter, and looked around.
Nice. Restful. Light green walls, dark furniture and a bed with a thick mattress. I was satisfied with my choice.
After tossing the suitcase onto the bed, I began to unpack what I wanted to hang the wrinkles out of-a pair of slacks, pale blue shirt and a tan sport coat. I glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand by the bed. Still plenty of daylight left, enough to take a quick shower, get something to eat at the Clover Grill and look into things. I was tired but I was working.
As I was walking across the parking lot, toward the motel restaurant, I decided to drop into the office and talk to Eddie. I could see through the window that he was alone, slouched in a leather chair near the desk, reading a magazine.
"Evening," I said as I entered the tiny paneled office.
Eddie looked up from his magazine and nodded, waiting for me to get to what I really wanted to say. He was a dehydrated old bird with a narrow face, wispy gray hair and blue eyes containing a quiet humor that life hadn't broken.
"Layton's a bigger town than I imagined," I said.
"You must not have much of an imagination. Thought you might want towels."
"Nope. Plenty of towels. How's the food in the restaurant?"
"Make you deathly ill. Don't tell 'em I said so."
"Sure." I saw that he was reading one of those factual detective magazines, with a cover featuring a bound girl in panties and bra, begging to be spared while the determined type who stood over her with a ripsaw seemed to be listening to distant sirens.
"'Bout the Michigan Mutilator," he said, noticing that I'd scanned the cover. "You remember him?"
"Vaguely."
"Killed six."
"What's that big cluster of buildings east of town?" I asked.
"Used a chain saw, though. Black and Decker. That's Carlon Plastics you're talkin' about. Employs nearly half the town."
It was what I'd been afraid of. And now that I knew for sure how big Carlon Plastics was in Layton, my stomach arranged itself into a knot that would have done a scoutmaster proud. If anything did go wrong, I knew how the authorities would deal with me. Roughly and on the edge of the rules.
"What do they make up there?" I asked.
"Different things, from plastic cups for vending machines to some kind of parts for the government. There's nine more Carlon plants spread around the country, but this one was the first. Worked for 'em myself up to six years ago, in the molding section. Then I inhaled enough fumes to mess up my lungs. Had to quit, take my disability pay."
"Worth a lot to a town, an operation like that."
"Wouldn't be no town without it."
"Is there still a Carlon in the business?", "Better believe it! Dale Carlon himself. Lives up near the plant in a ritzy place you wouldn't believe. He's the son. Father's dead."
"Carlon live alone in a place like that?"
"Yeah. Wife died nearly five years ago. No live-in servants. Got two daughters somewhere, though." He tilted his head slightly, much like the Michigan Mutilator on the magazine cover. "You here for the fishin'?"
"I wish I was. Business."
I headed the compact back toward the motel, my uneasy feeling growing claws. At a big drugstore with a flashing neon palm tree I stopped and bought some antacid stomach tablets, a spray can of dog repellent and a bottle of blended whiskey. Dog repellent is almost as effective as Mace, and the can doesn't attract nearly the attention.
The vending machine outside the office at the Clover Inn furnished me with ice, and I mixed myself a drink and sat in my cabin, thinking about Lornee, as I usually did at some point or other when I was on a job. We'd had some fine, if precarious, years, some fine children; but when Mr. Happy was found to be having an affair with the wife of a city alderman, politics entered the somewhat muddled picture. Politics and divorce.
No one would believe that the affair was one-sided and far less serious than the press had intimated. The alderman's wife was one of those bored, self-styled eccentrics with money who'd met me when I was taking part in a local charity-celebrity function, and she had talked too much and thrown herself at me more jokingly than anything else. But the press was controlled by the rival party, and when her husband had me removed from the department, he only fanned the flames-or rather, the smoke.
I didn't contest when Lornee filed for divorce, and I thought it right to give her custody of Danny and Lynn as long as I had visitation rights. Then, a year later, Lornee left the state with a man named Hogan-a close friend of mine, a tall, lonely man who drank not a lot but a bit too much-and on a Texas highway he drove into a parked car at high speed and killed himself and my ex-wife and my children.
Nobody to blame, really. Nobody deserving of blame for that much horror; nobody, dead or alive, to take it out on, to hate. And only one survivor to harbor the memory.
Now I was lonely, the way Hogan used to be, and I was drinking, not a lot but a bit too much, the way Hogan used to drink.
Some people are star-crossed.
4
In the morning I was thankful that I hadn't dreamed.
I reached out, slapped down the sharp button on the jangling alarm clock and lay for a moment in its vibrating aftermath of silence. There was a sour taste in my mouth and a numbness in my left arm where I'd lain on it in my sleep. I remembered then that I'd been on one of my alcohol-induced self-pitying binges the night before. I hated the sniveling, masochistic self-analysis to which I sometimes fell prey, hated the lethargic uselessness that often evolved from it. Every day I met people more mutilated by fate than myself. The most maudlin word in the English language is "I"-at least for me, past a certain number of drinks.
The black arrow hands on the alarm clock indicated six forty-five, the minute hand pointing toward the door in a broad hint. No time for breakfast. Just as well. As my thoughts focused on the Melissa Clark case, the familiar knot tightened in my stomach and quashed what little desire I had for food.
I managed to get my feet on the floor and commanded them to propel me to the bathroom, where I showered, shaved without nicking myself, combed my hair, and brushed my teeth with toothpaste that tasted like chalk. Gazing at my lean, somewhat lopsided features in the mirror, I wondered if my hair had started to thin. I'd be the last to know.
As soon as I was dressed I drove from the motel, in the direction of Star Lane. Halfway there I stopped at a dingy little doughnut shop built like a castle and got a cup of black coffee to go. By the time I was parked near the end of Star Lane, I'd only burned my hand twice and still had a squishy paper cup half full of coffee.
At twenty minutes to eight the first child came out, a boy of about twelve carrying a ponderous armload of books. Within a few minutes two girls, younger than the boy, emerged from the white frame house nearest my car. The girls walked to where the boy was standing, and though he carefully avoided looking at them, they stood close to him on his left. More children, mostly very young, came out of the houses on each side of the street and stood in a cluster that seemed to center around the boy with all the books.
The school bus arrived promptly at seven forty-five, big and yellow and noisy; and when it had rumbled around the corner, with more noise than speed, Star Lane was again deserted. Melissa Clark hadn't come out of the yellow house fronted by the faded picket fence.
I waited until eight o'clock. Several tired types left to go to work, and the teen-age boy I'd seen yesterday passed in his old Buick. My coffee had long since got cold. I tossed the dark liquid out the window, crumpled the cup and stuck it above the sun visor. Then I drove down the street and parked across from Number 355.
The paper was still on the lawn, the folded magazine still protruding from the mailbox. In the brightening morning there was still a faint yellow glow behind the front curtains.
I decided to be an aluminum siding salesman and got out of the car and crossed the street. When I stepped up on the porch of Number 355 and knocked, I had the feeling I was rapping on the door of an empty house. It's an instinct anyone who's knocked on enough doors acquires.
I waited a few minutes before stepping down from the front porch and walking around to the back of the house. An old rusty swing-set frame in the far corner of the yard now supported only a bald tire suspended by a rope. The grass, where it wasn't worn away, stood about six inches high.
No one was home, I was ninety-nine percent sure, but I went up on the porch and knocked on the back door for the other one percent.
"Whad'ya want, mister?"
It was a boy of about eight, standing near the corner of the house, looking at me with the open expression of fearless curiosity possessed only by young boys and terriers.
"I'm looking for Melissa's mother. You know where she is?"
"No, sir." He was wearing a blue T-shirt about five sizes too large, and he unconsciously gripped it and stretched it down on himself almost to his knees while he stared at me.
"What's your name?" I asked in a friendly voice.
"Mick."
"How come no school today, Mick?"
"I felt bad when I woke up."
"You don't look sick."
"It's on the inside."
"How come Melissa didn't go to school?"
Mick shrugged inside his T-shirt. "Maybe she's sick, i '» too.
"How long's it been since you've seen her?"
"Few days. She was with her mom and dad."
A scraggly-haired woman in a rumpled pink housecoat stepped partway out of the back door of the house on the left. "Mick, you get back in here! If you're too sick to be in school you ain't gonna be out runnin' around!"
I smiled at her, but she didn't smile back, and I didn't like the way her hand clutched her housecoat between her breasts.
"I gotta go," Mick said.
"I would if I were you," I told him. I knocked on the back door again, loudly this time, to appear above-board.
That's when I saw the bullet hole.
It was from a large-caliber bullet and it was just below the doorknob, where it wasn't too noticeable. And it was neat, as if the bullet had gone through the wood from the outside.
I looked the door over and saw another neat round hole, up near the top, alongside the door frame. The bullet had made a thin groove in the frame, as if it had been fired at an angle. Stepping back on the porch, I looked over the rear of the house as if figuring a siding estimate. There was another neat bullet hole in the bottom-left corner of the window beside the back porch.
My throat went dry. I was afraid now of what might be inside the house. Squatting on the back porch, I tried to see through the lower of the two bullet holes in the door, but all I could make out was what looked like the bottom of a picture frame against the pale green of the opposite wall.
I straightened and drew a deep breath that made me light-headed for a second. Maybe the bullet holes meant nothing; maybe they'd been there for years.
Feeling a bit steadier, I went to the window and tried to peer in between the drawn curtains. They overlapped too much and it was impossible. I saw something else, though. Directly opposite the neat hole in the window pane was a neat hole in the curtain.
My breath caught in the dryness of my throat and lumped there, and my stomach felt as if it had been stabbed with a tuning fork. There was no walking away now. It was time to have Mick's mother call the law.
They got there in five minutes and I showed them my identification and they weren't impressed. A tall man with dark hair combed like Hitler's introduced himself as Lieutenant Frank Dockard, the stocky uniformed policeman with him as Sergeant Avery. By their manner I saw within a few minutes that Avery was the silent servant and that Dockard fashioned himself the brains.
Mick and his mother watched soberly from their front porch as I told my story, and Dockard made notes in a leather-covered note pad with the diligence of a monk copying an ancient manuscript. When I was finished, he snapped the note pad shut and gave no indication of what he thought, and the professionally placid, thick features of Sergeant Avery were unchanged.
After a while Dockard rubbed a long forefinger behind his right ear, as if checking for an injury. "Let's take a look at these bullet holes," he said, and led the way toward the back of the house.
The three of us stood on the back porch while Mick and his mother looked silently on from next door. Dockard grunted when he saw the holes in the door, stepped down off the porch and grunted again when he saw the bullet hole in the window and the corresponding hole in the curtain.
"Phoned Mr. Carlon," Dockard said as Avery inserted a pencil into the bullet holes to check the angles of the shots. "He said he hasn't heard from his daughter in months but knew
she wasn't in Layton."
"If he hasn't heard from her in months," I said, "how can he know where she is?"
"He can know where she isn't."
I decided not to rise to that bait. I got a roll of antacid tablets from my pocket and popped one of the white disks into my mouth.
"What's that for?" Dockard asked.
"Nervous stomach."
He looked me over appraisingly with small brown eyes. "Can't blame you for that."
I could feel the veiled suspicion, the catlike waiting to pounce on my first wrong move, my first indication of whatever they thought I was trying to pull off.
"Look," I said to Dockard, "I'm only doing my job. We're in the same business… You ought to understand that."
"I don't understand what a Carlon and her daughter would be doing living in a little dump like this, especially here in Layton. And I don't know if I like your line of business, either. It's legalized kidnapping."
"So is what Joan Clark did. The father has as much right to the child as she does. Besides, after I make the snatch I always let the child decide."
"Decide what?"
"Whether to go or stay."
"And what do they do?"
"After we talk it out they usually pick the parent who cared enough about them to hire me."
"And if they don't?"
"I leave them and refund my client's fee. It's in the fine print of my contract."
"That's stupid business."
"It doesn't happen very often. I'm a persuasive talker"
Avery was finished fooling around with the bullet holes.
"Why don't we go in?" I asked, but I was afraid to go in and Dockard could see that.
"Better the front way," he said, and we walked around the house. We must have been driving Mick and his mother crazy.
The front door was locked, and at a nod from Dockard, Avery leaned his bulk against it and the latch splintered from the wood frame. My heart tried to scramble up my throat as we went in.
The inside of the tiny house was uncomfortably hot, stuffy, with the thick stillness of a place that has been closed tight for a long time. We were in the living room-red shag carpet, worn sofa, recliner chair, incongruously expensive stereo set up along one wall. The lamp on the table by the front window was still glowing.