by L. L. Enger
Behind Gun the kidney man at last stood up successfully and started a cramped quiet walk toward the sea. The kid with unlucky shins was awake and had the whimpers. The dog gave a sudden, joyous yip and started scratching up earth with its back feet.
Now that Moses had the blond man’s ears he was communicating furiously. “So you her cute-ass little boyfriend, what do you, own the woman? Hey? She come back to me because she’s missin’ something with you maybe? Boyfriend?”
Well, it was the usual thing then. Gun felt hollow at having wrecked a man’s legs over nothing more than someone else’s woman trouble. He called, “Say, Moses, take a stretch, will you?” He walked slowly to the still-open door of the Gates Motel and sat down on the threshold. The adrenaline was going fast now and taking with it the interest and caffeine he’d used instead of sleep. He felt like he was back on the plane with Mrs. New York hearing three hours of narration about her sister. Wanting to avoid this he stood up again. He went to the kid, whose pants were soaking up blood now over the shins and whose womanlike lips were gray and murmuring, though admirably quiet. He picked the kid up as easily as he could and carried him past Moses, who still had hold of the man’s ears and seemed to be settling in for the day, to a long yellow Lincoln Continental. It was early ‘80s and had a flattened roll of rubber-backed carpet across the backseat.
“You get here in this?” Gun said.
The kid nodded. Gun opened the back door and laid him in on the roll of carpet. On the back of the tan leather seat someone had printed you don’t smoke jackass in black marker.
“I know this won’t help,” Gun said, “but I feel bad, about the legs. Your buddy’s socket wrench, I had to grab something. It wasn’t worth it. For either of us.”
It didn’t help. Gun listened but the kid didn’t open his mouth, so he shut the car door and went to Moses and tapped him on the shoulder. He said, “Don’t hurt Blondie too much.”
Blondie had his hands over Moses’s hands over his ears. His eyes were as wild as a pig’s at slaughter.
“Why in the hell not?” Moses gave a shake.
“He’s got to drive his little pal to the hospital. And himself, it looks like.”
Finally Moses let go, the storm leaving him and dissipating into the slow seaside breeze of this fine morning. Blondie put his hands to his ears tenderly and not finding the words to leave, went to the Lincoln in silence. The car rumbled, backed out of its spot, and coughed its way out of their hearing.
The sun was only a little higher over the ocean. Across the highway a swirl of gulls screamed and dipped. The kid’s legs bothered Gun and he thought a broad repentance. Then the good salt heat flooded him and he tore up a handful of grass to rub blood from his fingers.
Moses had taken off his shirt and was wiping blood from his face. In one of the motel windows a tiny black girl watched, crying. Moses said, “We get cleaned up, we can still head over to Billy’s.”
The dog had trotted up gladly to Gun and he reached down to scratch it. He said, “You catchers sure do take a beating.”
5
In the car Gun said, “Did you know this woman was so popular?”
They were going north on the Intracoastal Highway with the wind rising off the Atlantic almost too cool for lowered windows.
“No big shock. Linda never had a hard time finding company.” Moses’s face after a wash didn’t look so bad, a couple short deep cuts on the cheeks, a place on the forehead like a bad rash. A little puffier than
normal. “When she showed up that evening I hadn’t seen her in half a year. Hadn’t realized how sick of my own self I was until I saw her. She came in and I thought, I’m a sad piece of crap, but not no more.”
“That was the night Billy died.”
Moses nodded once. “She wouldn’ta stayed long, though, Billy or not.”
The fight had been nasty for the Beretta. There was a long shallow dent in the center of the hood where Moses had landed, and a smaller sharp pock Blondie had hammered in using Moses’s head. It was a topographical disaster. Now Gun turned the bruised Chevy left on Arlington Road and steered past small farms interspersed with roadside fruit stands, still vacant in the morning, their long windows covered with sheets of plywood.
“Left again,” said Moses, and they turned in at one of the fruit shacks that was minus plywood, paint, or fruit. A dirt track led behind the shack and into a small grove of mature citrus trees. Orange and grapefruit, mixed, the fruit hanging from boughs in nearly ripe corpulence. The heavy scent made Gun feel strong and slightly off balance, as though he were breathing pure vitamin C.
“Private orchard,” Moses said. “Billy’d just bought the place. Old fella had it before used to pick all his fruit himself and sell it out his roadside window. Hobby. Billy talked about doing the same thing. Some days he got sick of newspapering.”
The track led over a hummock where the fruit trees stood off to let in some sun, and topping it they saw the weathered home of Billy Apple. An old house of unpainted Florida cypress, bigger than it looked at first: two stories topped by a steep roofline that leveled down in front over a generous southern porch, blooming azaleas rushing up under a set of paned windows on the west side, other greenery in full wildness pressing in on the place as if coveting the ground it was built on. A yellow police ribbon was taped around the house and tied off in front with something like a Christmas bow. The porch held a swaybacked davenport, and the davenport held Sergeant Morrell.
“Mr. Gates,” he said, standing as the car rolled up. He was a tall, one, made taller by gauntness and the uniform and somehow by the spare crop of mustache hairs riding his upper lip. He was clutching his pointy policeman’s cap in both hands. “And Mr. Gun Peder-sen. I’ll be damned, it’s the All-Star team.” Morrell was grinning. “Thought you were gonna stand me up. Say, Mr. Gates, you get hit or something?”
“Just another jealous boyfriend. You know how it goes.”
“Sure I do, ha-ha.” Morrell grinned some more. Even his teeth were tall and thin.
They ducked under the awkwardness of the police tape and shook hands. Gun said, “So you’re in charge of the Apple investigation.”
“Nope. I’ll be helping out with it, though.” Morrell looked uncomfortable. “It’s gotta be confidential, me letting you come here this way. You see? My superiors wouldn’t understand, Mr. Pedersen.”
“Gun.”
Most of the worry left Morrell’s face, but not all. “So do you fellows just want to see the place, or is it something in particular?”
Moses explained about the cubbyhole. “We just thought it was worth a look. If they wanted his notes...”
Morrell was back to grinning as he produced a key and snapped it in the lock. “Say, I know you feel some responsibility here, Moses—”
“Mr. Gates.”
“—since he was doing a story about you and everything, but you understand that Apple had his fingers in a lot of different, ah, pies.” The darkened house as they stepped inside, smelted of stale smoke and old food, milk going bad in the refrigerator. Morrell didn’t appear to notice. “He did some really dangerous stuff, made some genuine bad people very mad. Remember that coke piece he did, the South American soccer guys?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“Well, that story popped a pretty big pipeline, real men’s-club stuff. You think the old boys were some kinda pissed off? You bet.” He smiled down upon Gates with the look that people who know give those who don’t. “That was Apple’s habit, pissing people off. I used to read him all the time. He had fun with it.”
Gun was quiet. The half-dark house made hollow settling sounds. Moses said, “He didn’t have so damn much fun here the other night”
“Mr. Gates, you told me right off Billy Apple was an old fan of yours. That’s why he was looking into all that business with Ferdie Millevich, right? To show everybody once and for all you were in the clear. To get you in the Hall of Fame.” Morrell’s voice went gentle. “Geez, Mr. Gates, I’m a f
an of yours, too. It’s a shame now Billy can’t finish what he was doing. But that was a lot of years ago. It’s history, is what it is. I don’t know ... history’s not something people get killed for, generally.”
Morrell added the “generally” to appease Moses, Gun knew. He said, “We’d like to have a look in the bathroom, anyhow.”
“Sure. Sure. You just don’t ever know.” Morrell seemed glad to get moving again and led them to the right, past the sour kitchen to the bathroom.
There was a moment as the young cop took down aspirin bottles and ruinous disposable razors when Gun heard Moses’s breath quicken, and then they had the cubbyhole open. It was maybe a foot square, framed by pine two-by-fours, and bare as a blown egg.
“Say, nice little spot, though,” Morrell said, over-
full of solace. “There would be plenty of room for a notebook in here.” He craned his long neck as though looking closely might show something after all in the hole, “You know,” he said, “we never did find many notes of his. The newspaper office told us he worked out of his home most of the time, and we did find a few things—scrapbooks and some shorthand junk, nothing current. We figure he was one of those guys, he kept most of his working stuff on computer.”
“Here?”
“Yeah. Lousy break for us, after they killed Apple they went over the whole house pretty well. Used a tire wrench or something on all his machinery. Smashed up his television, VCR, his stereo stack. And a computer, a Macintosh, wouldn’t you know it? We got it pretty much cleaned up now. You want to see the rest of the place?”
It was a little brighter now, the sun just getting in over the nearest orange trees and showing them rooms despoiled: Impressionist prints razored and sagging in their frames, chairs tipped forward, their backs and bottoms opened, showing guts. Around it all was the haphazard order left by investigation; a heavy wooden-shafted reading lamp, lifted and inspected and placed back down off center.
“Sergeant,” Moses said, “Billy told me he really had something with all this Ferdie Millevich business. Maybe he’d figured something out they couldn’t afford for him to write about.”
“Could be.” Morrell sighed. “Could be he’d learned something real mysterious and they killed him to shut him up and then scoured the place and got his notes so nobody’d ever find out what it was. Yeah, it’s all possible. But I got to tell you guys, R-rated thrillers aside, people usually don’t get killed so they won’t do something. They get killed for doing it.”
A moment of quiet.
“You think it was revenge for some story he
did?”
“Look at how he died, yeah, it seems that way.” Morrell looked at Gun. “Mr. Gates tell you about his feet? Not that Billy felt any pain. The fire was a little extra hate, was all.”
“What were they looking for?” Gun nodded at a slashed chair.
“You tell me. Maybe Billy took a payoff and they wanted it back. I’ll be honest with you, we don’t have shit.”
Morrell saved the living room for the final flourish, leading them in with a cathedral hush. It was smaller than Gun had imagined, ruled by the fieldstone fireplace facing the door, and barely furnished with a straight-backed oak rocker and a slender writing table and chair. The room, though small, had been left open all the way to the peaked second-story ceiling. A single pane of glass high on the southern exposure sent a slanting column of light to the red carpet. It would have been, Gun thought, like dying in a chapel.
“The rope was tied up there.” Morrell pointed to a place on the chimney halfway up where there were unmortared gaps between the stones. “That’s the draft for the fireplace. Guy pulled that little table over to stand on, getting the rope through those chinks. We found the marks from the table legs on the rug.”
There were several chalky burned-out bits of log in the rack. On the stone hearth Gun could see dried dime-size spatters, like drippings from a black candle. For Moses he said, “Morrell, Billy Apple was investigating the death of a man who died by hanging. Now he’s dead, of hanging. That must be worth looking into.”
Morrell had been dangling his policeman’s cap from the middle finger of his right hand. Now he tucked it firmly onto his head with the brim at his eyebrows. “Mr. Pedersen, we’re looking into it. We’re looking into every damn corner of this thing, and we’re going to keep doing it until we get”—he looked at Moses—“the real hangman. But listen. What happened toBilly Apple, he got himself hanged. What happened to Ferdie Millevich, go look it up if you want to, he hanged himself. Now you show me the similarity.”
Gun looked at it from the neck down and saw that there was none, and nodding to Moses they followed tile sergeant out into hard sun and orange-tasting air.
6
There was no talk on the drive back to the motel where they now sat, still in the Chevy with the engine running, windows up, air-conditioning on.
“Anybody dies in this idiot state, they blame it on the drug dealers,” Moses said. “You hear that Morrell? Talking about the damn coke pipeline and the South Americans. Just one time I wish they’d give the drug dealers the day off, get back to the rest of us.”
“He didn’t take the Ferdie thing too seriously,” Gun agreed. “Why don’t you get out now, go mind your motel. Got a game this afternoon?”
“One-fifteen, West Palm Park. Where you headed?”
“Out looking. Maybe Billy’s pals at the newspaper know more than they told the cops.”
Moses smiled, his lips pushing the new bruises into shiny knobs. “What are you, Travis McGee?”
“Sorry,” Gun said. “You’re not pretty enough.”
The By-Line was not the dominant newspaper of West Palm Beach. It didn’t have a million readers or machines all over the city like the Post or that foolish national jokes-and-graphics rag. What it did have was a nice location, one block off the ocean in a small square office complex just high enough to see over the red tile roof of the mansion between itself and the Atlantic. Gun wondered how such an unpretentious brown structure had ever been built here, on such plainly envied ground. It violated what he’d noticed about the city’s unwritten code: on the seaside, private mansions. First block in, financial institutions, about one per mansion in the clean white stone of moneychangers’ preference. More white stone another block inland, this headlined in simple neon with the names of dress designers and art dealers. Beyond, the wilderness: schools the same as schools anywhere, cheap T-shirt stores, ballparks, fish shops on streets the city hadn’t swept in years. Coming in on the low side Gun had seen a scrawny raccoon pawing through the gutter’s urban humus. The Everglades.
Looking without success for parking he ended up a little off the money district and put the Chevy in a lot next to a boarded-up theater. Across the lot a stadium’s lights rose above palm trees. A marquee told tourists this was West Palm Park: old ball is good ball, cheer our patriarchs. Gun locked the Beretta and aimed for the sea.
A block from the By-Line he passed a pin-striped old man in a motorized wheelchair. From behind, the man’s head seemed to lean back in first one direction, then another; there was an irritating humm Gun thought came from the chair itself, but catching the old man and going by him he saw it was something else.
The man, out for a drive in his Sunday suit, was shaving.
With an electric razor, a pricey one, pointing his chin here and there, getting at the rough spots.
Gun smiled, saw the old man’s eyes only
mildly distracted, went on ahead. Then a voice soft but somehow sharp pierced the hum of the razor.
“Gun Pedersen. Stop a moment, please.”
Turning, Gun saw the old man had halted his chair and had him by the eyes. He was making a few final cleanup sweeps down close to his shirt collar, which was drawn tight by a deep red paisley tie. He shut off the thing at last and said, “It’s my unfortunate lot not to have your card with me today.”
There were days it was not handy to have to admit who you were. Many da
ys. “Card?” Gun asked.
“You despise this. I completely understand,” the man said. He had on a pair or black-rimmed drugstore glasses, the bows tilted upward until they gripped his head an inch above the ears. The lenses angled so sharply the world must have seemed a continuous down slope. “However, now that I have you, on a very public street, the conventions of courtesy leave you little choice. I’ll have your autograph now, thank you.”
The old man produced a Bic from his breast pocket and a folded sheet of paper from under the suit coat On the sidewalk people passed them quickly, their attention conspicuously elsewhere. Gun signed.
“Efficient, aren’t you?”
“What I am,” the old man said, studying Gun’s signature, “is a detached old bastard, a decrepit and heinous collector of artifacts. Baseball in particular,” he said, his eyes meeting Gun’s with a calm brilliance, “to a dangerous degree.”
Gun grinned naturally at this but there was no grinning left in the old man and so he stopped and said instead, “You work this corner much?
“I work nothing. Things come to me.” He bent forward in the chair, which was upholstered in red paisley to match the tie. Maybe, Gun thought, he owned other wheelchairs: Tartan plaid, Oxford stripes, Little Eddie Bauer ducks.
“You’ll see, Pedersen, that I don’t much care for a simple scrawl on twenty-pound bond. In your case it’ll have to do; as I told you, I’m unprepared. See.” The old man had reached beneath the seat as he spoke and brought up a slender case of glowing black wood the size of a box of Havanas. He laid it on his lap and opened the lid with the careful fingers of a curator. Within were baseball cards.
“A small collection, carefully chosen for the day,” he said.
“I see.”
“I’m quite certain that you don’t. Of the several hundred, let’s say, past-prime ballplayers attempting to get it all back in this—” he smiled his disgust— “Senior League, there are a few dozen who used to own considerable talent.”