by Jon Jackson
“Connie Luck was all right then, I guess,” Mulheisen said. “Not ill?”
“Oh, yeah. She was fine. But come to think of it, that was the last time I seen her.”
“She wasn’t from around here,” Mulheisen said. “Where was she from?”
“Down below, I heard. Seems like they must of took the body down there, I guess, for the funeral.”
“You know,” Mulheisen said, “I never saw any sign of her out at the house. No pictures, no sign that a woman had ever lived there. Kind of a bachelor existence Luck lives.”
Charlie contemplated his beer. “A woman like that, a man’d have to be made of stone not to be just killed by the loss. She was a good bit younger’n ol’ Imp. Damn fine-lookin’ woman. He prob’ly decided it was best to just clear all her gear away, try to put it behind him. Be a hard thing. Not like my old lady,” he added, almost under his breath.
Mulheisen was intrigued. “A woman like that, I imagine she had a lot of friends.”
“I don’t think so,” Charlie said. “She wa’n’t around all that long, just a couple of years. And they kind of kept to themselves, out there. Came and went, just like that.” He tried to snap his fingers but he didn’t succeed. Charlie had put down a couple more shots while they were talking.
“I wonder how they met?” Mulheisen said.
“Don’ know,” Charlie said. “It was like Imp to find a woman like that, from away. He was all’s a kind of outsider kind of guy, though you wouldn’t expect it. Some folks admire him. Him and me are the same age, went to school here in the same room, first grade through senior. He was the smartest kid in school, best athlete, All-State in basketball, you know. But he never really fit in.”
“You don’t say,” Mulheisen said. “I wonder why?”
“It was his Ma, I think. She was an outsider. His Pa married her ‘gainst the old man’s wishes. Oh, they had a big foofaraw about it, seems like. Imp’s Pa never spoke to Old Man Luckenbach again. They was cut off. Eb, Imp’s Pa, even changed his name, cut it to Luck. I don’t know what that was all about. It was before my time. Nowadays, a course, Imp has quite a following ‘round here. New folks, mostly. But some of the old backwoods trash, too,” Charlie conceded.
“What kind of following?”
“Oh, it’s that patriotic bullshit,” Charlie said. “Militia, and all that bull. Buncha Nazis, if you ask me. Say, how about another shot?”
Mulheisen said, “Charlie, you’re going to have a little trouble driving home. You want me to drive you?”
But Charlie wasn’t driving. He had a little apartment behind the garage. He was staying there tonight. He muttered some rough comments about “. . . my War Department. She wou’n’t open the door if I came home now.”
Mulheisen decided that was about it for Charlie. He got up and said good night and walked back to the motel.
It was too late to reach his mother. She’d be in bed by now. But he felt obliged to call. The night nurse would be on duty. She was. His mother had gone to bed at eight, according to the nurse she’d relieved. Mrs. Mulheisen was fine, sleeping peacefully.
“Well, tell her I called,” Mulheisen said. “I’ll call in the morning. Tell her I heard an interesting story about silver martins.”
Mulheisen went to bed. The motel was next to the highway, but there was no traffic. He slept like a baby. In the morning, he went out for coffee and a copy of the Traverse City Record-Eagle at a restaurant next door called the Queen’s Table. He was tempted by the massive “Hunter’s Special” breakfast on the menu—a steak, eggs, hash browns with gravy, biscuits. He decided that he could never get half of it down. He settled for pancakes with local maple syrup, then smoked a cigar as he walked back to the motel. He called his mother.
Cora Mulheisen was quite perky. He told her about the apples he’d bought. She asked about the silver martins. The story made her chuckle.
“There are no such things as ‘silver martins,’” she assured him. “It must be some local name for a swallow, or maybe that’s what they call swifts up there. The only martins we have in these parts are purple martins, and they are dark birds. The story about the lard bucket sounds authentic. Very likely, if they’d been used to nesting at that site they’d return there. That’s all there is to that. They’re very social birds, nest in large houses that people used to put up. We had a martin house, don’t you remember? I can’t remember what happened to it. Probably something like what happened to your friend Charlie’s martin house. Oh, I remember. Your father took it down. It was so ramshackle. He was going to build a new one, but . . . just another of those things that didn’t get done. Martins are purple. Actually, dark blue, with that kind of iridescence that makes them seem to change tones in certain kinds of light. They’re a kind of swallow, you know.”
“What about the hibernation thing?” Mulheisen asked. “That didn’t sound quite right.”
An old folk tale, she assured him. Birds didn’t hibernate. “But you know,” she said, “thinking about it, I would guess that the story arose from the fact that a related species, like the bank swallow, excavates tunnels in cliffs and sandbanks next to water. The swallows make hundreds of these holes for nests. And then, of course, one day they’re gone. If the local people don’t notice, I suppose someone might jump to the conclusion that they’ve gone into hibernation. Then one day, they’re back, en masse. People don’t often see them return, but suddenly they’re here, flying in and out of their holes in the sandbank. Yes, I would imagine that’s it.”
Mulheisen was pleased that she sounded so normal. He told her he’d be back soon, possibly that evening. Otherwise, the next day for sure.
“You know,” she said suddenly, obviously having been thinking about the hibernation problem, “it occurs to me that I have read, somewhere, that a few birds do sometimes become rather torpid, if there has been a sudden change of temperature. They’re able to reduce their metabolism, it seems. Then it might seem that they’re in a state similar to hibernation. You can see how beneficial that might be, since in a cold snap the number of airborne insects they live on would obviously diminish as well. I think swifts might be one of the species. They’re sort of like swallows. Laymen might confuse them with swallows. Then, you see, country folks are used to the idea of hibernation, from bears, and so on. They might naturally extrapolate from that to include birds.”
When they finally said good-bye, Mulheisen turned his attention to other information he’d picked up. He called his old friend Jimmy Marshall at the Ninth Precinct in Detroit.
“I need a favor,” he said. “What can you find out for me about M. P. Luck? Military service, criminal record, that kind of thing?”
“Mul, Mul, Mul,” Jimmy said. “I thought you retired.”
“I did retire,” Mulheisen said. “I just need a little information.”
“You know what you are?” Jimmy said. “I was thinking about it the other night. I was wondering how you were getting on with this retirement. Since I didn’t hear anything from you, I decided retirement must agree with you. But I guess I was wrong. You sound like you got that old fever.”
“What fever is that?” Mulheisen asked.
“You want to know things. Something catches your interest, so you want to know. But I was saying, it occurred to me that retirement might be right for you, even if you’re too young for that. You’re one of those outcats.”
“What’s an outcat?”
“You know, like the Hawk.”
“The Hawk? You mean, Coleman Hawkins?”
“What other Hawk is there?” Jimmy said. “I know you were always partial to the Hawk. Great player, but he was one of those people, you know. He played in lots of bands, but he was always special. He was someone separate. Seems like he kept himself apart, somehow. I mean, he was in the scene, sure, but he was the cat who walked by himself, you know? That’s you. The department wasn’t really your gig.”
Mulheisen couldn’t help but feel gratified by this comparison. Co
leman Hawkins! But “outcat"? He wasn’t so sure if this was wholly complimentary. “I’ve never been a cat person,” he remarked.
“Well, maybe you’re an odd duck, then,” Jimmy said. “That better?”
“Oh, there’s another thing,” Mulheisen said, letting this discussion slide. “Luck was supposedly married, but his wife died. Can you find out something about that? Oh, and maybe you could check out these license plates for me.”
Marshall sighed. “You’re still in it, outcat or odd duck.” He put him on hold and told him when he returned that the plates belonged to a Dodge pickup, owned by an Earl Huley, of Beckley, a town Mulheisen recognized as being not far from Queensleap. The rest of the information he’d requested would take a little while to gather. Mulheisen thanked him and said he’d check back later.
A little while later he drove to Traverse City, the county seat. He looked up the plat maps. The property owned by Luck consisted of some three hundred acres. It bordered an immense swamp on one side, and extended almost, but not quite, to the Manistee River. The land had been registered to one Constance Malachi, subsequently transferred to one Martin Parvis Luckenbach. For some reason, the two parcels of land that blocked the access to the river were registered to Ms. Malachi and a Thomas Adams, respectively. They were just strips of riverfront property, extending back approximately a few hundred feet from the river and running for several acres. The Adams property had devolved to a Charles McVey, upon the decease of Adams. There was no similar disposition of the Malachi property. Mulheisen presumed it had been inherited by Luck.
When he looked in the civil records, there was no record of a marriage certificate for Martin Parvis Luckenbach, or for Constance Malachi. No death certificate, either. Idly, he looked up a birth certificate for Luck. Nothing. And nothing for M. P. Luckenbach.
He went by the sheriff’s office. He identified himself as a retired police officer from Detroit. He chatted up the sergeant at the desk, a young woman named Candace, very pretty and quite intelligent and voluble. Things didn’t seem too busy at the office that morning. Candace was mildly flirtatious with this older, retired cop. He suggested that he was possibly interested in relocating up that way. What were land prices like? Candace said they were, or had been, pretty low for land that was marginally useful for agriculture, but in recent years they’d been creeping up.
“Why is that?” Mulheisen wanted to know.
“Inflation, I guess,” Candace said. “But there’s been quite a few people moving up from down below. Retirees, some of them. Building big houses. Queensleap’s a good area for them. And folks moving out from town. Lot of building. Or was, until the slowdown.”
Mulheisen agreed he’d seen the houses they were building. Way too big for a bachelor like him. He supposed the sheriff’s department had a little more work, break-ins, and so forth. Probably a lot of these folks are just summer folks, he opined. Candace agreed.
“That reminds me,” Mulheisen said. “I was stopped last night, by a Corporal Dean, out west of Queensleap. About eleven-thirty or so. I couldn’t figure out what for. Did he give any indication in his report? He didn’t issue a ticket or anything.”
Candace looked it up in the log. There wasn’t any report from Dean. He wasn’t on duty last night. Was he sure it was Dean? Mulheisen wasn’t absolutely sure. He thought that was the name, but he could be wrong. But no, there wasn’t any report.
Mulheisen thanked her and left. He called Jimmy Marshall on the cell phone. As he’d feared, there was no information on M. P. Luck, militarily. Mulheisen suggested he try the name Luckenbach, and also to check on Constance Malachi. He gave the number of the cell phone and drove back to Queensleap. He’d decided to take the motel unit for another night, so he called home to let his mother know. There was no answer. He assumed she had gone out for a walk, accompanied by the nurse. He left a message on the answering machine. As Jimmy had not called back, Mulheisen called him.
“I called you,” Jimmy said, “but evidently you had the phone turned off.”
“Well, of course I had it turned off,” Mulheisen said. “This thing runs down if you leave it on.”
“Well, you can’t get calls if it’s off,” Jimmy pointed out. “Sure, it runs down, but you just charge it up again. Don’t you have one of those gewgaws that you plug it in with?”
“Oh, yeah. It’s in the box. I think I left it at home.”
“Well, it’ll help a lot there,” Jimmy said. “Anyway, Luckenbach worked a little better, except that there’s a hold on his military record. The Homeland Security people have it. You’d have to contact them. I’d guess it means that either he’s on their list or maybe he works for them.”
Mulheisen was intrigued. Evidently, the hold also applied to any other public record of Luckenbach, including legal affairs. That apparently included Constance Malachi. Thinking about the plat map, he recalled that it had simply showed a name crossed off and another name, a successor, added. Whoever had been blocking files hadn’t thought of that. But still, it seemed remarkable to Mulheisen that an agency could remove files at all.
“Can they do that?” Mulheisen asked.
“Well, there’s something called the Patriot Act,” Jimmy said. “I’m not sure this kind of secrecy would stand up to an official request, but they’re saying that. You know, if it was something official . . .”
“Ah, well, thanks, Jimmy. I appreciate your help. Maybe we can get together one of these days and play some Ellington or something.”
“That would be nice. Come on by, Mul. So,” Jimmy spoke casually, “what are you gonna do?”
“I think I’ll hang around up here for a couple of days,” Mulheisen said. “Nice weather.”
“Enjoy your retirement, Mul,” Jimmy said.
7
Run Spot
Joe was well into North Dakota when he saw a man by the side of the road, far ahead. At first he didn’t pay much attention. He had been thinking about other things. He had begun with thinking about Fedima and their encounter, followed by just thinking about Fedima, about what it might be like to be in bed with her. Would they wrestle? Probably not. Would it be interesting? Oh yeah, he was sure it would be. What would be the consequences, for him, for Helen, for Frank, if he and Fedima began to disturb the domestic tranquillity? Was he, after all, just looking for some excuse to bail out of a life that was beginning to bore him? He didn’t feel bored. He felt rather excited right now.
But these were road ramblings, that was all . . . the dreamy wanderings of the mind that come when you’ve been driving for a while, with a long road ahead, no traffic, and especially when driving through a slightly surreal landscape like the one flowing by . . . Long rising runs, with distant ridges, maybe an occasional barn or a silo, a radio tower in the distance . . . And now, he had gotten to that place where the land began to break up into weird eroded outcroppings, twisted canyons, scrub brush, sage, and tumbleweeds. It reminded Joe of something out of an old cartoon strip he had seen—Krazy Kat. The weird formations, the great space. Sometimes he could see a distant donkey engine, pumping oil or gas, or whatever, dipping its birdlike head again and again, like one of those gag devices one used to see perched on a cocktail glass. The Roadrunner was in it too, except that out here in the Dakotas there weren’t any road-runners, just hawks hunched on the occasional fence post.
He wondered how Fedima would take to a life with him, if he got her to leave. Would she leave? No, he was sure that she wouldn’t. He was confident that he could seduce her—hell, it was she who had initiated the business. Or had she? Was that just her open, frank style, which he had misread as an interest in seduction? It may have been that. Was he tired of Helen? No, but he was . . . what? He had to admit that he was a little alarmed at the kind of life into which he had so easily and comfortably slipped. He hadn’t even noticed it happening until he was deeply into it. It was like some trite joke . . . the Tender Trap. This whole attraction to Fedima could be nothing more than an attempt to jar himsel
f out of the trap of the straight life. He was just restless.
These thoughts seemed idle, but they hurtled through his mind. And all the time, the car was hurtling toward the figure on the road, which wasn’t distant anymore. He saw that the man by the side of the road was not walking. He wasn’t a hitchhiker, either—not that Joe was going to stop. Once he might have stopped, just out of curiosity, to find out why a man might be way out here in the badlands, with no sign of a car broken down, no other road from which the man might have been dropped off. But Joe didn’t stop anymore. The last time he’d stopped, one of the two hitchhikers had already been dead and shortly thereafter Joe bid fair to join him. Joe had taken a bullet in the head for his generosity that time. He had still not fully recovered; maybe one never recovered from being shot in the head.
Maybe that’s how I got into this straight life, Joe thought. My head tried to get me into a safer place. And then, as he flashed by the man at eighty miles per hour, he realized it was the Colonel.
Joe almost hit the brakes. It was a close thing. Instead, in the mirror he watched. The Colonel did not turn around, he continued to gaze down the road, hands clasped behind his back. Evidently, the Colonel had not recognized Joe. As far as Joe could tell, he hadn’t even turned his head to glance at Joe as he’d passed.
One reason the Colonel hadn’t looked was that Joe was no longer driving the green Dodge Durango in which he’d left the place on French Forque. He was driving a Ford Taurus, a light brown one with tinted windows. Unless a hitchhiker is very intent upon the face of the driver of a vehicle approaching him at eighty miles per hour there is a good chance that he will be able to determine little more than that the driver is male or female, and perhaps not even that. And if the windows are tinted, it’s even less likely that he’ll be able to identify the driver, especially if he’s not expecting to see the person he’s looking for in that kind of car.