The Lime Pit

by Jonathan Valin

  I bent forward to the glass and peered closely at the face, just to be sure. Then I went inside the shop.

  There was a tall glass display case to the right of the door. Behind it a very black Negro with a gold chain around his neck and teeth and eyes of the same color gold was leaning against a shiny register, gazing at his reflection in the chrome.

  “What is it?” he said abstractedly. He tore himself away from his favorite sight and looked sullenly down at me.

  “Those pictures in the window, are they for sale?”

  “Sho’. Everything's for sale, man. Which one you want?”

  “Lower left. There's a snapshot of a red-haired girl.”

  He turned to the window. The corkboard on which the photos were pinned swung open like a dutch door and a chunk of bright sunlight fell into the room. The black squinted at it furiously, as if it were a big yellow brick someone had tossed through his window.

  “Which, now?” he said irritably.

  I leaned over the counter and pointed to Cindy Ann.

  He plucked the photograph off the cork and slammed the display door shut. “Man,” he said, holding the picture at arm's length. “Can't say she do nothing for me.” He slapped the photo to the glass. “Two dollars.”

  “Got any more like that one?” I said, pulling my billfold out.

  “Could be. Got a whole box of them in the back there.” He grinned. “Ah'll hold this one for you, suh, while you go'n take a look.”

  “You won't sell it to anyone while I'm gone?”

  The black man looked at me stupidly.

  I had the rear of the shop more or less to myself. It was dry-walled into a three-sided cube, racked on each side with magazines. A curtained portal in the back wall led to the peep shows, and there was a bin marked “Special” in the center of the floor. I rummaged through the torn magazines and snapshots inside the bin and came up with two more of Cindy Ann. Both of them were tame, nondescript Polaroids—very different fare from what Hugo had discovered in that shoebox. Which puzzled me.

  I looked back up to the counter and decided it was time to do a little detection. After thinking it over, I decided a twenty dollar bill would be just about the right tool.

  The clerk was staring at his own reflection again when I walked back up to the register. “Find what you looking for?” he said to me.

  Some of them are back-slappers and some of them handle you as daintily as teacups. This one was the cautious type. But I figured that most of his suspiciousness came from being black and poor. Which made the twenty dollar bill seem more and more like a good idea. Besides, that gold in his eye wasn't all eyestrain.

  “These pictures,” I said in my most casual manner. “I'd like to get some more of them.”

  “You would?” he said, mocking my tone of voice. “How bad?”

  I slipped the twenty out of my wallet.

  “That bad?” he said and his eyes glittered. “Well, I'll tell you, we get us a shipment every month.”

  I started to put the bill back in my pocket when he reached out and grabbed my arm.

  “ ‘Course you in a hurry. So you might try up to Gem Distributors on Mohawk.”

  He pulled the twenty out of my hand. “You can jus’ keep them,” he said, pointing to the three photographs. “They's your change.”

  ******

  It took me half an hour to walk up to Mohawk. Half an hour in the noon sun through that part of the city where commerce dies off and languishes in two-story storefronts and red-brick tenements. Used furniture stores, redneck bars with names like “Liberty Bell,” two-dollar-a-day hotels, pawn shops, abandoned movie houses. Most great cities trail their own death around with them and sleep, like John Donne, with one foot in the coffin. And the Over-the-Rhine, around Mohawk, is Cincinnati's dead-end.

  It took me ten more minutes to find Gem Distributors, because, like a box within a box, Gem Distributors was tucked away inside an old white trolley depot. At least, it looked like it had been a trolley depot from the size of the round picket doors set in the white stone facade. I found a customer's entrance on the west side of the building and walked in. Two men were sitting on a dolly by the door, drinking wine from a paper bag. One of them had long red hair and the lush, simpering face of a painted Cupid. The other was older, with a great shock of white hair and white walrus moustaches and spry gray eyes. They were both a little drunk and, from the looks on their faces, I'd walked in on them in the middle of a joke. The old one got to his feet and dusted at his overalls, while Cupid broke up in laughter.

  “Don't mind him, mister,” the old one said. But there was laughter in his voice, too, and he was having a hard time containing it. He made his face over into a mask of seriousness. And the young one fell back on the dolly and roared.

  “Shut up, Terry,” the old one said. “Don't mind him, mister. What can I do for you?”

  “I want to speak to the manager,” I said.

  “You're looking at him.'' The old man hiked up his pants. “Pete O'Brien,” he said, holding out a hand.

  “Harry Stoner,” I said.

  Pete O'Brien didn't look like a pornographer—for what that was worth. And if he were, he wasn't a particularly successful one. The warehouse was virtually empty. From the dust on the floors it hadn't seen much business in quite a time. I began to think that the clerk had pulled a fast one.

  “You deliver all over the city, Pete?” I asked him.

  “Hell, yes. You got some items you want shipped?”

  “Not exactly. I'm looking for some goods that you handled.”

  He looked at me warily. “You an insurance adjustor, Mr. Stoner?”

  I shook my head. “I'm a P.I.”

  “A cop?” Terry said gamely. The grin left his face and was replaced by the sort of amusement that rings like a coin slapped on a bar. It can go either way—heads its violence, tails its back again to explosive laughter.

  O'Brien, who'd apparently seen his friend Terry get worked up like that before, looked back over his shoulder and said, “Find something to do, Terry. And I mean now.”

  The boy got to his feet and took a pull of wine. “The hell,” he said quietly. He wiped his lip with a shirt sleeve. “He's a cop, Pete.”

  O'Brien looked back at me. “Just what is it you want?”

  “I'm looking for a girl,” I said. I handed him one of the snapshots I'd picked up at Adult News. “That girl.”

  “Ho-lee!” O'Brien said, looking at the picture.

  Terry ambled up and peered over his shoulder. When he saw Cindy Ann, his skin got as red as his hair and his face filled with a coarse lust.

  “Shit,” he said softly. “Look at that!”

  I snapped the picture out of O'Brien's hand. The kid jerked his head up and leered at me. I had enough of leering and of dirty minds for one morning.

  “Wipe that smile off your face,” I said, before I realized how silly I sounded.

  The old man laughed. “Better do like he says, Terry.”

  “The hell.” Terry swaggered a bit—the bottle clutched in his right hand. But I knew it was all for show. I was a lot bigger than he was, and like most bullies, Terry had an instinct for odds. “I don't like you,” he said nastily.

  “‘Feel better now that I know?”

  The old man laughed again. “Take it over in the corner, Terry. Or this fella's likely to call your bluff.”

  Terry muttered something under his breath, then took a ferocious pull of the wine. His mouth looked bloody with it when he jerked the bottle away. He walked slowly back to the trolley and plunked himself down and stared at me and drank and muttered to himself.

  “Kids,” Pete O'Brien said to me. “That one there hasn't got the guts of a chicken. But he's sure enough vicious when your back is turned.”

  “I'll keep that in mind.”

  “You do that,” O'Brien said. “About the picture. I don't know where on earth you got the idea that that girl was around here, but I'll tell you plainly she ain't. I've
never seen her before in my life. Christ, she sure looks young for that kind of thing.”

  “She's sixteen,” I said. “And I didn't think you'd know her... It's the photograph I'm interested in. It was shipped out of this warehouse.”

  “Could be,” O'Brien said. “We ship all sorts of things. I take it you want to know where that photo came from.”

  I nodded.

  He walked over to a work table next to the door. There was an old ledger on the counter. “I'll tell you the truth, Mr. Stoner. I'm just the floor manager around here. The man you ought to talk to is Morris Rich. He owns this place and he'd be the one that could tell you who ships what from where. That is, if he'd be willing to talk. Which I doubt. Why you looking for that girl?”

  “She's a runaway,” I said. “Her father wants her back.”

  O'Brien sighed. “I shouldn't do this, but I'm going to let you look at the manifests. I don't know how much help that'll be. But that's about all I can do for you.”

  I thanked him and took a quick look at the dusty ledger.

  There were monthly shipments to the bookstore on Eighth Street, consigned out of Atlanta, where the big pornography houses are based. But the snapshots in my pocket weren't professional smut. They were strictly amateur stuff—the kind of thing that might run as a one-line ad in the back of a magazine. Ten photos for ten dollars and, maybe, a steamy letter to go with them. According to the ledger, there weren't any local shippers dealing with Adult News. Which meant that either the Negro had been lying to me or that he just didn't know where the photos came from. I figured he didn't know. Like Pete O'Brien he was only a hired hand and, as far as he was concerned, everything in the store came from Gem Distributors. If I was going to go any further, I would have to talk to someone higher up, either to Rich or to whoever owned the porno shop. That is, if, as Pete O'Brien said, they were willing to talk to me.

  5

  IT TURNED out that I didn't have to make that choice, because Pete O'Brien got talkative after I couldn't find anything in the ledger book. Like Hugo Cratz, he was an old man with a heart, and he felt badly enough about Cindy Ann to let drop the fact that Morris Rich not only supplied Adult News, he owned it. Rich had an office in the Dixie Terminal Building on Fifth Street. O'Brien gave me the address as I left, along with a piece of advice.

  “Morrie's a family man. The more you say about his kids, the better you make him feel. Just keep talking about his sons and you might make out O.K.”

  Judging from the decor of Rich's handsome office, I thought O'Brien was probably right. The Rich boys looked down from every wall and up from every end table in the room. And, in case you missed the point, Morrie Rich reminded you by tapping constantly on the dozen picture frames that crowded his desk. I had the disconcerting feeling that his family was sitting there with us. And, eventually, I realized that Rich felt that way, too. Occasionally his nasal voice seemed to soften, and he'd be talking familiarly to one of the boys in the photographs, as if the kid were standing there by his desk, asking his dad for another twenty or for the keys to the Seville.

  Morris Rich was a sly, sentimental man of about fifty. A Reds Rooter. A Shriner. A big contributor to the Ruth Lyons' Christmas Fund. A soft touch to his children, who would probably pay for that generosity in later years when someone finally got fed up and told them what selfish, soulless bastards they'd grown up to be. But he was first and foremost a thief. I knew that as soon as I saw him at his huge kidney-shaped desk, sitting behind that photographic phalanx of family and kin. Some men wear their consciences on their sleeves; Morris Rich had his arranged like an army at his feet.

  He was a short man with a smooth, hairless head the exact size of a schoolyard kickball and the bright, famished eyes and tiny upturned mouth of a rat. I didn't like him or trust him. And, after a few minutes of listening to him talk about his boys, I realized that he wasn't going to tell me a thing about where the three photographs I'd shown him had come from. Not unless I made finding Cindy Ann a family affair.

  “Oh, we ship from all over the world, Mr. Stoner,” he said, making a globe with his stubby arms and hugging it to his chest. “It would really be impossible for me to say exactly where this item or that item from a lot came from. You see, we're just distributors here at Gem. We don't pack no goods. We don't have no say over what goes into a crate we deliver. Of course, a customer gets mad if what comes out don't tally with what was shipped.” He chuckled blandly and dropped his arms to the desk.

  “That's too bad,” I said. “The girl's family will be very disappointed.”

  He shook his head sadly. “To be a parent is sometimes a terrible burden. I know. Believe me. Cory, my youngest, is just turning eighteen. I give him a car and he wrecks it. I warn him about girls and he goes out and knocks one up. Cost me eleven hundred dollars to send her to a clinic in New York. And he's still hanging around with her. You explain it.”

  “I wouldn't know what to say,” I said, making my voice cozy and sympathetic. “Hell, I don't know what I’m going to tell the girl's parents as it is. It looks bad when a politician's daughter goes as wrong as this girl has. I don't know what he's going to do. Make a real fuss, I guess.”

  He bit. Just like I thought he would. His bright, beady eyes danced across the photos and he said, “In the government,” in a voice as tight as his little mouth.

  It's a shameless business—blackmail. But, like a football coach, you go with what works. And with Morris Rich what worked was whatever could bring the roof down on his household of boys.

  “Ah, it's worse than that,” I said. “The guy's got a lot of friends. Listen, if I told you his name you'd understand. He's going to blow a gasket when he learns that I couldn't turn anything up.” I shook my head. “What the hell do I care? I did my job. I'll show him the pictures and tell him you just couldn't help me out. I mean business is business, right?”

  Morris Rich nodded his head, but his eyes didn't move from my face.

  “I hate to take up any more of your time,” I said. “But I guess I'd better get a deposition, just in case this thing goes to court. As far as I'm concerned, he'd be better off letting the Feds handle it anyway. They can get court orders, wire taps. You know. Their hands aren't tied. Let them take care of it. Would you mind calling your secretary in for a minute. She can take your statement down. Then we can get it notarized at a bank.”

  Morris Rich leaned back in his Eames chair and put a finger beside his nose. “You ain't exactly the man you pretend to be, are you, boy-chik?”

  I threw out my hands. “Hell, Mr. Rich. I'm just a guy trying to make an honest dollar.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said.

  Rich held out his hand. “Maybe I should take another look at the photographs.”

  “Sure,” I said politely. “It sometimes pays to take a second look. Just like with people, sometimes a first impression ... you don't see clearly.”

  I handed him the photos and he looked them over quickly.

  “What the hell was I thinking of!” he said, slapping his bald head roundly. “I know where these come from. Look, it's”—he glanced at his watch—”almost one-thirty. I'm going to shut down for lunch anyway. What say we go back up to Gem and take a look at the manifests, just to be sure?”

  “I already saw the manifests, Mr. Rich.”

  He got a pained look in his eyes. “You ain't supposed to look at those books, Mr. Stoner. I don't know what Pete was thinking of to show them to you.”

  “Well, I guess he just got carried away by the pictures.”

  “Uh-huh.” Rich tapped nervously at the picture frames on his desk and I dragged one foot across the floor and made swirls in the plush carpet. And that's the way we would have remained—me making swirls and Rich playing those picture frames like a brassy xylophone—if I hadn't gotten to my feet with a mild groan and told him what he would never know was the absolute truth.

  “I'm getting tired of this game, Mr. Rich. If you've got some information about the whereabouts of
this girl, it would be in your best interest to tell me now, before this thing gets out of hand.”

  “Are you threatening me?” he said with alarm. “I got lawyers who can handle this, if you're threatening me.”

  “We both know it would be cleaner to keep this thing out of court, Mr. Rich. You don't want cops crawling around your warehouse and your bookstore, do you?”

  “What bookstore?” he said. “I don't know nothing about no bookstore.”

  I looked at him ruefully. “All right, Mr. Rich. I guess you know better than I do how much heat you can take.”

  I was almost to the door, past those walls of smiling Rich boys, when he called me back.

  6

  THE WHITE frame house was on River Road, along the stretch’ of bottomland that is flooded yearly when the Ohio crests in the spring. I could smell the rot from where I'd parked the car on a clay embankment—that fecal smell of decay that troubles the river where it goes shallow and dead. It made me think of the war and of the jungle heat and of the bodies that puffed up like drowned men in the steamy rain forests.

  A beat-up white Falcon was parked next to the house, and there was an old tire lying on its side in the grassless front yard. It looked a likely enough spot for a pornographer to hole up, although an hour before Morris Rich had tried to convince me that the man who was holed up there would be better off left alone.

  “Jones is his name. Abel Jones,” he said to me. “But, believe me, it should have been the other one—Cain. He's a very tough customer, Mr. Stoner. I get snapshots from him once and a while. Polaroids. He's the only one who sells me Polaroids. That's why I know the ones you showed me are from him. I bought 'em maybe a month ago. Always they're different girls. And sometimes I can't even display them.”