10
RAGGED PLASTIC PENNANTS FLUTTERED OVERHEAD—yellow, red, orange—on slack wires between corroded floodlight poles. Dave walked among secondhand cars toward a small wood-and-glass building in the weedy rear corner of a blacktop lot. PAT FARRELL GOOD USED CARS, the tin sign read. WE CARRY OUR OWN CONTRACTS. The cars were filmed with dust. Lettered on their windshields in chalky pink paint were false claims: LOW MILEAGE, CLEAN, FACTORY AIR, ALL POWER, STICK SHIFT, SHARP, EVEN CHERRY—along with prices the dealer knew better than to expect.
Pat Farrell’s was the kind of lot you walked onto with cash if you were smart. You chose what you wanted and didn’t listen to why it was worth the three hundred fifty dollars it was marked. You pressed down on the upholstery, frowned under the hood, kicked the tires while the salesman followed you around, talking. Then you waved a hundred-dollar bill under his nose and drove out with twenty-five dollars’ worth of scrap steel, cracked plastic, thin rubber, and the pink slip in your pocket.
At the foot of the plank stairs to the sales office was parked a European mini like the one that had died under Vern Taylor on the coast road yesterday morning, GAS SAVER was lettered on the glass. Especially when it stalls, Dave thought, and climbed the steps. The office door stood open because it was another hot morning. Inside, a man sat at a yellow wood desk whose top was covered by the spread-out classified ad pages of the Examiner. The man was circling ads with a felt-tip pen. His suit hung loose on him. A cigar was clenched in his teeth. An electric fan blew from the top of a tin file cabinet in a corner, ruffled his greenish toupee, chased the cigar smoke out through the glass louvers of a side window. He looked up, dropped the pen, laid the cigar on the desk edge, where earlier burns had made black fluting.
“Morning.” He stood up, held out a hand. Where thick flesh must have padded out his cheeks once, a smile gathered back loose folds on either side of his mouth. The show of teeth was tobacco dingy. But the voice had warmth and a high gloss. “Pat Farrell. What can I do for you, sir?” Eyes like cheap green glass measured Dave and the smile died. “No—you don’t want a car from me.”
Dave laid a business card on the gray-print pages. It was the card Billy Wendell had given him day before yesterday. “When will he be in?”
“He won’t be.” Farrell dropped into his creaky swivel chair again. Above his head a flyspecked sign read YOUR CREDIT IS GOOD WITH US. “I fired him last week. That’s not the way to put it. Makes me look bad. He fired himself. I warned him a dozen times, if he came on the lot drunk again, he had to go. But”—shoulder bones moved inside the bulky suit—“you feel sorry for them. Hell, Billy knows this business. He’s good when he’s sober.”
“And when would that be?” Dave asked.
“Yeah.” Farrell breathed a sour laugh. “Well, I just hoped the shock might help him. I hated to do it. He’s old. Nobody else is going to take him on. Everybody in the business knows him. I was his last chance. And I put up with a lot for a long time. I’ll take him back too. Told him so. If he’ll quit the bottle. Nobody can do that for him. Man’s got to do that for himself. Look at me.” He put fingers inside his shirt collar to show how loose it was. “I know what I’m talking about. Not drink; no. Food. Loved to eat. Doc told me it was killing me. Either I lost a hundred pounds or I could plan on dropping dead here one of these days.”
“You lost the weight,” Dave said. “Congratulations.”
Farrell wagged his head. “Haven’t lost it all yet. That’s why I’m wearing my old clothes. Looks like I borrowed this suit from somebody, doesn’t it?” He plucked at an ample sleeve, laughed, picked up the cigar, clamped it in his teeth again. “I’m just waiting till I get down to one sixty-five. Then I’ll buy new duds.”
“I need Wendell’s home address,” Dave said.
“Don’t think he’s there.” Farrell stood up again. “I went over there yesterday. To try to find out a little more about a contract he wrote that somebody skipped on. His landlady thinks he took a runout.”
“She could check with his ex-wife,” Dave said.
Farrell’s eyebrows went up. “Never knew he had one. He never said anything about her.”
“Their son died,” Dave said. “He saw the notice in the paper. He hadn’t known where they were, so he says. Close to forty years. He went to the funeral.”
“Never mentioned them.” Farrell opened a file drawer, brought a manila folder to the desk, sat down and copied an address on a note pad. He tore off the slip, pushed it across the open newspaper to Dave. “That’s the dump where he was living. Always made me feel bad when I saw it. I mean, I was paying the man a decent wage. He didn’t have to live like that.”
“Liquor is expensive.” Dave folded the paper and pushed it into a pocket. “Thank you.”
“What’s your interest in Billy?” Farrell followed Dave to the door. “You’re not a cop. You’re not a bill collector. What’s your line?”
“Insurance,” Dave said. “Death claims.”
Farrell squinted. “Something wrong about the boy’s death?”
“Everything.” Dave started down the steps, turned. “Did Billy Wendell owe you money?”
Farrell turned down the corners of his mouth. “I advanced him twenty here, fifty there. Never kept count.”
“You weren’t pressing him hard for fifteen hundred dollars?”
The skin-crumpling smile again. It looked ghastly in the bright sunlight. “I’m good-hearted but I’m no fool. It’s been thirty years since I let a drunk get into me for that kind of loot. No—maybe a hundred, two hundred at the outside. I kissed it goodbye when I gave it to him. You seen him?”
Lighting a cigarette, Dave nodded.
“Then you know a man wouldn’t expect loans back from Billy Wendell. He’d work overtime for me when the wife and I had a date or went to Vegas for the weekend or whatever. I got it back that way—when he was sober enough to trust.”
Dave gazed off across the dully glinting car tops, watched the anxious, frantic flutter of the little ragged flags, calling no one from the empty sun-stark boulevard beyond. “You thought I might be a bill collector. Why? Did they come around? Did they want you to garnishee his wages? Say for a bill like that. A thousand, fifteen hundred?”
“You telling me his son was murdered? For money?”
“Possibly.” Dave shrugged. “Fifteen hundred is missing. Off his desk. He lay dead by the desk.”
“Naw.” Pat Farrell shook his head decisively. “He wouldn’t kill anybody. Not Billy Wendell. He had his faults but he wouldn’t kill anybody.”
“He didn’t need a large sum of money to stay out of jail?” Dave asked again. “Nobody was closing in on him?”
“Nobody knew he existed,” Farrell said. Then he saw at the far corner of the lot a Mexican youth in a buttoned shirt without a tie, a fat brown girl carrying a baby in her arms, peering into a broad, low-slung maroon convertible with high tail fins and flashy hub caps. He bolted past Dave down the steps and, suit flapping, jogged across the tarmac, holding out his hand, grinning. His voice drifted back to Dave on the warm breeze. “Howdy. Buenas días. What can I do for you folks this beautiful morning? Isn’t that a beauty? That’s what I call a sharp automobile. And a steal at that price. An absolute steal.”
The street was broad with a center divider where abandoned streetcar rails turned to rust among dry weeds and clumps of sunflowers. Across the way, a chain-link fence with barbwire closed in vast gas storage tanks. Up the block, boxy stucco buildings made a corner—Lucky’s bar and grill, the others empty, FOR RENT signs curling in the windows. Here, in the middle of the block, a red neon anchor and the word MOTEL tilted at the top of a steel post above a square of cement-block units painted clay color. Ivy geranium struggled in the hard dirt between a cracked sidewalk and the small-windowed walls. Blacktop covered the inner courtyard, where a greasy motorcycle stood with pieces of itself scattered around its wheels and there was an automobile that would have discouraged even Pat Farrell.
/> Spiky upthrusts of tired Spanish bayonet guarded the car entrance. A red-and-white sign beside a Dutch door on the cabin to the left said HI! RING BELL FOR SERVICE. He rang bell and a cat came from somewhere and rubbed its yellow stripes against his legs. He crouched and scratched its ears. It purred. The top of the Dutch door opened and a knobby-jawed woman gave him a smile. She wore a crisscross halter and shorts of a Hawaiian material whose hibiscuses had faded many voyages ago. There was nothing Hawaiian about her look or her talk. They were strictly Little Rock, Arkansas.
“We got lots of room,” she said. She rattled up a clipboard on a chain from inside and laid it on top of the lower shelf. There was a ballpoint pen on a braided nylon cord. “Take your choice.”
“I’m looking for Billy Wendell.” Dave handed her his Medallion card. “Unit nine, someone told me.”
“That’s right.” She opened the lower half of the door and stepped out. Her skin in the sun was dead white. She was all elbows, knees, collarbones. “But he’s not in it. Hasn’t been here two, three days. I don’t expect him. You gonna find him? Cause when you do, remind him he owes me three weeks’ rent. Place is nigh empty. I got to eat too, tell him.”
“Isn’t this your good season?” Dave asked.
“I don’t have a good season,” she said.
“Can I see his room?” Dave asked. “Before the police?”
“Police!” She gawked. “What’s he done?”
“A member of his family met with an accident,” Dave said. “That person was insured by my company. We have a set investigative routine, you know?” He gave her a smile. “All right? Or is the room rented?”
“Fat chance. Here.” She reached inside the door, where keys jingled. “Nope. Forgot. Maid’s got it. Cleanin’ up today. Look for her.” She turned her head, sniffed. “Damn! I boiled that coffee.” She vanished back inside. The cat jumped up on the shelf, knocked down the clipboard, followed her.
Next to the door of nine stood a square canvas laundry hamper on wheels. Sheets draggled from it. The door was open and inside the room a vacuum whined. He peered in. A shadowy female with a white cloth tied over her hair sullenly pushed furniture. Dave stepped inside. The maid was black and young. She didn’t appear even to glance at him but she said, “Ain’ ready yet.”
Closet doors stood open on emptiness. Big shabby slacks and jackets lay across a grudging upholstered chair with greasy arms. Hats, a worn raincoat, two pairs of cracked shoes. Dave picked up and dropped a tangle of stained neckties. “Did he leave anything else?”
“You the Man?” She glanced at him this time but without much interest. “Ain’ been through the drawers yet.” She jerked her head at a brown-painted thrift-shop chest under a wavery mirror. Dave found underwear and socks, empty bourbon bottles with supermarket labels, candy-bar wrappers, a cellophane bag with three dried-out doughnuts, moldy bread in white wax paper. He shut the drawers. “Nothing else?”
“Wastebasket out there.” She ran the shiny tube of the vacuum over faded plaid window curtains that matched the spread on the sagging bed. “He dead or somethin’?”
“Or something,” Dave said. In the morning sun glare he squatted by the wastebasket—cardboard papered in plaid—and lifted out another whiskey bottle and a cigarette carton. Under these was a folded section of newspaper. He put on his glasses and looked it over. Circled in red pencil was the story of Rick Wendell’s murder. The page number was 17 and Billy hadn’t lied—the address of the canyon house was there. Dave tore off the sheet, folded it, pocketed it, took a second newspaper section from the basket.
This wasn’t from the Times. It was from a local advertising throw-away. And there was a spread on the Mr. Marvelous contest to come, with pictures of, among others, Rick Wendell. He and Ace Kegan flanked Bobby Reich, who wore the little white shorts. A lot of other men were in the pictures—owners, contestants, most of whom Dave had met on his tour of the bars. Captions identified them and named their places of business. The text didn’t say what kind of businesses they were—this was a family paper. It was dated a week ahead of the murder. So Billy had lied about one thing—he’d known his son was alive and well and where to find him. Dave tore off this sheet and pushed it in with the other one.
The wastebasket held another bottle, a pizza tin gummy with sauce, wadded paper napkins, a waxed cup with the Coca-Cola trademark—and then the torn-up pieces of a letter. Dave fitted the ragged edges together on the gritty blacktop. My Dear Son—you will have forgotten me and no wonder since your mother and I came to a parting of the ways years ago but I want to say how proud I am to read in the paper that you are a success in life even though your father has not… The writing, sprawling and unsteady, broke off there.
Dave tucked the fragments into the pocket with the news sheets and poked into the wastebasket again. A half-eaten hamburger in its gold-foil Jack in the Box wrapper, a corn chip bag, last week’s TV Guide. And that was all. Dave dumped the trash back into the basket, got to his feet, brushing his hands together. He called thanks to the vacuuming girl and walked back to the motel office, where the bony woman leaned on the lower half of the Dutch door, drinking coffee from a mug with the yellow round “Smile” face on it, and eating a pastry.
Dave asked, “He had a home away from home—right?” She nodded. “Lucky’s,” she said. “Right up at the corner. You can’t miss it.”
A glass-and-steel phone booth waited beside the Spanish bayonets. He stepped into it, dragged the phone book on its chain from under the little corner shelf and thumbed the gritty pages. The yellow ones. He found the listing. Hang Ten. It had a red pencil mark around it, like the mark around the story of Rick Wendell’s death in the paper. He dropped the directory on its chain and got into the Electra. The radio went on with the ignition. A Beethoven quartet, one of the Rasoumovskys, he thought. He sat and listened to it for a minute before he let the brake go and rolled along the block to the lonely buildings huddled on the corner in the sun.
Out the open door of Lucky’s came an eye-stinging smell of pine disinfectant. Inside, someone short and fat, cocooned in a big white apron, mopped a floor of worn black vinyl tile. Like big metal insects stunned by the smell, stools stood legs up on the bar, chairs on little tables. There was a big metal bucket with rubber rollers on top. When the stubby being dropped the drizzly gray strings of the mop between these, levered them closed and pulled, there was loud squealing. Dave coughed. The mop wielder turned. The face was round, white, withered, like an apple forgotten in a cellar.
“You’re just a shade early for a drink.”
“I don’t need a drink,” Dave said. “I’m an insurance investigator and I’ve got a question or two about one of your regulars. Billy Wendell.”
“Insurance?” The popping of dirty soap bubbles was audible in the hush. “That mean he’s dead?”
“Do they die a lot?” Dave wondered.
“They’re not young, most of ’em.” The mopping began again. Cigarette butts fled from side to side. “Billy hasn’t been around last couple nights was why I asked.”
“He’s not dead,” Dave said.
“Gone off to find his wife and kid, then.” The mop went into the bucket again. The cigarette butts drowned. “I didn’t think he’d have the nerve. They talk like that, you know. Daydreams, drink dreams. I’ve got customers been planning to break out, change their lives, for years. Never do it. Truth. Most of ’em. Never did do nothin’, never will. I only know two kinds of people in this life—them that make things happen, them that things happen to.” The mop went to work again.
“And Billy Wendell?” Dave asked.
“He’d been talking about his son. Read a piece in the paper about him, how he’s got his own business.” Chunky elbows bent and straightened. “Billy was proud of him. Success, he says. Not a failure like his old man.” Dave backed from the wet sweep of the mop and the little figure bowed into sunlight from the door. The voice hadn’t let him be sure of it, but he decided now that she was fem
ale, a fat little woman of fifty in men’s clothes, with a man’s haircut. “When he got fired from the used car lot, Billy says it was okay with him. He could go back to his son, his son would look after him, his son wouldn’t let his old man go down to destruction.”
“Billy was here every night?”
“About. Oh, he’d get economy spells. Scuse me.” She nodded and Dave stepped out onto the sidewalk while the mop spread dirty suds across the doorsill. The woman leaned the mop against the door, wiped fat little hands on the wraparound apron, stepped out blinking into the sun. “There’d be a night or two he’d drink in his motel room.” A stubby thumb jerked in the direction of the cinder-block buildings under the neon anchor up the weedy block. “But he’d miss the company. We’d miss him too. It gets like a family, place like this. So he’d soon be back. TV’s poor company, you know. Nothin’ to drinkin’ alone.”
“Monday night,” Dave said. “Was that one of the times he tried TV?”
“Monday?” She looked back into the dark bar as if the answer might come from there. Then she looked at him again and her face puckered into a grin. “Naw, not Monday. Hell, we had a celebration Monday. Birthday party. For Lilian. Lilian Drill and her old man. They been coming in here must be five, six years. Lilian’s just the most fun. Everybody loves Lilian. No—Billy was here till two, till closing. All the regulars was here. Billy especially. They’re a set, him and Lilian.”
“How’s that?” Dave asked.
“The Beautiful People,” the pudgy woman said. “You heard that expression. Naw, I don’t mean these days, but once. Lilian was in pictures in the thirties. And Billy—everybody’s seen his photos, polo playing, horse shows, yachts. He was handsome. Money, high life. Yup, him and Lilian. They’re a set.”
“What time did he get here Monday? Late?”
“Five in the afternoon. He built sandwiches while I frosted the cake. I always bake the cakes myself. Store bought, they’re sawdust. Baked it, decorated it myself. My old man was a baker. Before he decided there was more money in booze.” She poked inside the apron and brought out a crushed pack of cigarettes. She lit one with a paper match and blew the smoke at the sidewalk. She wore tennis shoes, child size. “Thing he couldn’t remember was the booze was for the customers. Killed him. Anyway, I decorated the cake.” She gestured in the air. “Lucky’s Own Movie Queen—that’s what I wrote on it.” She gave a little sad laugh and shook her head. “Lilian cried.”
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