Summer Cool - A Jack Paine Mystery (Jack Paine Mysteries)

by Al Sarrantonio

  Paine parked his car not in the empty lot, but around the corner. He had cruised past first, looking for a car that might be Coleman's but there were no cars in the empty lot and the club itself looked deserted, and the picnic tables on the roughly cut lawn sloping down to the railroad embankment, where the trains went by to New York City, were empty and forlorn looking. Beyond the railroad tracks was the Hudson River, and once, at one of those parties in that first and last summer, on the Fourth of July, Paine had sat on one of those picnic tables with Ginny, and watched the fireworks that the river towns sent up, and it had been hot but he had liked the heat, and he had sat with his arm around his wife and, being so young, had thought that this was as good as it got. Later that same night he had gotten very drunk, and tried to kiss Terry Petty.

  The clubhouse was a building out in the open near the parking lot, with a bar and locker rooms inside. Paine approached it cautiously. There were no windows open, and Paine used the few trees nearby as cover.

  The door was closed, but when Paine tried it, it opened inward into darkness. Paine stepped in and to the side, closing the door behind him.

  The bar was deserted, chairs upended onto tables, cords from the bowling machine and the light above the shuffleboard table pulled from their sockets.

  Paine moved to the bar and looked behind it. The lights over the mirror behind the bar were off, but he could see that there was no one there.

  Paine crossed to the opening of the locker room, and called into the dark opening, "Coleman?"

  There was no answer.

  Paine moved around the opening into the locker room, snapping on the light switch.

  A bank of overhead fluorescents went on, one after another. One rogue lamp began to blink fitfully.

  The place smelled of men, and disinfectant, and powdered soap. The floor was tiled white, the walls painted a hearty green that had bleached with time.

  "Coleman?"

  No sound—not the breath of fear, the cock of the hammer of a.38 Special. Nothing.

  Paine moved through the dressing area, past a row of urinals and wall-mounted white sinks. He checked the stalls behind the urinals, pushing the doors slowly back. They were empty.

  "Coleman?"

  Still no sound, but a coppery smell now, afresh, hard smell that overwhelmed the disinfectant and powdered soap from the teardrop dispensers on the walls over the sinks.

  Paine moved into the shower area.

  It was a large room, bleached green walls, gray-enameled cement floors, shower heads at head height in the walls, floor funneling gently to a drain in the center of the room. Something very red had ceased raining into the opening, and was beginning to dry up the slope of the gray floor to the shower wall.

  Coleman's torso had been butchered like an ox. The bright smell of blood made Paine gag, but he saw enough of human organs in the split and opened thoracic cavity to fully illustrate a medical textbook. The limbs had been cleanly severed, and lay stacked against the wall. Coleman's head, showing grotesque surprise, had been mounted on one of the shower heads, looking down at the remains of the rest of the body.

  Paine's legs grew weak. He turned and walked out, making it almost to the lockers before his stomach emptied. He stood under the flickering neon tube, and there was nothing but the sickening sound of vomitus hitting ceramic until his stomach was dry. It had been that look on Coleman's face, that grotesque look of surprise that said, "Is this how I go?" that did it.

  After awhile, Paine stood, and pushed himself away from the lockers. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.

  He went back out into the barroom, and went behind the bar. There was a water tap over a deep rectangular aluminum sink, and he turned it on and took a glass from behind the bar and drank. He drank until the taste of vomit and copper receded from his mouth. The water got colder as it ran, and he continued to drink but the taste would not go away.

  He left, finally, making his way cautiously back to his car, the taste of death still in his mouth.

  16

  These three were much better than Koval and Kohl. They were waiting in the same alley beside Paine's building, and Paine never had a chance with them. They pulled him deep into the shadows at the back, and after softening him up with belly blows they laid him flat on the ground and one of them held the long cold muzzle of an AK-47 to this temple. A second backed up the first with a .44 Magnum, which he held at arm's length pointed at Paine's mouth.

  "You move," the one with the AK-47 said matter- of-factly, "I put six semiautomatic rounds into your mind."

  "I won't move," Paine said.

  The third one straddled Paine's supine body, standing over him before leaning down to stare into his face. He studied Paine with the same detached interest he and the others had shown at Roberto Hermano's funeral. "I saw you at the church," he said, making it into a slight question.

  "I was there."

  "Also," the man said quietly, "you were seen talking with Roberto in your car the day before he was killed."

  "That's true," Paine said.

  The man cocked his head to one side; his face still wore mild interest. "Did you kill Roberto?"

  "No."

  "Why did you talk to him?"

  "I'm looking for someone he knew. A man named Bobby Petty."

  The man closed his eyes and nodded. Paine's scalp prickled under the pressure of the AK-47's muzzle.

  "One more question," the man said mildly. "Do you know who killed Roberto?"

  The muzzle pressed harder into Paine's head.

  The man stared at him, searching, and then he straightened and nodded to the other two men, who pulled their weapons back. Paine felt relief at the withdrawal of pressure on his forehead.

  The man folded his hands in front of him and looked down at Paine. "We would like to find the man who killed Roberto. He was our friend."

  "Sure."

  "If you should find this man, I would appreciate it if you would let us know."

  Paine said nothing.

  "I'm sorry to have bothered you," the man said.

  The three of them turned and walked slowly out of the alley.

  Paine lay back a moment, staring at the sky through the faraway slit at the top of the alley. Polite drug dealers with AK-47s was something he did not much want to think about. The AK-47s, he imagined, were what made it possible for them to be polite.

  Perhaps if everyone had an AK-47, there would be much more politeness in the world.

  It was a thought he entertained for a very short time before he got up.

  The first phone message on his machine was from Anapolos, who made several loud threats and then hung up. There was another message after it, from Billy Rader, and Paine called him.

  "Good night again last night," Rader yawned into the phone. "Maybe clouds tonight, though."

  "What have you got for me, Billy?"

  "First of all, your friend Landers is in trouble. Seems he was involved in a minor way with a parking violations thing some friend of his skimming meters in downtown Fort Worth, and he knew about it but did nothing. It might hurt him, might not. 'Cause of the way he treated you, I called a couple friends of mine still on the Morning News and told them where to look for more. Just a hint, mind you, I didn't want to make it too easy. It might snowball, might not."

  "Jesus, Billy, I didn't tell you to crucify the bastard."

  "Why not? He's been a hard-on for a long time, and anyway, I told you he has enemies. He's not such a bad guy. They used to hang you down here for stuff like that, but not anymore. He'll probably come through intact, but humbled. Humbled is what he needed."

  "Is that why you called me?"

  "Of course not. I wanted to tell you about my night at the telescope last night."

  Paine waited; Rader laughed after a pause.

  "Well, okay," Rader said. "Seems Bobby Petty flew back to New York yesterday, American Airlines flight number fortyseven. He used an alias, but one of my friends at the American terminal asked aro
und and found somebody who recognized the description. 'Course it made it a little easier, the alias he used."

  "Which was?"

  "Bob Paine."

  Paine didn't laugh. "Christ."

  "Sure, Jack. Want me to see if he left New York again?"

  "You can do that?"

  "Computers, Jack."

  "Sure."

  "There's something else, too. That fellow Parker Johnson,

  I got some background stuff on him. Maybe you'll find it useful. He grew up in Fort Worth, went to school in Fort Worth, was briefly married to a Fort Worth girl from his high school. Two tours of duty in Vietnam, marines, came back and had a hard time of it. Four or five jobs—cook, school janitor, security guard at a mall, early shift at Burger King, that sort of thing. The past year he's been stacking cans in a supermarket. Like I said before, no record, no arrests, no drugs."

  "Thanks again, Billy."

  "This thing with Landers clears up, you can show your ass down here again. Maybe we can drive out to the desert, visit MacDonald Observatory in west Texas. I know some folks there, get you a look through the big scope."

  "Sounds good, Billy."

  "Listen, Jack, any idea why Petty would come back to New York?"

  Paine told him about Coleman.

  "Christ, Jack. That looks bad."

  "I'd still like to think he wasn't involved."

  "Well, you take care of yourself."

  "I will, Billy."

  Paine hung up, and immediately made another call.

  17

  "Come on in, Jack."

  The boxes were gone from the front hallway; the garbage-men had come, just as she had said. The house was as clean as ever.

  She led him to the kitchen, put a cup of coffee in front of him. She wouldn't look at him, but busied herself at the sink, washing dinner dishes.

  The girls were home, watching television in the playroom. Paine heard them alternately laughing and snapping at each other, normal siblings fighting over everything in sight. They came out to see him when he arrived, Mary saying, "Hi, Uncle Jack," shyly and then hiding behind her sister Melissa, who said, "Hi." They looked a lot like their mother, both of them, and Melissa had her mother's straight stare. She looked with it at Paine and it told him she wanted to know where her father was. She looked at her mother at the sink, then turned, and left the room.

  "Melissa's having a bit of a hard time," Terry said.

  "What did you tell her?"

  "I told her her father was gone and wasn't coming back."

  "Is that all?"

  "It happens all the time," Terry said. "It happened to one of her girlfriends in school last year."

  She had turned back to her dishes, refusing to look straight at him.

  "I need to talk about Bobby," Paine said.

  "Go ahead."

  "About his time in the marines."

  He could tell that memories were swirling through her, the way she changed the way she was standing, the way she put a wet dish into the drying rack absently.

  "What about it?" she said.

  "Do you have any records, any pictures?"

  "No. He didn't keep anything except his discharge papers."

  "Letters?"

  A pause. "I threw them out."

  "Did he talk about it a lot?"

  "No." She let the dish she was washing settle into soapy water, then turned, drying her hands on a dish towel. She looked at Paine now. "He never talked about it, Jack."

  "Never?"

  "Did he ever talk to you about it, Jack?"

  She waited for him to see her point, and he nodded. "I was sixteen when I met him, and he was just going in. He was there four years. In the beginning, his letters used to tell me where he was, what he was doing, his friends, things like that. Then after a while, he stopped talking about it altogether and just talked about coming home. Especially the last two years."

  "Didn't you think that was strange?"

  "No, Jack, I didn't. I wanted him home. I didn't want to hear about the war. Nobody did."

  "Did he ever mention Jim Coleman in his letters?" She shook her head.

  "Any other names you can remember?"

  "A couple of guys in the beginning. Then nobody."

  She turned back to the sink, closing the conversation; then she turned back, looking at him.

  "Look, Jack, about yesterday in your office—"

  "Forget it, Terry."

  Her gaze didn't waver. "No. I don't want to forget it. I did it because I wanted to."

  Paine looked at her, watched the battle on her face, the decision being made there.

  "I want you to know he's gone for me, Jack. He's dead. And if what I did means anything to you, I want you to know it's all right. We can take it from there. I know how hard it would be, but I don't care. It will take time, but I don't care about that, either. The girls would be all right, after awhile." She turned back to her dishes. "I know how bad things have been for you, too. I know what you've gone through. There was a time when I almost hated you, because the two miscarriages came while Bobby was helping you out, when he was the only one on the force who stuck his neck out for you. I was wrong. Most of that, the tension, was Bobby, the way he did things. He doesn't back down from anything. I just want you to know it would be all right. I think I could come to love you, Jack."

  Paine looked at his coffee; he looked up to see Melissa standing in the doorway, staring at him. She had the eyes of her mother, and she didn't smile.

  He opened his mouth to say something, but once again Melissa looked at her mother and then turned and was gone. Somewhere in the back of the house the television set was snapped off in midsentence.

  Paine got up and said quietly, "I've got to go, Terry."

  18

  The police had not been through Jim Coleman's house yet. Paine wondered if they had found Coleman; for a brief moment, the image of that surprised face staring down from the shower head broke through Paine and made him nauseous.

  It was easy to get in; like most cops, Coleman believed in his own invincibility more than in security devices, and, after Paine pulled his gloves on, a cut screen on the side near the back, unseen from the street and well concealed by bushes, was all that was needed.

  Coleman's wife had left him long ago, and the house looked as though a single man lived in it. The beam of Paine's flashlight showed wallpaper a woman had obviously chosen still covering the walls in the bedroom, but there was nothing else feminine about it. The bed was unmade, shoes in sloppy ranks along the sideboard where Coleman had dropped them from his feet. A television on the dresser was angled toward the bed, a squeeze of aluminum foil helping the bent rabbit ears on top. It was tuned to Channel 11, the Yankees network; Paine doubted if it had been changed in months.

  Washed clothes were stuffed in the dresser, unfolded, with unmatched socks mixed in with underwear. There was nothing else in the drawers. Under the bed there was dust and a couple of Playboy magazines. On the floor of the closet, more magazines, some of them hard-core; a box containing porno novels with a mix of mystery novels, and, surprisingly, a couple of history paperbacks: Carl Sandburg's biography of Abraham Lincoln, Bruce Catton's Civil War books. A few shirts hung in the closet, two pair of slacks with empty pockets.

  The living room was a mess—open potato chip bags on the scratched coffee table, which was propped up on one end by an old paint can. One good end table, the other a couple of stacked milk crates with an ugly fat lamp on top. A New York Post opened to the sports page next to the lamp. A couch between the end tables, a chair with a torn seat next to it, both facing another television, an old color console, against the far wall. Another pair of rabbit ears, newer, again with aluminum foil. A TV Guide on top of the TV, two weeks old.

  There was nothing for Paine in the living room, nothing in the dining room. A hutch, well preserved but dusty, which stood out against the rest of the furniture: a dining room table and three chairs with worn fabric on the seats, a pile
of mail on the table, all junk. On the wall next to the hutch, a wooden case containing a collection of miniature die-cast '50s automobiles.

  One of the drawers in the hutch was pulled out. It was empty. Paine went through the rest of them, found nothing: old candles, mail, letters from a brother wanting money. He looked at the open drawer again.

  He searched the kitchen, found nothing, backed down the hail and stopped at the bathroom. He pointed the flashlight in.

  On the floor, next to the toilet, was a low flat rectangular box, the kind department stores giftwrap shirts in.

  Paine went in, picked the box up. He walked back to the living room, sat down on the couch and opened the box, holding the flashlight with his chin, pointing down.

  On the top, a three-by-five photograph, four marines bunched together, staring at the camera half solemnly. They shared a comradely look of purpose; one of them on the end, the man Paine and Billy Rader had found beheaded in Fort Worth, smiled grimly.

  Next to him was Jim Coleman.

  On the other end was Bob Petty.

  Paine looked through the rest of the box; there was nothing to do with Vietnam, only the usual valuable papers. It looked as though they had been rifled through, turned aside, until two-thirds of the way down, where Paine imagined the photograph had resided until Coleman had dug it up. The papers around that spot were very old.

  On the top of the pile was a ledger book marked Hermano. Paine went through it, found a beautifully neat record of Coleman's dealings that Bryers would love.

  Paine put the photograph in his pocket, put the ledger book back in the gift box, closed it, then put the box into the open drawer of the hutch and closed it. He went through the rest of the house, found nothing, went back to the bedroom, turned off his flashlight, and let himself out through the broken screen and went home.

  19

  When the telephone rang, Paine was in the bad dream, searching for Rebecca between the stars. But she was not there. He was calling for her, his voice loud on a dark, lonely hillside, but the stars were mute until he heard a voice that he thought was hers. But it was the telephone, and he woke up.