Hard Case Crime: Getting Off

by Block, Lawrence

  And there’d been a phone number, but she had neither called it nor kept it. At the time she felt a little regret at having failed to close the books on Graham Weider, but not so much that she was going to hop on a plane and hunt him down. It hadn’t seemed all that important.

  It did now.

  Once again she managed to get a seat all to herself, toward the front but not too close to the driver. There was room in the overhead for her suitcase, and for the bag of clothes as well. She could still smell the clothes, even in their new location, but she had the feeling that she’d still be smelling them if she’d chanced leaving them in the trash can. Her nose was full of his scent, and it would take more than distance to clear them. It would take time as well.

  She’d bought a novel at the newsstand in the station, but never looked at it again until she was on the bus. Even then she waited until they’d cleared the Phoenix city limits before she switched on the overhead light.

  The book was a paperback thriller. Some wild-eyed eco-terrorist, crazy as a bedbug and twice as charming, had raided a secret government laboratory, killed half a dozen scientists, and made off with enough anthrax, plague bacteria, and smallpox virus to depopulate an already troubled planet. And, astonishingly enough, the only person in the world with even a slim chance of stopping this lunatic was a beautiful young FBI agent, the identical twin sister of one of the murdered scientists.

  Well, sure, she thought. These things happen.

  She read for a while, dozed for a while, opened her eyes when the bus pulled to a stop in Sedona. Three people got off, two got on. Next stop, Flagstaff.

  *

  She’d had one genuine oh-shit moment in the Phoenix bus station. She’d been sitting there, the suitcase at her feet, the bag of clothes beside her, the paperback unopened on her lap, when the room went dead silent, jarring her out of her reverie.

  When she turned her head to find out what everyone was looking at, what she saw was a pair of uniformed police officers striding through the entrance. One had a hand on the butt of his holstered pistol.

  Time, which had been crawling to begin with, came to a dead stop. She tried to think of something to do, some action to take, and came up empty.

  And then the cops walked straight over to a gaunt and hollow-eyed young man, his jeans out at the knee, his arms and neck and who knew what else heavily tattooed. He evidently couldn’t think of anything to do either. She’d thought earlier that he looked like a fugitive, and evidently he was, and his days on the run were over, because he didn’t even protest, just stood up and turned around to be handcuffed.

  After they’d led him out, the silence held for an instant. Then almost everybody started talking at once, and the ones who weren’t talking were hauling out their cell phones. This would make a good story for all of them, she thought. It would make an even better story for her, but one she wasn’t likely to tell.

  On the last leg of the trip, she remembered what had taken place in the kitchen, with her cheek against the cutting board and her panties around her ankles. As she’d anticipated, Steve was one of those piledriver types, hammering away at her, thrusting hard and fast, like John Henry determined to beat the steam drill or die trying.

  When John Henry was a little baby

  Just a settin’ on his mammy’s knee

  He picked up a hammer an’ a little piece of steel

  Said, Gonna be the death of me

  Lord, Lord,

  Gonna be the death of me...

  The John Henry approach had never been a favorite of hers, but she was far too excited to demand finesse. Her response was immediate and unqualified, and she didn’t see how it could have been otherwise. And that would have been the case even if he’d been true to ethnic stereotype and chosen a narrower passage than the conventional one. It might have proved painful, given the thickness of his cock and the lack of foreplay, but that wouldn’t have been enough to keep her from enjoying it.

  The hammering continued, and she writhed and twisted in response, and he tightened his grip on her hindquarters, as if any movement on her part was an unwelcome diversion. Her orgasm came on anyway, and it was strong enough but somehow incomplete, as if it was just an interim stop on the way to release.

  Then, with a great cry and a final powerful thrust, he finished.

  Five, she thought.

  And he tore himself off her and out of her, spun around, collapsed against the stainless steel triple sink. And she couldn’t wait, she just couldn’t, and so what if he didn’t see it coming? So what if she didn’t get to see his face? There were knives everywhere, and the one she grabbed was long enough and heavy enough, and she buried it in his back. And stabbed him again and again and again, five times at least, maybe more, as she was too much in the moment to keep track.

  And then he stopped making noises, and stopped moving, and lay on the floor. She was pretty sure he was dead, but she stabbed him one final time, making sure the blade found the heart. She bent down and stepped out of her panties, using them to wipe the handle of the knife, the counter where she’d gripped it, and anything else she thought she might have touched.

  And snatched his keys from the peg, and turned off lights, and locked the door once she was through it.

  On the way to her hotel, she dropped his keys in a storm drain.

  Four.

  In Flagstaff she wanted to get a hotel room and bed down for the night. She was tired, and not at all eager to set off on another bus ride. But she weighed that against her desire to get out of Arizona, and decided she ought to cross a state line as soon as possible. She thought about heading north and west to Vegas, but decided to go east instead. There was a bus for Albuquerque in two hours and change, and that would give her more than enough time for a proper meal, her first food since breakfast.

  The bus station in Flagstaff was really just a large gas station and mini-mart where they kept schedules and sold tickets. She used the rest room to freshen up, and wanted to drop her plastic bag full of dirty clothes in the trash can. There wasn’t any risk in that, was there? She was a long ways from Phoenix, and the Phoenix police had already missed one chance at her, choosing instead to grab the crystal freak with all the ink.

  But it was the bus station, or as close as Flagstaff came to having a bus station. If they traced her to the bus, mightn’t they check out the trash in the ladies room?

  Why take a chance?

  So she walked in a direction that struck her as most likely to yield a decent place to eat, and on the way she passed a parking lot, and toward the rear of the lot she spotted a corrugated steel bin the size of a privy, with a sign next to it reading GOODWILL. She was a few yards past it when she realized what it was—a collection box for Goodwill Industries.

  She lowered the little door and emptied her plastic bag into the bin, then tossed the bag in after it. And hoisted her suitcase and walked on.

  The restaurant she found was Mexican. She had salsa and chips and a combination plate with a taco and two enchiladas and something else she couldn’t identify. The food and service were good, and the only aggravation was the three-piece mariachi band, which insisted on serenading her. They probably knew another song in addition to “Cielito Lindo,” but you couldn’t prove it by her.

  She made her bus with time to spare. In Albuquerque she stayed the night in an inexpensive downtown hotel. She took a shower when she got there and another before she went to bed. In the morning she took another shower, then walked around the corner for a bowl of red at an unprepossessing café on Gold Street. She wiped the bowl with the last tortilla, finished her coffee, and took a cab to the airport.

  She caught a direct flight to O’Hare and let public transportation convey her to the Near North Side, where she’d spent enough time over the years to know her way around. She picked a mostly residential hotel on North Wells and took a shower right away, because she always preferred to sluice away that stale airplane energy once she was off a flight. But this shower felt less ur
gent than the others she’d taken recently, because somewhere between Albuquerque and Chicago she’d stopped smelling Steve. His reek had outlived him, but only for a little while.

  NINE

  There was no Graham Weider listed in the Chicago white pages.

  That was annoying, but couldn’t be said to amount to a dead end. He was some sort of corporate executive, and she seemed to remember a wedding ring, so he’d be more likely to live in a suburb than within the city limits.

  A branch library had all the suburban phone books. No Graham Weider there, either. But there were two G. Weiders, one in Lake Forest, the other in Naperville. “Hello, is Graham there?” And he wasn’t, and neither party knew anything about a Graham Weider. The G in Naperville stood for Gloria, and the one in Lake Forest wasn’t saying.

  Hmmm.

  Well, all that meant was that his number was unlisted. Or listed in his wife’s name, as there were plenty of Weiders scattered throughout Chicagoland. Should she call them all?

  The library had computers available, but you had to sign up, and there was a long list ahead of her. She found an Internet café and searched for Graham Weider Illinois and came up empty.

  A guy hit on her in the Internet café. Her frustration must have been showing, because his approach was, “You know, whatever you’re looking for, I bet I could help you find it.” He had a couple of piercings, along with a rattlesnake flag tattoo with the traditional Don’t Tread On Me updated to Don’t Y’all Fuck With Me. Not an improvement, she thought, but maybe it was supposed to be ironic. He was the sort of young man for whom irony was a sort of default setting.

  “We’ll never know,” she said, and his expression suggested that he enjoyed the put-down more than anything an acceptance might have led to. That was almost enough to make her change her mind, but not really. Better to take the tattoo’s advice.

  If only she knew something about Graham Weider besides his name.

  His employer, for instance. It was a corporation, and he must have mentioned its name, but if it had ever registered on her memory, time had long since pressed the Delete key.

  And she couldn’t just call firms at random. Even if she limited herself to Fortune 500 corporations, how many of them had Chicago offices? Four hundred? Four-fifty?

  No, that wouldn’t work. But his New York hotel would probably have his business address on file, and that would let her know where he worked.

  If only she could remember the hotel.

  Well, it was somewhere in New York, specifically somewhere in midtown Manhattan. And it was a first-rate hotel, not some budget bargain spot. But which one?

  Why the hell couldn’t she remember? She’d been there, for God’s sake, and not once but twice—once when he took her to his room and fucked her, and another time when he stood her up and she went to the front desk looking for him. And he’d left a note for her, on a piece of hotel stationery, but of course she hadn’t kept it.

  Dammit anyway. She could remember standing in the lobby, reading the note. She could even recall the supercilious look on the face of the desk clerk.

  Or was that some other snotty clerk, in some other hotel on some other occasion? Or was it all just her imagination trying to fill in the blanks?

  Graham Weider, she thought. Graham Weider from Chicago, not Joe Blow from Kokomo. Why was he giving her so much trouble?

  She tried the phone again, working her way through the Weiders. More often than not she’d get a machine, and rang off without leaving a message. The Weiders she managed to reach had never heard of a Graham Weider. “How does he spell it?” one of them asked her, and she started in: “G, R, A—” and was interrupted. “No, Weider,” the woman said. “There are different spellings, you know.”

  And that sent her off on a whole new tangent, checking all the area phone directories, looking for Wieder and Wheider and Weeder and Weidter and every other permutation she could think of. A couple of them had the initial G, which triggered some fruitless phone calls, but nothing led anywhere useful.

  She gave up on the Weiders, however they spelled their names, and thought about giving up on Graham altogether. Then she remembered something she’d read about Thomas Edison, and how he’d invented the lightbulb. It didn’t just form over his head, as in a cartoon; it took hundreds upon hundreds of experiments, in which the inventor and his assistants employed one material after another in an effort to find a workable filament, one that would glow when electric current ran through it without burning up or out in the process.

  At one point, someone consoled Edison for his lack of progress. And he replied that he was making wonderful progress, that he had already discovered umpteen hundred substances that would not work.

  That was inspiring, all right, but she couldn’t see that it led anywhere. She went out and walked for a while, stopped for a late-afternoon cappuccino at a little coffeehouse that billed itself as “the anti-Starbucks,” and sat there wondering how she’d come upon the Edison anecdote, and whether or not he’d actually ever said it.

  And then, remarkably, a lightbulb, complete with tungsten filament, formed above her own head.

  There were a great many Weiders, spelled one way or another, living in or near Chicago, and most of them didn’t answer the phone, and the ones who did were no help at all. And how many Fortune 500 companies were there? That question was right up there with Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? and What color is orange juice? There were 500 of them, far too many to call, and there was no guarantee that Graham Weider’s employer was on that list in the first place.

  But there were far fewer A-list hotels in midtown Manhattan. And, no matter what time of day she called, there’d be somebody there to answer the phone.

  She went back to the Internet café and pulled all the midtown four-star hotels from the hotels.com site, then found a quiet bench in Lincoln Park and worked her way down the list from the top. “Hi, my name’s Susan Richardson and I’m on the organizing committee for the upcoming class reunion for Oak Park High. It’s my job to track down the graduates we’ve lost track of, and one of our class members, well, about the only thing anyone could come up with was that he always stays at your establishment on business trips to New York. So I was wondering—”

  The people she talked to were remarkably cooperative. Maybe it was the wholly frivolous nature of her request; she had the feeling they’d have made less of an effort if she’d claimed an urgent business reason to establish contact with Graham Weider, but how could they resist something as pointless as a high school reunion?

  And perhaps it was their positive attitude that sustained her when the first ten hotels were unable to find Graham Weider in their records. Ten more failed filaments, she thought. Ten steps closer to success.

  Her eleventh call was to the Sofitel on West 44th, and this time the lightbulb blazed like the sun.

  It took her an hour to pack and check out of her hotel, and most of another hour to get through traffic to O’Hare. She ate a Caesar salad and drank a bottle of iced green tea while she waited for her flight to Seattle, which was just as well, because all they gave her on the plane was a cup of truly bad coffee and a tiny packet of trail mix.

  It was early evening when they landed at Sea-Tac. She picked up her suitcase at Baggage Claim and caught a cab to the Heathman Hotel in Kirkland, right across from the library and a block from Peter Kirk Park.

  She’d booked a room earlier, and it was ready for her. It was spacious and tastefully appointed, and you could see the park from her window. She’d stayed at the Heathman in Portland once, so she wasn’t surprised at how nice it was, but her enjoyment was tempered somewhat by the knowledge that she couldn’t afford a long stay. Even a single night was a questionable luxury, and you could say the same for the cab ride from the airport. There was almost certainly a bus that would have made the trip for thirty dollars less, not even counting the tip, and it wasn’t as though it hadn’t occurred to her. But she’d been worn out from the travel and keyed up
at the prospect of finally finding Graham Weider, and she couldn’t be bothered by the need to watch the pennies.

  But she’d have to start doing just that.

  She’d had a lot of expenses lately and zero income. She usually paid cash for everything, wanting to avoid a paper trail, and that included airline tickets and hotels. She’d had what seemed like plenty of cash when she left Denver, but it was going fast, and she’d missed an opportunity in Phoenix. Stenchful Steve was the sort of man who’d keep a lot of cash on his person, and she’d never even checked his pants for a wallet. That was a mistake, and so was her failure to clean out the cash register. Between the two, she’d left hundreds of dollars behind, maybe even thousands.

  A hell of a price to pay, just because she’d felt in urgent need of a shower.

  “Graham Weider, Graham Weider, Graham Weider,” said Bob, the cheerful fellow at Sofitel New York. “Now he was a regular a few years ago, wasn’t he? And then he stopped coming. I hope we didn’t do anything to alienate his affections.”

  “I understand he was based in Chicago then,” she ventured.

  “Let’s just see. Willoughby & Kessel, State Street, in the heart of the Windy City. So-called not because of the wind from the lake but the legendary verbosity of its politicians. But you’d know that, wouldn’t you? Oak Park High and all that.”

  She actually hadn’t known that, nor did she know if there really was an Oak Park High.

  “Oh, lookie here! If he got ticked off at us, he must have gotten over it, because here he is just four months ago for three days, and again for three days the following month. But he’s no longer with Willoughby & Kessel.”

  “I hope he didn’t do anything to alienate their affections.”

  “If so, the aftershocks sent him clear out of Chicago. His current employer is Barling Industries, whoever they may be, in Kirkland, Washington.”

  *

  Barling Industries, whoever they might be, housed their operations in a concrete-block cube set in an industrial park on the eastern edge of Kirkland. And Graham Weider, whoever he might be these days, lived in a modest ranch house on a skimpily landscaped half-acre lot less than a mile from his office. She obtained both addresses from the phone book in her hotel room, and filled in the descriptions by spending some more of her cash on a taxi. The taciturn driver, an Asian immigrant with a much better grasp of the local geography than the English language, returned her at length to the Heathman, where she packed up and checked out.