“Right,” he said. “And a whole lot more besides. Big deal round here, Mr. Kliner.”
“He is?” I said.
“Sure,” the guy said. “You heard about the Foundation?”
I shook my head. Finished my coffee and pushed the mug over for a refill.
“Kliner set up the Kliner Foundation,” the guy said. “Benefits the town in a lot of ways. Came here five years ago, been like Christmas ever since.”
I nodded.
“Is Mrs. Kliner OK?” I asked him.
He shook his head as he filled my mug.
“She’s a sick woman,” he said. “Very sick. Very pale, right? A very sick woman. Could be tuberculosis. I seen tuberculosis do that to folks. She used to be a fine-looking woman, but now she looks like something grown in a closet, right? A very sick woman, that’s for damn sure.”
“Who’s the guy in the truck?” I said.
“Stepson,” he said. “Kliner’s kid by his first wife. Mrs. Kliner’s his second. I’ve heard she don’t get along so good with the kid.”
He gave me the sort of nod that terminates casual conversations. Moved away to wipe off some kind of a chromium machine behind the other end of the counter. The black pickup was still waiting outside. I agreed with the guy that the woman looked like something grown in a closet. She looked like some kind of a rare orchid starved of light and sustenance. But I didn’t agree with him that she looked sick. I didn’t think she had tuberculosis. I thought she was suffering from something else. Something I’d seen once or twice before. I thought she was suffering from sheer terror. Terror of what, I didn’t know. Terror of what, I didn’t want to know. Not my problem. I stood up and dropped a five on the counter. The guy made change all in coins. He had no dollar bills. The pickup was still there, stationary at the curb. The driver was leaning up, chest against the wheel, looking sideways across his stepmother, staring in straight at me.
There was a mirror opposite me behind the counter. I looked exactly like a guy who’d been on an all-night bus and then spent two days in jail. I figured I needed to get cleaned up before I took Roscoe to lunch. The counter guy saw me figuring.
“Try the barbershop,” he said.
“On a Sunday?” I said.
The guy shrugged.
“They’re always in there,” he said. “Never exactly closed. Never exactly open, either.”
I nodded and pushed out through the door. I saw a small crowd of people coming out of the church and chatting on the lawns and getting into their cars. The rest of the town was still deserted. But the black pickup was still at the curb, right outside the convenience store. The driver was still staring at me.
I walked north in the sun and the pickup moved slowly alongside, keeping pace. The guy was still hunched forward, staring sideways. I stretched out a couple of steps and the truck sped up to keep station. Then I stopped dead and he overshot. I stood there. The guy evidently decided backing up wasn’t on his agenda. He floored it and took off with a roar. I shrugged and carried on. Reached the barbershop. Ducked under the striped awning and tried the door. Unlocked. I went in.
LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN MARGRAVE, THE BARBERSHOP looked wonderful. It gleamed with ancient chairs and fittings lovingly polished and maintained. It had the kind of barbershop gear everybody tore out thirty years ago. Now everybody wants it back. They pay a fortune for it because it re-creates the way people want America to look. The way they think it used to look. It’s certainly the way I thought it used to look. I would sit in some schoolyard in Manila or Munich and imagine green lawns and trees and flags and a gleaming chrome barbershop like this one.
It was run by two old black guys. They were just hanging out there. Not really open for business, not really closed. But they indicated they would serve me. Like they were there, and I was there, so why not? And I guess I looked like an urgent case. I asked them for the works. A shave, a haircut, a hot towel and a shoe shine. There were framed newspaper front pages here and there on the walls. Big headlines. Roosevelt dies, VJ Day, JFK assassinated, Martin Luther King murdered. There was an old mahogany table radio thumping warmly away. The new Sunday paper was crisply folded on a bench in the window.
The old guys mixed up soapy lather in a bowl, stropped a straight razor, rinsed a shaving brush. They shrouded me with towels and got to work. One guy shaved me with the old straight razor. The other guy stood around doing not much of anything. I figured maybe he came into play later. The busy guy started chatting away, like barbers do. Told me the history of his business. The two of them had been buddies since childhood. Always lived here in Margrave since way back. Started out as barbers way before the World War Two. Apprenticed in Atlanta. Opened a shop together as young men. Moved it to this location when the old neighborhood was razed. He told me the history of the county from a barber’s perspective. Listed the personalities who’d been in and out of these old chairs. Told me about all kinds of people.
“So tell me about the Kliners,” I said.
He was a chatty guy, but that question shut him up. He stopped work and thought about it.
“Can’t help you with that inquiry, that’s for sure,” he said. “That’s a subject we prefer not to discuss in here. Best if you ask me about somebody else altogether.”
I shrugged under the shroud of towels.
“OK,” I said. “You ever heard of Blind Blake?”
“Him I heard of, that’s for sure,” the old man said. “That’s a guy we can discuss, no problem at all.”
“Great,” I said. “So what can you tell me?”
“He was here, time to time, way back,” he said. “Born in Jacksonville, Florida, they say, just over the state line. Used to kind of trek on up from there, you know, through here, through Atlanta, all the way up north to Chicago, and then trek all the way back down again. Back through Atlanta, back through here, back home. Very different then, you know. No highway, no automobiles, at least not for a poor black man and his friends. All walking or riding on the freight cars.”
“You ever hear him play?” I asked him.
He stopped work again and looked at me.
“Man, I’m seventy-four years old,” he said. “This was back when I was just a little boy. We’re talking about Blind Blake here. Guys like that played in bars. Never was in no bars when I was a little boy, you understand. I would have got my behind whupped real good if I had been. You should talk to my partner here. He’s a whole lot older than I am. He may have heard him play, only he may not remember it because he don’t remember much. Not even what he ate for breakfast. Am I right? Hey, my old friend, what you eat for breakfast?”
The other old guy creaked over and leaned up on the next sink to mine. He was a gnarled old fellow the color of the mahogany radio.
“I don’t know what I ate for breakfast,” he said. “Don’t even know if I ate any breakfast at all. But listen up. I may be an old guy, but the truth is old guys remember stuff real well. Not recent things, you understand, but old things. You got to imagine your memory is like an old bucket, you know? Once it’s filled up with old stuff there ain’t no way to get new stuff in. No way at all, you understand? So I don’t remember any new stuff because my old bucket is all filled up with old stuff that happened way back. You understand what I’m saying here?”
“Sure I understand,” I said. “So way back, did you ever hear him play?”
“Who?” he said.
I looked at both of them in turn. I wasn’t sure whether this was some kind of a rehearsed routine.
“Blind Blake,” I said. “Did you ever hear him play?”
“No, I never heard him play,” the old guy said. “But my sister did. Got me a sister more than about ninety years old or thereabouts, may she be spared. Still alive. She did a little singing way back and she sang with old Blind Blake many a time.”
“She did?” I said. “She sang with him?”
“She sure did,” said the gnarled old guy. “She sang with just about anybody passing throu
gh. You got to remember this old town lay right on the big road to Atlanta. That old county road out there used to come on down through here straight on south into Florida. It was the only route through Georgia north to south. Of course now you got the highway runs right by without stopping off, and you got airplanes and all. No importance to Margrave now, nobody coming on through anymore.”
“So Blind Blake stopped off here?” I prompted him. “And your sister sang with him?”
“Everybody used to stop off here,” he said. “North side of town was just pretty much a mess of bars and rooming houses to cater to the folks passing through. All these fancy gardens between here and the firehouse is where the bars and rooming houses used to be. All tore down now, or else all fell down. Been no passing trade at all for a real long time. But back then, it was a different kind of a town altogether. Streams of people in and out, the whole time. Workers, crop pickers, drummers, fighters, hoboes, truckers, musicians. All kinds of those guys used to stop off and play and my old sister would be right in there singing with them all.”
“And she remembers Blind Blake?” I asked him.
“She sure does,” the old man said. “Used to think he was the greatest thing alive. Says he used to play real sporty. Real sporty indeed.”
“What happened to him?” I said. “Do you know?”
The old guy thought hard. Trawled back through his fading memories. He shook his grizzled head a couple of times. Then he took a wet towel from a hot box and put it over my face. Started cutting my hair. Ended up shaking his head with some kind of finality.
“Can’t rightly say,” he said. “He came back and forth on the road, time to time. I remember that pretty well. Three, four years later he was gone. I was up in Atlanta for a spell, wasn’t here to know. Heard tell somebody killed him, maybe right here in Margrave, maybe not. Some kind of big trouble, got him killed stone dead.”
I sat listening to their old radio for a while. Then I gave them a twenty off my roll of bills and hurried out onto Main Street. Strode out north. It was nearly noon and the sun was baking. Hot for September. Nobody else was out walking. The black road blasted heat at me. Blind Blake had walked this road, maybe in the noon heat. Back when those old barbers had been boys this had been the artery reaching north to Atlanta, Chicago, jobs, hope, money. Noon heat wouldn’t have stopped anybody getting where they were going. But now the road was just a smooth blacktop byway going nowhere at all.
IT TOOK ME A FEW MINUTES IN THE HEAT TO GET UP TO THE station house. I walked across its springy lawn past another bronze statue and pulled open the heavy glass entrance door. Stepped into the chill inside. Roscoe was waiting for me, leaning on the reception counter. Behind her in the squad room, I could see Stevenson talking urgently into a telephone. Roscoe was pale and looking very worried.
“We found another body,” she said.
“Where?” I asked her.
“Up at the warehouse again,” she said. “The other side of the road this time, underneath the cloverleaf, where it’s raised up.”
“Who found it?” I said.
“Finlay,” she said. “He was up there this morning, poking around, looking for something to help us with the first one. Some help, right? All he finds is another one.”
“Do you know who this one is?” I asked her.
She shook her head.
“Unidentified,” she said. “Same as the first one.”
“Where’s Finlay now?” I asked her.
“Gone to get Hubble,” she said. “He thinks Hubble may know something about it.”
I nodded.
“How long was this one up there?” I said.
“Two or three days, maybe,” she said. “Finlay says it could have been a double homicide on Thursday night.”
I nodded again. Hubble did know something about it. This was the guy he had sent to meet with the tall investigator with the shaved head. He couldn’t figure out how the guy had gotten away with it. But the guy hadn’t gotten away with it.
I heard a car in the lot outside and then the big glass door sucked open. Finlay stuck his head in.
“Morgue, Roscoe,” he said. “You too, Reacher.”
We followed him back outside into the heat. We all got into Roscoe’s unmarked sedan. Left Finlay’s car where he’d parked it. Roscoe drove. I sat in the back. Finlay sat in the front passenger seat, twisted around so he could talk to the both of us at once. Roscoe nosed out of the police lot and headed south.
“I can’t find Hubble,” Finlay said. Looking at me. “There’s nobody up at his place. Did he say anything to you about going anywhere?”
“No,” I said. “Not a word. We hardly spoke all weekend.”
Finlay grunted at me.
“I need to find out what he knows about all this,” he said. “This is serious shit and he knows something about it, that’s for damn sure. What did he tell you about it, Reacher?”
I didn’t answer. I wasn’t entirely sure whose side I was on yet. Finlay’s, probably, but if Finlay started blundering around in whatever Hubble was mixed up in, Hubble and his family were going to end up dead. No doubt about that. So I figured I should just stay impartial and then get the hell out of there as fast as possible. I didn’t want to get involved.
“You try his mobile number?” I asked him.
Finlay grunted and shook his head.
“Switched off,” he said. “Some automatic voice came on and told me.”
“Did he come by and pick up his watch?” I asked him.
“His what?” he said.
“His watch,” I said. “He left a ten-thousand-dollar Rolex with Baker on Friday. When Baker was cuffing us for the ride out to Warburton. Did he come pick it up?”
“No,” Finlay said. “Nobody said so.”
“OK,” I said. “So he’s got some urgent business some-where. Not even an asshole like Hubble’s going to forget about a ten-thousand-dollar watch, right?”
“What urgent business?” Finlay said. “What did he tell you about it?”
“He didn’t tell me diddly,” I said. “Like I told you, we hardly spoke.”
Finlay glared at me from the front seat.
“Don’t mess with me, Reacher,” he said. “Until I get hold of Hubble, I’m going to keep hold of you and sweat your ass for what he told you. And don’t make out he kept his mouth shut all weekend, because guys like that never do. I know that and you know that, so don’t mess with me, OK?”
I just shrugged at him. He wasn’t about to arrest me again. Maybe I could get a bus from wherever the morgue was. I’d have to pass on lunch with Roscoe. Pity.
“So what’s the story on this one?” I asked him.
“Pretty much the same as the last one,” Finlay said. “Looks like it happened at the same time. Shot to death, probably the same weapon. This one didn’t get kicked around afterward, but it was probably part of the same incident.”
“You don’t know who it is?” I said.
“His name is Sherman,” he said. “Apart from that, no idea.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. I was asking out of habit. Finlay thought for a moment. I saw him decide to answer. Like we were partners.
“Unidentified white male,” he said. “Same deal as the first one, no ID, no wallet, no distinguishing marks. But this one had a gold wristwatch, engraved on the back: to Sherman, love Judy. He was maybe thirty or thirty-five. Hard to tell, because he’d been lying there for three nights and he was well gnawed by the small animals, you know? His lips are gone, and his eyes, but his right hand was OK because it was folded up under his body, so I got some decent prints. We ran them an hour ago and something may come of that, if we’re lucky.”
“Gunshot wounds?” I asked him.
Finlay nodded.
“Looks like the same gun,” he said. “Small-caliber, soft-nose shells. Looks like maybe the first shot only wounded him and he was able to run. He got hit a couple more times but made it to cover under the highway. He fell down
and bled to death. He didn’t get kicked around because they couldn’t find him. That’s how it looks to me.”
I thought about it. I’d walked right by there at eight o’clock on Friday morning. Right between the two bodies.
“And you figure he was called Sherman?” I said.
“His name was on his watch,” Finlay said.
“Might not have been his watch,” I said. “The guy could have stolen it. Could have inherited it, bought it from a pawnshop, found it in the street.”
Finlay just grunted again. We must have been more than ten miles south of Margrave. Roscoe was keeping up a fast pace down the old county road. Then she slowed and slid down a left fork which led straight to the distant horizon.
“Where the hell are we going?” I said.
“County hospital,” Finlay said. “Down in Yellow Springs. Next-but-one town to the south. Not long now.”
We drove on. Yellow Springs became a smudge in the heat haze on the horizon. Just inside the town limit was the county hospital, standing more or less on its own. Put there back when diseases were infectious and sick people were isolated. It was a big hospital, a warren of wide low buildings sprawled over a couple of acres. Roscoe slowed and swung into the entrance lane. We wallowed over speed bumps and threaded our way around to a spread of buildings clustered on their own in back. The mortuary was a long shed with a big roll-up door standing open. We stopped well clear of the door and left the car in the yard. We looked at each other and went in.
A MEDICAL GUY MET US AND LED US INTO AN OFFICE. HE sat behind a metal desk and waved Finlay and Roscoe to some stools. I leaned on a counter, between a computer terminal and a fax machine. This was not a big-budget facility. It had been cheaply equipped some years ago. Everything was worn and chipped and untidy. Very different from the station house up at Margrave. The guy at the desk looked tired. Not old, not young, maybe Finlay’s sort of age. White coat. He looked like the type of guy whose judgment you wouldn’t worry about too much. He didn’t introduce himself. Just took it for granted we all knew who he was and what he was for.
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