“It's not a bad place,” Hugo said as he reseated himself on the lawn chair. Frail as he was and wet-eyed, he looked like a fuzzy-haired, wizened child. “My son's got a nicer one up in Dayton. Nice boy, Ralph. He'll send me the money. I mean if it ends up costing me a few dollars to find her.” Cratz surveyed the lawn and said again, “It's not a bad place. Schwartz bought it for his kids seven, eight years ago, when old man Carroll died. He divided it up good. Split the downstairs into eight measly apartments. Then jacked up the rent so's I had to take the job of handyman just to stay on. It was a helluva lot of work for me alone. ‘Course with Cindy Ann around there wasn't much to it. She'd take care of the lawn and I'd look after the garbage and repairs.” Hugo's eyes began to tear and his thin collapsed mouth trembled. “It was real nice,” he said.
“She's no kin of yours, is she, Mr. Cratz?” I said softly. “No blood relative?”
Cratz ducked his head, and I caught sight of George fidgeting uncomfortably on the stoop.
“What if she isn't?” Cratz said defiantly. “Does a person have to be kin for you to care about ‘em, to want to make sure they're all right?”
“What if she doesn't want to be taken care of?”
“What're you saying?” Cratz said slowly. Anger dried his blue eyes and gave his thin face a sharp, predatory vigor.
“All I'm saying is what the police have probably already told you. If Cindy Ann left you of her own free will, there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. You can't hire someone to make her come back to you, Mr. Cratz, as much as you might want to.”
Cratz made a shrill little noise in the back of his throat—a stifled scream. Then he grabbed me savagely by the arm. “C’mon,” he said, pulling me out of the chair toward the apartment door. “C’mon in here. And you—” he pointed at George, “get on home. Goddamn loudmouth,” he said under his breath.
George started to say something in his own defense, but Hugo cut him off with a chop of his left hand. “Can it, George. I blame myself. I shoulda known better than to leave you out here with this one.” He plucked me by the sleeve. “And don't you say nothing neither. This is my time we're on now. And I already used up two and one-half dollars of it lollygagging.”
He shoved me through the door into a dark, musty antechamber. On the right a stairwell coiled up to the second floor; on the left a narrow hallway meandered toward the rear of the house. Cratz walked down the hallway to the first door on the right and fumbled in his pants pocket for a key.
“I always keep it locked,” he said. “Two years ago we had some niggers move in on the second floor. ‘Bout then apartments started getting broke into.” Cratz cackled dryly. “I'd like to see 'em break in here. Yes, I would. After you,” he said, pushing the door open.
The door frame was low and I had to stoop to make it through.
“You're pretty good size, ain't you?” Cratz said with a touch of expertise. “What d'you go? ‘Bout six-three? ‘Bout two-twenty?”
“Two-fifteen,” I said, surveying the dim little room. Cratz's apartment looked to be no bigger than a small storeroom and it was stuffed like a storeroom with sprung and faded furnishings.
“You ever play ball?” Cratz asked me.
“Some. In college.”
“What? End, maybe?”
“You got it.”
Cratz chuckled. “Don't mind the mess. Just sit yourself down.”
There was a television whispering on my left on a flecked metal trolley and a big scarred darkwood table in the shallow bay. A chair covered with a torn and dusty yellow throw sat next to the table, and a sprung, pea-green convertible couch next to the chair. The bed was pulled open; and the sheets were rumpled and dirty. Behind the couch was a stone mantle crowded with photos of a young man in uniform. Beyond the couch the narrow room emptied abruptly into an alcove the size of a small walk-in closet. In it were a long trough-shaped sink and a tiny Kelvinator refrigerator that made a mournful, ubiquitous hum. The apartment was so narrow that the front of the convertible bed actually touched the credenza stacked against the far wall. The walls themselves were papered in a faded, water-stained stripe that was peeling off near the ceiling. The whole place stank of grease, old clothing, and unwashed flesh.
“It ain't much, is it?” Cratz confessed as he sank down on the open bed. “I just said that stuff about it being a nice place to comfort that old woman George.” He looked about the room with a mournful, watery eye. “No, it ain't much to show after seventy-some years.”
“About George,” I said, sitting gingerly on the dusty edge of the yellow chair. “He didn't say a word about Cindy Ann.”
“Then how'd you know?”
“I guessed. It wasn't too hard to guess from the way you were acting.”
Cratz stared out the big window at the bright expanse of lawn. “It's dark in here, ain't it?” he said softly. “I gotta replace that overhead bulb. ‘Course it's hard for me to get up on a ladder since I had the stroke. It done something to my sense of balance. Man, I used to be as light-footed as a cat.” Hugo toed the faded rug and looked over at me. “I know it's shameful. To be so old and so damn helpless. I know it. I know that's what you're thinking, too. You get to a certain age and people, younger folks, figure you're through with life. You ain't even supposed to have an appetite any more—just pick at your food and smile. ‘Bout now it's all supposed to wind down. And you're supposed to get yourself all prepared for the big one. Like starving yourself a little at a time out of all the pleasures of life was the way of easing into it. Don't you believe it! I ain't prepared to die. I wake up in a cold sweat every night thinking of it. Stuff the damn sheet in my mouth to keep from crying out.” Cratz pressed a hand over the crumpled sheets. “But, then, she'd be there,” he said, patting the mattress. “And I'd feel better.
“You know where Mt. Storm Park is?”
I nodded.
“It ain't so far from here. And up to the time of my stroke I could walk it easy. Just cut down Mount Olive and over to the Park Road. Me and George used to go over there every damn afternoon. Just to be doing something. That's where I met her, Cindy Ann. Stretched out on a beach blanket alongside the shelter house. Man,” Cratz said wistfully, “she was a sight. And pleasant to me. Not thinking right off what maybe she should have been thinking. That I was just another old man looking down her sun dress. Which I was, too. No, she was too sweet for that. We started to chat and she invites me to sit down. And I told George I wouldn't be needing him any further. And that's how I spent that afternoon until way on toward sunset, sitting on that big yellow beach towel of hers and telling her about my life.
“It ain't often that you can find a young person that you can sit and talk to. They just don't care about the past. But Cindy Ann was different. And it wasn't like she was putting on. Boy, you get old enough and you can spot that sort of thing a mile away. She cared about me. Maybe having come from a broken home and being miles away from it and her folks and her friends she needed somebody to care for. So I'd walk on out to that park every day. And she'd be there waiting. And it got so that was the only thing I'd look forward to in the day. Sitting with Cindy Ann in the park and telling her about my days in the Corps or about football or my son. Whatever.
“And then one day ‘bout a year ago, I come to the park and she wasn't there. Man, I'd liked to die. I didn't know what happened to her. Whether she was hurt or sick or something worse. I got George to lend me his car and I spent the whole damn afternoon driving through Clifton, just looking to see if I could catch sight of her. I come home, feeling like an old man, and, damn, if she wasn't setting out there on that very stoop waiting for me! I ain't ever seen anything looked as good as that little girl sitting on the stoop, with her little bag of clothes and things in her hand.
“To this day I don't know why she come to me. I just figured she needed a place to stay and I offered her the couch and she said, Yes, O.K., for a while.
“We had a real good year together, mister. A real good
year. And, right off, I made her promise me that if she ever wanted to leave she would tell me first. So's I wouldn't spend another afternoon like I did when she didn't show up in the park. And she promised. That's how come I know something's happened to her. She never said goodbye, and Cindy Ann would never've done me that way. She was good to me. Looking after me. Cleaning up this hole.”
Cratz began to cry, tears rolling down his cheeks and dropping heavily to the rug. “Ain't supposed to fall in love at my age,” he said. “Ain't supposed to care too much. Too near the end. Too near the grave. Mistake, maybe.” He swallowed hard and swiped at his red nose. “You see, I didn't force her to do nothing. She come of her own free will, like you said. And I just ... I just ain't got enough ... it ain't fair they should've taken her from me.” Cratz began to sob. “It ain't fair.”
“Who are ‘they,’ Mr. Cratz?”
“Them!” he said ferociously and pointed to the window. “Them! Them! Them damn heartless bastards that called themselves her friends. That's who!”
3
I KNEW what she'd say before she said it. I knew because I knew that Hugo was a tired man at the end of his own particular road. Maybe I just wanted to hear her say it, so that I could tell myself I'd given the old man his full half-hour's worth. Maybe if Laurie B. Jellicoe had lived on Lorraine or Newman, instead of two houses down on the opposite side of Cornell, I would have called it a mistaken afternoon. Mistakes happen. Hugo Cratzs happen, although we don't usually see them unless they're selling newspapers in front of a rusted tarbarrel on a windy street corner. Maybe if it hadn't been so sleepy hot that I had to pack my sportscoat over my sleeve like a waiter's napkin, I'd have been thinking more clearly about Hugo Cratz. Maybe I'd have seen him for the bigoted reprobate that he was. Using his devils and his debilities to perpetuate the myth of one Cindy Ann X. Who, judging from the dogeared photograph that Cratz had shown me before I went a-hunting, was probably fell and feeble-minded. Blonde-haired, buck-toothed, sixteen-year-old girlchild with a thin, pale, avaricious face. Who was probably five states away by now on the back of a motorcycle, hanging on for dear life to the belt of whichever rambler she had spotted at Reflections or the Dome and taken a liking to. Probably.
But all I was thinking about that late July afternoon, as I trudged through the maple trees up to the two-story brown-stone apartment house that Cratz had designated with trembling hand—as if he were pointing to Gehenna and the altar of Baal—was that old man's apartment and the old man smells of ripe, unimpeded decay. There were nights when my own rooms smelled of the same death that Hugo was trying to lie his way out of. And, after hearing his story and seeing the way he lived, I just didn't have it in me to tell him it was a hopeless cause.
So I trudged across the street and up the concrete pathway of 1309 and into the blue-tiled lobby with its brass mailboxes set in stippled yellow plaster and ran my finger across the name slots until I came to Jellicoe. Number Four. I walked up to the second landing and, either from force of habit or simply from the sheer contrast with Cratz's place, noted the swirl of detergent on the freshly mopped floors, the woodlight sheen of the balustrade, and the framed print of a sailing ship hung in the hall. It was a nice, expensive little apartment house and Laurie B. Jellicoe—when she answered the door—seemed a nice, smart-looking young woman.
“Yes?” she said in a breathy, little girl voice. “Can I help you?”
I took a good look at her and balked. Tall, about twenty-five, dressed tastefully out of Cardin, with a blonde, bland Farrah-Fawcett face and a great mane of ash-blonde hair, Laurie Jellicoe looked like the last person on earth who would have befriended á gamine like Cindy Ann.
“Well?” she said.
“Well—” I said. “You're a nice-looking girl.”
She nodded almost imperceptibly.
“I guess that's not news.”
“What is it you want?” she said with an edge in her voice. “If you're selling anything—”
“No, I'm not selling. I'm working for Hugo Cratz. I'm a private detective.”
Laurie Jellicoe's eyes widened and her arm slithered down the door like a snake gliding down a tree trunk. “I don't believe it!” she barked with laughter. “He hired a private detective?”
I reddened a little.
“Hey, Lance,” Laurie called over her shoulder to someone sitting in the living room. “Old man Cratz hired a private cop. Can you believe that!”
There was a terrific creak, like the sound of a tank shifting onto its tracks, and then a pound, pound, pound that shook the floorboards. The door flew open and Lance, all ten feet of him in a T-shirt with a “have a good day” face on it, blue jeans, cowboy boots that curled at their tips like a witch's toes, blocked the light. Laurie Jellicoe patted him proprietarily on the butt and said, “Easy there, baby,” in a low jocund voice.
Lance was a sandy-haired giant, a long-nosed, square-jawed, big-chinned Texas boy. Men his size don't come along all that often; and I realized as I stood in his shadow that I had seen him once before in the University Plaza at the corner of Vine and McMillan, striding across the arcade toward the Nautilus Health Club. I was buying cigarettes at Walgreen's at the time, and ol' Lance had practically emptied the rear of the store in his wake. Shopgirls and lady customers had plastered themselves against the window to watch him pass. “What a hunk!” one of the shopgirls said to a girlfriend, who whistled soft agreement.
In the flesh, Lance was a mean-looking hunk, with one of those vain, stupid, pretty-boy faces that get very tough and very shrewd around the eyes.
“You say you're working for that tired piece of shit?” he said in a low Southern baritone. “What kind of man would earn his living like that? No kind of man I'd like to know.”
“Why'd you ask, if you already knew the answer?”
Lance took a breath and, I swear, I could hear the elastic threading of his T-shirt pop.
“Go back inside, honey,” Laurie said quickly. “I'll handle this.”
Ol' Lance gave me one helluva angry look and plunged a finger the size of a dollar cigar at my chest. “Be seeing you,” he said sharply. He managed to pack enough real menace into those three words to make me think twice before I ever wised off to him again. He patted Laurie on the rear and rumbled back into the living room.
Laurie watched him retreat and then turned to me. “Mister,” she said in that little girl voice. “You don't know how close you came.”
“I think, maybe, I have an idea.”
“No, you don't,” she said. She gave me an appreciative look, a cold professional sizing-up, and smiled favorlessly. “He'd squash you like a bug.”
I hadn't realized it before—the clothes, the little girl good looks, and the timid breathy voice had disguised it—but this Laurie was a hunk herself. Big-boned, big-breasted, with long handsome legs and a firm round rear that showed seamlessly beneath her tailored slacks, she made a good match for ol' Lance. I couldn't help thinking she made a good match, period. She caught that look in my eye—girls that are built like she was never miss it—and shook her head, no.
“Don't even think about it,” she said with a cautionary grin.
“Can't kill a man for dreaming.”
“You don't know Lance.” She glanced quickly into the living room. “Another place, another life, maybe it'd be different.”
“I'll take that as a compliment,” I said.
“What is it that Cratz expects you to find out?” Laurie Jellicoe said, leaning back against the door. “Where we stashed Cindy Ann?”
I nodded. “That's it.”
She didn't say anything for a second. Just stared at me with a mild worry in her stone-blue eyes. “Look, Mr.—”
“Stoner. Call me Harry.”
“Look, Harry,” she said. “In the last couple of days we've had the police here two times. Cratz has called us every hour on the hour since Monday. And we're just a little sick and tired of the whole thing. I wish to God at this point that I'd never met th
e girl.”
“You two were friends?”
Laurie Jellicoe shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. We did laundry together down on Ludlow and we'd go shopping at Keller's together. To tell you the truth, I think she had a crush on Lance.” Laurie passed a tan hand through her golden hair. “I felt sorry for her. Coming from a broken home. Having to live the way she did. She was one of those runaway kids who you just know are going to end up in trouble. She had that victim look about her. You know? So washed-out that her eyes were the only color in her face. And skinny. And just as awkward and naive as hell. In a way she was lucky, tying up with Cratz. At least he didn't abuse her physically. Not that he wouldn't have if he'd been able to.” Laurie Jellicoe grimaced. “He's such an awful old man. Dirty and repulsive. It was no wonder she couldn't take it anymore—living over there. Especially after his stroke. Cleaning up his messes. Practically feeding him by hand. It gives me the fantods to think about it,” she said with a shudder.
“Fantods?”
“Just a word that my grandma used to use.” Laurie smiled half-heartedly. “You know I've told this to the police. Do you really want me to go through it again?”
“Please.”
“All right. Last Sunday Cindy Ann came over here to talk. She told me that she'd found a guy—I don't know who. Some biker in Norwood who worked days at the General Motors assembly plant. She'd met him at a V.F.W. dance that Cratz had sent her off to and she'd just gone crazy over him. And, now, she didn't know what to do about the old man. I never did understand why she cared for him. But there must have been something decent about Cratz, because she didn't want to leave him in the lurch. She came to me to talk it out. Girl to girl, you know? She was such a pathetic little thing, and she always looked up to me like I was some sort of, you know, authority. Because of Lance and all. Well, we talked and she said she was afraid that Cratz would get steamed if he knew that she was running off with a young guy. He was very jealous in that way. So, I suggested that she tell him she was going home to see her folks and that she was going to spend the night before she left with us. You see Lance has a car and she could say that he planned to drive her down to the bus station around midnight. I mean it wasn't that unusual. She'd stayed overnight before to listen to music and just to talk. So, she told Cratz what she was going to do and came over here on Sunday night. About eleven or so some kid rode up on a chopper and Cindy Ann left with him. She told me before she left that if Cratz asked about her to tell him that she'd be in touch when she could. And she cried a little. And we hugged and kissed each other. And that was it.”
The Lime Pit Page 2