Cinnamon Skin

by John D. MacDonald

  He put a scrap of envelope on the table. I held it so Meyer could read it as I did: Route 3, Box 810, Cold Brook, New York.

  “Said to be someplace north of Utica,” Boomer said.

  “Long way to go to come up empty,” Sigiera said.

  “No place is too far,” Meyer said. “And why empty?”

  “Because most old cold leads turn out empty, that’s all. The new hot ones pay off a lot more often.”

  We bought the lunch over Sigiera’s protests, and we promised to let him know if we learned anything.

  Seventeen

  They let us check out of the little motel north of Eagle Pass at three in the afternoon without paying for the extra night on the two rooms.

  I estimated on the map that we were a little less than three hundred and fifty miles from Houston on Route 57, then 1–35 and 1–10, and so should make it back to the Houston apartment by midnight.

  A brassy sun filled half the sky, and with the air on full blast it was still warm inside the van. At speed the van was just noisy enough to inhibit conversation. We were both involved in independent guesswork. When either of us came up with something, we would yell across to the other side of the seat to check it out.

  “Hideout in Mexico?” Meyer shouted. “Got the language. Use the same papers going back and forth to the States. Change identity once he’s across the border?”

  “He was using Evan Lawrence down there, working with somebody named Willy in Cancún.”

  I glanced over at him. He looked disappointed.

  Once, when we stopped for gas, he said, “If I had a hideout I would use trip wires and tin cans and cow bells to let me know if anybody was approaching.”

  “If we ever get close, we can expect that. And expect him to be dangerous.”

  “I still like the idea of Mexico. Maybe Evan Lawrence is his hideaway name.”

  “So why would he call attention to it by arranging to have himself killed?”

  “I see what you mean. I’m not thinking well.”

  “We’re doing okay. Thanks to you, we know the name he started with. And we know what started him.”

  “It seems incredible to me that we could have had dinner with him and Norma, and there wasn’t the slightest hint of violence under that friendly face.”

  Then we were back on the highway, booming along through the end of the day, the sunset behind us, our shadow long, angling to one side or the other as the road changed subtle directions. I grunted and pulled into the next rest stop, parked with the motor running, and turned and faced Meyer. “We make it too complicated.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “It just came to me. He had to destroy Evan Lawrence.”

  “Why?”

  “The money.”

  Meyer frowned and then suddenly said, “Of course! It would be too risky to hang around as the mourning husband and wait for the legal procedures to clean up the details and hand over the money. When he talked Norma into gradually moving all the cash out of the trust, he knew he was going to stage a common disaster. Otherwise, if he could have risked staying right there, he would have left the money in the trust and it would have come to him on her death. But that would have meant a more careful research job on him by the law and the lawyers.”

  “Wouldn’t you have inherited under the terms of the will?”

  “Wouldn’t it have been an easy job for him to get her to make a new will? And then that too would have been significant. You’re right, Travis. Evan Lawrence was a temporary person. He could only last so long. How long was it, a half year maybe? And now he’s back in his safe place. And sooner or later he’ll come out again, as someone else. On the hunt. Prowling. Searching. Smiling.”

  Back up to speed, each of us thinking, adding up the little morsels we had discovered, from Christine Statzer, Martin Eagle, Betsy Ann Larker, Bunky, Boomer, Paul Sigiera. Like a child’s game in the Sunday comics. Connect the dots and find the animal.

  “Common disasters are hard to stage,” Meyer shouted.

  So I worked on that one, through the end of daylight into night, into late quarter-pounders at an almost deserted McDonald’s at Seguin. “You can arrange it with fire,” I said, “if you can find somebody approximately the right size. Hitchhiker. Backpacker. A transient is best, because he won’t be missed for a long time, if ever. Chunk them both on the head, drive off the road into a tree, jumping free at the last minute, the way he probably did in Ingram. Then toss the match. Put your ring on his finger before you toss the match. Take off any rings he might have. Car fires are hot. Water is easier. Overturned boat, drowned woman, man missing, presumed dead. Explosives are good too, except it takes an awful lot. Send her up in a plane with a bomb in the luggage, after buying two tickets. Last-minute excuse. Join you later, honey. But you kill a lot of other folks that way.”

  Suddenly a small elderly woman jumped up out of a booth across the way. I hadn’t noticed her. She glared at me. “Monsters!” she said in a breathy whisper. “Monsters!” She scuttled out.

  And Meyer started laughing. It was the first genuine laugh I had heard from him in a year. His eyes ran. He hugged his belly and groaned. “Oh, oh, oh.” I levered him up and aimed him toward the car. He staggered with laughter. The little old lady might call the law, and it would be well to be up to speed in reasonable time.

  On Friday morning at a travel agency in the shopping mall near Piney Village, we discovered that if you want to get to Utica, Houston isn’t a good place to start from. Maybe there aren’t any good places to start from. But they could get us to Syracuse by six that evening, with a long wait between flights at Atlanta.

  A few minutes from Houston we came up through hot murky clouds into a bright white blaze of sunshine. At Atlanta we took a train from our gate back to the terminal. I wandered back and forth past a row of phone booths and finally went in and phoned Naples.

  She answered on the first half of the first ring. “Yes?”

  “Me,” I said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Atlanta, heading north pretty soon. I wondered about the job.”

  “You didn’t wonder enough to call me on Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday, or—”

  “I thought about it every day.”

  “I bet.”

  “I really did. We’ve been doing a lot of scuffling. Okay, tell me how it came out.”

  “The job was offered and the terms are marvelous. They gave me until Monday to think it over, so I did, and I phoned them and said yes.”

  “And if I had phoned Sunday?”

  “McGee, I would like to stick you with it. I would like to tell you that if you’d called, maybe I would have said no. But it just ain’t true, darlin’. I want that job so bad I can hardly breathe.”

  “When will you be leaving?”

  “The man I’m training to replace me reported this morning. They want me in Maui on August fifteenth.”

  “How’s the guy they sent?”

  “Howard is a little bit slow to catch on, but once he has something firmly in mind, it stays there. I think he’ll be okay. Cornell hotel school. They made him very well aware of the records I set here, so he knows he’d be a fool to make any big changes.”

  “Seems awful soon.”

  “It is soon. I’ve been a little bit depressed ever since I said yes, as a matter of fact. Not just about you but about the whole thing here. It’s been a wonderful part of my life.”

  “Past tense.”

  “What’s over, as they say, is over. How are you doing?”

  “We learned the name he started with. Cody T. W. Pittler. And we think we know why he is a congenital murderer.”

  “More murders?”

  “Lots we don’t know about, probably.”

  “Do be careful, will you?”

  “We may never get any closer to him than we are now. We’re going up north to see his sister. She hasn’t seen him in twenty-two years, probably. We think he has some safe place from which he ventures fo
rth from time to time, to evil do. The great lover. He sets up passionate affairs with women and then does them in.”

  “At least they die happy. Sorry. That was bad taste.”

  “I encouraged it. I was giving it the light touch. But I don’t feel light at all inside. I’m depressed by how soon it is going to be the middle of August.”

  “I’m glad, at least, that you finally called. I was beginning to get really annoyed with you.”

  “I’ve been basking in garden spots, like Freer, Encinal, Cotulla, and Eagle Pass.”

  “City life, huh? Excuse, Travis. I was on my way out when the phone rang. I’m to have a rum something with Howard by the pool, and we are going to talk about getting the east forty re-zoned. We really need it if we’re to have any room at all to grow here. Phone me, please, when you get back home. The minute you get home, okay?”

  “Okay. Good luck with the rezoning.”

  “Good luck with your mass murderer, baby.”

  I hung up and went over to where Meyer was sitting. He was fatuously content. He had found a copy of The Economist on the newsstand and was learning all about economic crises in the NATO countries.

  By the time we reached the Avis counter in the Syracuse airport, it was six thirty on a hot sticky Friday evening, the sun still high. We’d reserved the car in Atlanta, on Meyer’s card, and it was waiting for us out in slot 20, a burgundy two-door with a drooped nose and a memory of cigar smoke inside. The Avis woman had given us instructions as to how to get on the Thruway. It was still bright daylight when we took the Utica exit and found, on the way toward downtown, an elderly and overpriced Howard Johnson motel. I could stomach the motel but not the restaurant, so Meyer studied the yellow pages. He has good instincts.

  “What they seem to have the most of here is Italian,” he said. “So one goes with the tide. Objection?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Grimaldi’s, I think. Let me see. Yes. Grimaldi’s.”

  When we finally found it, the daylight was almost gone. It was on a corner, with a public park across from one side of it and some sort of yellow-brick public housing project across from the front entrance. We had a hard time finding a parking place. Meyer said that was a good sign. The doors opened onto smoke, loud talk, laughter, a general Thank God It’s Friday flavor. The bar was off to the left, the dining area to the right. A slender, grave, dark-haired woman led us to a table for two against the far wall and gave us over-sized menus. A small, bald, elderly waiter came trotting over and took our order for extra-dry martinis with twists. They came quickly. Meyer sipped, he smiled, he relaxed. “The food will be good,” he said. “You never get a generous and delicious cocktail in a proper glass in a restaurant where the food is bad.” Another Meyer dictum. They seem to work out.

  And the veal piccata was indeed splendid, and went well with the Valpolicella.

  Over coffee, Meyer said, “It’s like coming back to life. All this. I was shut down for a year. Now there is a kind of internal pressure that every now and then pops another area of me wide open the way it once was. When I take pleasure in it, then I feel guilty that I owe this conditional resurrection to Norma.”

  “Conditional?”

  “Of course. How long does it last? Only until the next animal gives me a choice between acting like a man or sitting on the floor and forgetting my name. At times I am anxious to find out, and at other times I hope there will never be another confrontation.”

  “You’ll be fine.”

  “My words to myself exactly. Meyer, I say to myself, you’ll be fine. Just fine.” His smile was wry.

  I looked around at the patrons of the restaurant and the bar. Politicos, many of them young. Lawyers and elected officials and appointees. Some with their wives or girls. It looked to me as if a lot of the city and county business might be transacted right here. They had a lot of energy, these Italianate young men, a feverish gregariousness. I wondered aloud why they seemed so frantic about having a good time.

  Meyer studied the question and finally said, “It’s energy without a productive outlet, I think. Most of these Mohawk Valley cities are dying, have been for years: Albany, Troy, Amsterdam, Utica, Syracuse, Rome. And so they made an industry out of government. State office buildings in the decaying downtowns. A proliferation of committees, surveys, advisory boards, commissions, legal actions, grants, welfare, zoning boards, road departments, health care groups … thousands upon thousands of people making a reasonably good living working for city, county, state, and federal governments in these dwindling cities, passing the same tax dollars back and forth. I think that man, by instinct, is productive. He wants to make something, a stone ax, a bigger cave, better arrows, whatever. But these bright and energetic men know in their hearts they are not making anything. They use every connection, every contact, every device, to stay within reach of public monies. Working within an abstraction is just not a totally honorable way of life. Hence the air of jumpy joy, the backslaps ringing too loudly, compliments too extravagant, toasts too ornate, marriages too brief, lawsuits too long-drawn, obligatory forms too complex and too long. Their city has gone stale, and as the light wanes, they dance.”

  “Very poetic, Professor.”

  “Valpolicella tends to do that to me.”

  “I’ve missed your impromptu lectures.”

  “Be careful what you say, I may try to make up for the lost year.”

  “I haven’t missed them that much.”

  Eighteen

  After breakfast, the morning news on the car radio said that the high for the day was estimated to be one hundred and two degrees in downtown Utica, a record for the last day of July. I drove, following the directions given me at the motel desk when we checked out.

  We headed out of the valley, up Deerfield Hill, past television towers, on a two-lane road so steep in places that the little dark-red car had a problem handling both the grade and the air conditioning, lugging down until it shifted itself into a lower gear. After the suburban houses came the small rundown farms, barns dark-gray and sagging, a few horses grazing. The farms were on a plateau where the road led straight into the distance, toward the misted foothills of the Adirondacks.

  There was less traffic headed north than I expected. No doubt the vacation-bound had left the city on Friday. It was a little cooler on the plateau. We had merged with Route 8, and I wanted to get to the post office in Poland—as the man at the desk had suggested—to find out how I might find Mrs. Fox.

  We came down off the plateau to run along a creek valley into Poland, a small commuter town with such large maples bordering the main street that they gave an illusion of coolness on this summer Saturday. Route 8 turned left by a tiny island of greenery in the middle of the village. Meyer spotted the post office ahead on the right, and I stayed at the wheel while he went in.

  He came out quite soon and said, “We stay on Route Eight up through Cold Brook, another village the size of this one. And we’ll see the name on a mailbox on the right side of the road, across from the house. The house is a mobile home. He said he thought it was gray and blue, but he wasn’t sure. He guessed it at about ten miles past the far edge of Cold Brook. Strange thing, though.”

  “Such as?”

  “He was reasonably cordial when I went to the window. But when I told him who I was trying to find, he got very short with me. Abrupt and impatient. He gave me the information and walked away. He registered disapproval of her, and of me for asking how to find her.”

  It was only two miles between villages, and I checked the speedometer when we left Cold Brook. Soon the road made a long curve up a gentle slope, and a sign at the top of the hill told us we had entered the Adirondack Park Preserve.

  The man had underestimated by about three miles. When we came to her place, I began to understand why he had acted as he did. At one time evergreens had been planted in a long line, close together, along the left side of the road to provide, I guessed, a snow fence to keep the road clear in winter. The tr
ees were very large. Several of them were gone, and her trailer sat in the gap about fifty feet from the road and parallel to it. It could have once been gray and blue. There was a big battered red-and-white four-wheel-drive Bronco on extra wide and extra tall tires parked in the dirt driveway headed out, leaving us no room to turn in.

  I parked beyond her mailbox and we got out and stood there, stunned by the profusion of junk that filled the yard from fence to fence. Car parts, refrigerators, cargo trailers without wheels, stovewood, rolls of roofing paper, bed frames, broken rocking chairs, broken deck furniture, piles of cinder block, piles of roof tiles, a stack of full sheets of plywood, moldering away. Glass bottles, plastic bottles, cans, fenders, old washing machines, fencing wire, window frames, 55-gallon drums rust red, an old horse-drawn sleigh, crates half full of empty soft-drink bottles, and many other bulky objects which did not seem to have had any useful purpose ever. The scene stunned the mind. It was impossible to take it all in at once. In a strange way it had an almost artistic impact, a new art form devised in three dimensions to show the collapse of Western civilization. It made me think of an object I had seen in New York when a woman persuaded me to go with her to an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. That object was a realistic-looking plastic hamburger on a bun with an ooze of mustard, pickle, and catsup. It was ten feet in diameter and stood five feet high. This scene had that same total familiarity plus unreality.

  “Maybe she’s in violation of the zoning laws,” Meyer murmured.

  “If those are her own clothes hung out over there on the fence to dry, she is sizable.”

  We walked in, past the big vehicle. She must have seen us through the window. She opened the narrow door of the trailer and stepped down onto the top step of the three that led to the door. The trailer was up on cinder blocks.