She stooped to grip the pack in her right hand, straightened up, and took a very careful exploratory step. Nothing blocked her way. She took another, then another, placing each foot cautiously, feeling for rotten boards or open holes in the floor before bearing down with her full weight.
After three short, tentative steps she halted. She'd felt something. A gentle draft of air against her face as if a door had opened in the building somewhere. No. She was being ridiculous. The creepy old place was starting to get to her. If she was going to feel like this, maybe she'd be better off out on the street after all.
Another step.
Another—
And then her heart gave a wrenching leap. Somebody had coughed. Or at least she had heard something that sounded like a cough.
She wasn't alone. That explained those freaky lights. She ought to have realized it in the first place, only—
She heard it again, or thought she did. A thin, short rasping sound that reverberated faintly in the unseen depths of the room. Instantly choked off as if suppressed by the back of a hand.
Her heart was now pounding so hard it seemed to be reverberating off the walls. If only it wasn't so damn dark in the place. If only she had brought a flashlight that worked. If only—
A floorboard creaked. Now that she was sure of. There was no mistaking it. And she was absolutely certain it came from somewhere off to her right. Now her knees were trembling so violently her whole body was shaking. A cold dread pressed around her like a suffocating weight. She turned back to the tracery of aisle lights.
"Anybody there?"
Her own quavering voice startled her. It didn't even sound like her. And why ask the question, anyway? She was the intruder. The situation was ridiculous.
Ridiculous but absolutely terrifying.
And then she heard the rasp of a breath. She knew she heard the rasp of a breath. And at the same moment the aisle lights winked as if something shadowy had passed in front of them. She felt herself losing control. Starting to panic. She lurched blindly toward the exit just as a whickering sound whipped past her head. What the hell was that? Were there bats in here?
The whickering sound came at her again, but she only heard the start of it this time.
* * * *
"Look, Robideau,” Chief Butts said, spreading his hands out flat on his desk and expelling a great whistling sigh, “the point I'm making here is that you can help me out. And you can bill me for it. I'll make sure you're paid."
"If you can get a bill from me past the town manager, I'll take my hat off to you,” Robideau replied. “Seriously, what do you need me for?"
"I got a runaway on my hands. Wayward daughter of some big shot in the city. And not just any big shot. One with friends. Political associates. I could blow it off with no problem, tell them the kid never showed up here, but the problem is she was spotted by somebody.” Robideau nodded. Only Butts would think spotting a missing person was a problem. “Ate her lunch up there at the Husky. The old man traced her that far himself with a private investigator, some guy named Doyle; and there's no one, nothing, to say the girl ever left here. No bus ticket bought by a single female, no rumors of anybody thumbing a ride."
"What's her name?"
"Mona Crainer."
"Any money?"
"Forty dollars she stole out of her old man's wallet."
"Well, Chief,” Robideau said, “you know all this doesn't mean much. It rained like the devil last night. She could have been picked up the minute she stuck her thumb out. She could be halfway across the country by now."
"Yeah. And she probably is, too. But it don't cut no ice with the father. The kid was last seen in End of Main, and he wants every corner of the town shaken out. What we're talking about here is optics. I gotta go through the motions. Show that I'm doing something. And that don't leave me a whole lot of time for anything else on my plate."
"Like Bulwer Onager."
"Exactly. If I could phone the guy, drive over and talk to him—hell, if he was a halfway normal human being!—things would be different. But Bullet is Bullet. There's nothing normal about him. Besides..."
"Besides, I know him and you don't."
"Well, that's a fact, now, isn't it? I've only lived here three, four years. You—hell! You been here all your life. You had my job for twenty years. You grew up here. I bet you were throwing spitballs from the balcony when he was still showing cliffhangers in that dump of a theater of his."
Robideau smiled. Butts was right. Except for the part about the spitballs.
"It wasn't always a dump, you know."
"Fine. And I wasn't always a potbellied old man. Time flies when you're having fun."
"So what do you want from me exactly?"
"I want you to go to him, talk sense to him, and deliver a message from the town council. Tell him he's got to clean up the Palace Roxy before the town expropriates and knocks it down. Tell him there are rats in it. Tell him anything you want. Tell him he's single-handedly threatening the Toyota—Koyota—"
"Kyoto?"
"That's it.” He threw his hands up. “Those dumb pollution accords. And tell him to clean up his house, too, while he's at it. From what I hear it's even worse than his theater."
"He might not listen."
"I couldn't care less. Just so long as he's notified. Person-to-person, the town manager tells me. That's the rule. No messages left on answering machines, no letters through the mail slot. He has to be given fair warning, and then I can send in the front-end loaders."
Chief Butts suddenly stopped talking. He seemed to have run out of arguments. He sat behind his desk like a giant rat himself, neckless, shoulderless, looking a tiny bit vulnerable under the glare of the fluorescent light.
"Okay,” Robideau said. “I'll give it a shot. But the minute the kid turns up, I'm off the case, all right?"
Butts looked alarmed.
"You think it'll take that long?"
* * * *
First, Robideau decided, he would find out the latest on Bulwer Onager. He didn't want to confront an irascible man without learning everything there was to know about him. Leaving the Safety building, and aiming a wink and a grin at his old receptionist Claudia Webb on his way out, he jaywalked across Burton Street to the offices of the Netley Leader, climbed a flight of stairs, and knocked at a door with a sign on it that said: THIS MAN BITES DOGS!
"Come in,” muttered an amiable voice, “if you can stand it."
When Robideau leaned into the room, the long, lined face of Editor Delyle Allwood lit up. A tall man with wispy white hair, Allwood leaped to his feet and came around his desk with a grin. He gripped Robideau's hand and forearm, saying in his faintly British tones, “Chief Robideau! Retired Chief Robideau! I knew you had to be alive. I've been watching the obits and haven't spotted your beaming face there yet.” He ushered his visitor to a chair. “What's your poison? Coffee that'll remove your stomach lining? Or would you prefer a spot of the other?"
He fluttered his eyebrows.
"Oh, the other,” Robideau said, “by all means."
"Exactly right. Or no point being retired."
Allwood opened a sideboard liquor cabinet that was almost entirely filled with office clutter: loose papers, old camera cases, a broken light bar, and a horde of other junk. He rummaged out a couple of mismatched crystal glasses and sloshed a generous portion of Crown Royal into each of them. Passing one to Robideau, he said, “Here's to homicide,” and downed his in one gulp.
"Woof!” He thumped his chest. “Excellent blood thinner. Better than aspirin.” He dropped into his chair. “Now, what brings you this vast distance? This must be—what?—at least a good block and a half from your house."
"Sorry I haven't dropped by sooner."
"I'm a newspaperman. I'm used to rejection."
"I was just visiting Chief Butts."
Allwood's nose wrinkled. “I thought I detected an air of unpleasantness."
"He wants a favor. Wants me to s
peak to Bulwer Onager."
"Ah, now there's a mission almost impossible. Bulwer doesn't take kindly to being spoken to these days. I know. I've tried."
"Yes, well, I'm going to give it a shot. But before I do, I want to know a little more about him. And since you never forget a fact—"
"I see. You want to paw through my files.” Allwood touched his brow. “The ones up here."
Robideau nodded. Took a small sip of whiskey.
"Well,” said Allwood, “I'll give you the thumbnail sketch.” He tilted his chair back, pulled out a desk drawer, and draped his long legs over it. “Bulwer is one of those odd individuals who has lived his life more or less in reverse. Where most people start with little or nothing and slowly progress to affluence and influence, he has marched steadily in the opposite direction. His father once owned half the town, as you well know, including the movie house—the Palace Roxy. Of all the Onager interests, only the Palace interested Bulwer, so the old man signed it over to him. A comfortable berth for a year or two, but shortly after that two significant events occurred. In April of ‘53, television came to town, and in the fall of that year the old man died, relaxing his grip on the levers of power. Bulwer and his mother faltered. Couldn't cope. Squabbled. Made a belated effort to shore things up by hiring a boardroom full of MBAs. But too late. By the end of the Fifties it was sell-off time."
"I didn't know the Onagers squabbled,” Robideau said.
"Squabbling was their lingua franca. In seven years all they managed to agree on was changing the Onager logo from a bold “O” against a starkly delineated siege engine, to a gentle lower case “onager” superimposed upon a soft black stripe. This was early days. And it was prescient."
"Was it?"
"You do know what onager means?"
"No."
"Ah, well. You must do more crossword puzzles. Anyway, after the first Onager establishment fell—Onager Flowers and Gifts—the rest toppled like dominoes. Only the Palace remained upright, but of course it was wholly owned by Bulwer. When his mother passed on, she left him to fight a brave but lonely battle against Jack Benny, Lucille Ball, and Wayne and Shuster of the tiny screen. The experience rattled him. Shook him. He couldn't walk down a street without compulsively counting the insidious TV antennas sprouting from the rooftops like alien life-forms."
Robideau mused. “I remember Dragnet..."
"You would. In the middle Sixties Bulwer gambled everything on a second screening of one of the blockbuster Hitchcock films—I forget which. It had been his biggest draw, you see. He figured if that smash hit didn't pull in the crowds again, nothing would. And the idea worked. To a point. For the first time in years, the Palace had a full house and a line-up. Bulwer even ran out of popcorn and had to rush across to the Family Fare for more kernels to feed into the machine.
"But it wasn't sustainable. He was soon back to empty seats. His accountant—you remember Heddy Halderson? Hot Heddy, as the fishwives called her?—advised him to start showing blue movies. Bulwer was scandalized. Refused to do it. And very soon after that, the Palace closed."
"Any brothers or sisters?"
"None."
"And he disliked his mother?"
"Quite the opposite. Sure, they bickered, but that was surface tension."
Robideau sat back. “I remember going to shows at the Palace back in the Sixties."
"Yes, he had a couple of reprieves. Thiessen Electric stopped selling TVs locally after old man Thiessen slipped on an icy patch out front of his store one night, fell down and obligingly killed himself. And then Ronnie Ralston, who rigged TV antennas, met that girl at the Netley and ran away with her."
A silence descended.
"Is that it, then?"
"That's it."
"You're a wonder, Delyle."
"I most certainly am. And you, my friend, are a very slow drinker. I believe I'll have another whiskey while we sit around and wait for yours to evaporate."
* * * *
From the offices of the Netley Leader, Robideau drove to the Onager house at 9401 Fairvale. He didn't need the scrawled address on the ragged piece of notepaper Butts had thrust at him; everybody knew where the old Onager place was. It stood well back on a large lot in an aging, once elegant neighborhood. The town's first real mansion, it had been joined over the years by the houses of other successful citizens.
It was a hulking place gone to ruin at the top of a commanding bluff. Storm clouds scudded behind it. The lot backed onto a deep ravine. The once stately black iron fence leaned dangerously in spots. As for the house, its paint was scaling away in strips, the roof had lost many of its shingles, and those that remained were curling at the corners and dark with moss. The gate was secured with a twisted coat hanger, which Robideau had to struggle with before proceeding up the walk to the porch.
He followed a line of derelict cars. Each one apparently replaced with a cheaper model as the owner fell upon progressively harder times. Nearest the house was the oldest of these, a robin's-egg blue 1960 Lincoln, the largest car shy of a limousine that Robideau had ever seen. It had two flat tires.
The front porch looked as if a tornado had roared by. It sagged under the weight of stuff. A rusting bed frame. Headboards with the wood laminate lifting from the damp. Coils of wire, pails of nuts and bolts, boxes of swollen paperbacks bursting open and spilling their contents into the yard. A grungy toaster, a small stuffed rabbit, some chintz pillows, a heap of old office chairs, a pile of food wrappers, a book with no discernable printing on it, a bar of yellowing lye soap still in its dish. And everywhere, bundles of newspapers.
A narrow passage wended its way treacherously through the junk to the entrance. Robideau eased himself gingerly along it until he could knock on the leaded-glass door. Surreptitiously, a curtain lifted and a sallow face peered out, a prank of the light presenting a double-image of it. Robideau gazed back, not sure if he should smile, nod his head, or introduce himself through the glass. The curtain fell back into place.
He knocked again. He knocked several times. On his last attempt he used the ball of his fist to save his bruised knuckles.
No response.
Robideau cleared his throat irritably. He saw why Butts had pushed this job off on him. He backed away through the junk to the sidewalk, then threw one more glance up at the house.
To all appearances, no one lived there.
But he knew differently. Oh yes, he did.
As Robideau got back into his car, it began to rain again in large splashing drops.
* * * *
Let there be light!
He dropped the douser to allow the carbon-arc light to blaze forth, brought up the sound, and hit the roll-back switch for the drapery. The music swelled, the opening credits blossomed, and the block print shifted eerily across the rattling, gathering folds of the retracting curtain.
* * * *
UNIVERSAL
AN MCA COMPANY
The reels revolved in their opposite directions, the old Simplex projector purring steadily like a contented mechanical cat. The lamp house gave off a subtle scorching odor. The lacing lamp glowed on the tips of his fingers as he loaded the second machine with the next reel of film.
The film was no longer in prime condition. It was brittle with age, scratched in places, and had a rash of sparkles at some of the changeover spots. But the movie, well, that was top-notch fare. Nothing better made before or since. And putting aside that small unpleasantness of the night before, he anticipated another enjoyable evening at the movies.
* * * *
Robideau parked downtown but remained in the car. His gaze traveled along the street, seeking enlightenment among the rain-streaked storefronts, finally settling on the Palace Roxy, its ponderous marquee looking shabby and slumped. He studied the rooftops, where Bulwer's despised TV antennas had been displaced by a crop of satellite dishes. Progress. But was it really? He sorely missed those days when, after a double feature, he and his friends would saunter home, their mind
s reeling, filled with delicious thoughts of mad scientists and bug-eyed monsters.
Butts had mentioned throwing spitballs. It was the sort of thing Pete Melynchuk and his pals might have done.
They had been a different bunch. They still were...
Robideau got out of the car.
He found the old-timers just where he expected to, at a back table in the Netley, with an unobstructed view of the nine-foot television screen. Pete Melynchuk, gruff and grizzled; Wilmer Gates, thin and dogged looking; Chuck Lang, brawny elbows on the table; and old silent Wolverton, all arms and legs, with that perpetual and mysterious grin on his horsey face.
These men were a giant step closer to Bulwer Onager than he was.
"Well, well,” said Pete, the usual spokesman for the group, “it's the cops. I told you not to bury your landlady in that front flower bed, didn't I, Wove!"
Wolverton's grin widened, his mirthful eyes all but disappearing under his knobby brow.
Chuck Lang snagged a chair from the next table with his foot and dragged it up for Robideau. Wilmer pushed a beer at him.
"I'm not a cop,” Robideau said, sitting down. “Not anymore."
"You got that cop look on your face,” Pete insisted. “The look that tells me you're here to ask questions and take down names."
"You're right about the questions,” Robideau said. “I'm helping out Chief Butts. There's a problem with Bulwer Onager."
"The Bullet!” Pete exclaimed. “Ha! What did he do, murder his landlady?"
"I'm trying to keep his movie house from being knocked down by the town council."
Chuck showed his habitual scowl. “The old Palace? They should knock it down. And with him in it too."
"Now, now,” Pete grinned, “that ain't neighborly."
"Have you looked at the place lately? Really looked at it? Have you seen his house up there on the hill? Unbelievable!"
"It's ‘cause he don't throw nothing away,” Wilmer Gates observed.
"I knew a guy once,” Pete Melynchuk said, “couldn't throw away a darn thing. He'd toss an old gum wrapper in the trash, then come back a minute later and take it out again. It's a sickness—"
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