“Yeah, well, fuck ’em. Fuck ’em all.”
She pulled a phone book across the desk and began to flip through it angrily, ripping one of the pages, crumpling another. “Just one more question,” I said. “What do you think happened to Covington?”
She looked up. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“He’s under cover. It’s just a guess, but that’s what I think. Deep cover.”
“You sound like a spy.”
“This business is a lot like the spy business, don’t think it isn’t.”
“What do you mean, exactly?”
“I mean I think Mark’s assumed a new identity, maybe even a new face. There’s a plastic surgeon on every corner these days. After a half-day session with one of those boys I could sit right here and you’d swear you’d never met me before.”
“Why would he do that?”
“The Big One, of course. The game breaker. The Big P.”
“What’s that?”
“Pulitzer. Posterity. Call it what you want. Mark’s done it all on the local scene. I mean, I hate the bastard, and I think I’m better than he is, but still, he has done some fantastic pieces. The series on the Water Project should have gotten him the Pulitzer last year. It would have, if it wasn’t for those kids up in Point Reyes who took on Synanon.”
“Any idea what the Big One is?”
Her eyes slipped shut again, the eraser went to the mouth, seconds ticked by, metronomic, loud. “Are you any good?” she asked finally.
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you trying to do anything other than find Mark Covington?”
“No.”
“Will you keep it a secret if I give you a lead? I’m supposed to hate Mark’s guts, you know,” she added sarcastically. “I’d hate for anyone around here to learn I’d helped find him.”
“I’ll keep the secret.”
“So you say. So you say.”
She got up and went to the entry to her cubicle and looked up and down the corridor, then went back and sat down, pulling her legs under her and crossing them into a lotus position. “Okay,” she said. “Here’s the deal. I’d go after this myself, you understand, but I’ve got something hot that’s about to break, and I’ve been working on it for six weeks and I hate to let it go. So I’ll give you a tip, if you promise that when you get something firm, anything, you’ll tell me so I can be the first to write it. Deal?”
I didn’t even think about it. “Deal,” I said. I wasn’t sure I meant it, but I said it.
“Okay. Check out the Biloxi Corporation.”
“Biloxi? What’s that?”
“I don’t know. But the last time I saw Mark was here in his office. I heard him say that name on the phone. When he saw I was standing where I could hear him he hung up.”
“Biloxi,” I repeated. “Anything else?”
She shook her head. “Anything else I might say about Mark would tell you more about me than about him.”
“That’s usually the way it works.”
The telephone rang and I got hurried directions to Hal Arndt’s office before Miss Brown picked it up and started taking notes in a rapid scribble. As I left her office she was telling the person on the other end that she would go to jail before revealing his name to anyone.
As I turned down the hall Miss Brown called out for me. “Hey, Tanner. You know, you’re the only one around here who ever asked me what I thought about Mark’s disappearance. Thanks for that, okay?”
Hal Arndt was in. He was a thin, haggard man with the drooping air of a frustrated jock. His face was lined, his fingers stained with nicotine, his hair trimmed to within a centimeter of his scalp. I stood in the doorway and watched as he thumbed his way through The Sporting News. His desk was in the exact center of an office that contained at least twenty souvenir balls of various shapes and sizes and textures, arrayed like planets in a modest solar system.
I knocked on the wall and Arndt peered around the edge of his tabloid, sloe-eyed and weary. “Have a seat,” he offered. “You the guy from Stanford?”
I shook my head. “I’m the guy who wants to know about Mark Covington.”
Arndt swore and lowered the paper to his desk and sighed. “I was hoping to spend the afternoon talking about football.”
I apologized. “I’m told you and Covington were friends.”
“So?”
“So I’ve been hired to try to find him. I’m sure you know he hasn’t been seen for a while.”
Arndt frowned, then shrugged. “I considered Mark a friend. I’m not sure what he considered me. He never said.”
“When did you see him last?”
“A few weeks ago. Five, maybe.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Anything unusual?”
“Just being around Mark was unusual. He was an unusual man. But there wasn’t anything you would find useful.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Tall. Dark hair. Thin. Like Dolph Schayes. Remember him?”
“Sure. How come you got along with Covington when no one else could seem to manage it?”
Arndt smiled. “One, he liked sports. Two, he didn’t have anything I wanted, and vice versa. Three, I never called him, he always called me.”
“Where do you think he is?”
Arndt shook his head slowly. “Nope,” he said. “It’s too soon. When someone shows me evidence that Mark’s in trouble, then I’ll talk. Till then I’m going to do what I always do when someone asks about Mark.”
“What’s that?”
“Keep my mouth shut.”
“Chet Herk thinks Covington’s in trouble.”
“Chet Herk thought the Cubs would win the pennant.”
Arndt was one of those men who knows his life will never see a big battle but only lots of little ones and so has resolved to fight those to the death. I started to leave but then changed my mind. “I just spent some time with Arnold Greer,” I said. “What’s the story on him? The eye, for instance.”
Arndt took a minute to decide whether there was any reason not to talk to me, then decided there wasn’t. “The eye,” he began. “Well, Arnold lost the eye in Africa a few years back. He went to Biafra while the war was on over there, real Ernie Pyle stuff, you know? Took along his own little band of mercenaries, out to save the Ibos. But Arnold went a little too far into the bush and got himself captured by one tribe or another, I forget which. The old chief thought Arnold was a spy for the bad guys and tried to get him to talk. The way Arnold tells it, they poked his eye out with a red-hot bayonet. The way Arnold tells it also, he never made a sound the whole time.”
“You believe the story?”
Arndt shrugged again. “Why not? Arnold’s a tough little bastard, I know that. He’d be real pissed off at getting captured, as much as he hates to lose. I could see it happening like that.”
“What’s Greer doing running a newspaper? Seems a little tame.”
“It is, but then everything’s tame these days except rugby and hang gliding. Arnold’s perfectly willing to devote his time and money to achieving social change as long as it has his name on it when it happens.”
“I get the feeling the paper’s in trouble financially.”
“Could be. They don’t talk to me about anything but the point spread around here. Chet’s pretty worried these days, I can tell that.”
“Why?”
“It’s obvious. He’s fifty years old. If the paper folds he’s out of a job. There’s not much market for fifty-year-old editors these days. The newspaper business is a young man’s game.”
“Name one that isn’t,” I said.
“Quoits.”
NINETEEN
The Covington house was a small, white-stucco, tile-roofed place on Quintara Street in the Sunset District, just off Thirty-third Avenue. Like the other houses in that area it was surgically sterile and eclectically ornate and enough like its neighbors to be indisting
uishable to anyone except its owner. If you wanted to live incognito, as Mark Covington apparently did, there was no better place in the city to do it.
I trotted up the stone steps and rang the bell. The wind whistled overhead—cold, wet, salty, aromatic—hinting of romance and danger and decay. I put my hands in my pockets and waited.
After a minute I rang again. Some sense told me an eye had just nestled next to the peephole and that I was under inspection by someone who inspected everything. I straightened up and tried to look like something more intriguing than a vacuum salesman.
The door opened, but not far. The chain was still latched, drawn taut across the six-inch opening like a rein on the occupant’s curiosity. I tried not to look dangerous. I’ve been told I don’t do it well.
A face appeared, or rather a part of a face, hidden partially on each side by the door and the jamb, the center panel of a neogothic triptych. It was a woman’s face, and the most obvious thing about its puffy features was that it had been sleeping, sleeping soundly, drug-soundly. I told the face I was sorry to bother it. Then I told it I had come to talk to it about its husband.
That bit of information seemed to exhaust the face even further. It nodded resignedly. The door closed, the chain rattled and the door opened again, freely this time. I went inside, bidden only by implication.
The face looked at me from atop a slim, unobtrusive body that was wrapped in a silken pink robe that was Macy’s idea of what they wore in Japan. The face and the body both seemed on the rim of collapse. “I’ve come to ask you some things about your husband,” I repeated earnestly.
“Mark,” the face said, and the face finally became a person. If her husband was as dead as the tone she used to name him I was wasting my time and hers.
“Do you have a few minutes, Mrs. Covington?” I asked.
“I don’t … there isn’t … Oh, well. I guess you might as well sit down.”
She inclined her chin toward a chair that was camouflaged by a blue damask spread that lay over it like a shroud. I sat on it anyway and watched Mrs. Covington. Her skin was dappled from circulatory sloth. Bands of black cupped her eyes like nests. Her lips were dry and cracked. Lines of gray stretched through her hair like vapor trails. She was unlovely and knew it.
She went to a horsehair couch across from me and sat down. The furry bristles on the cushions had been trimmed and dyed in places to make fleurs-de-lis. One of the arms was worn to the nap, which was dark and grimy. The reading lamp on the table beside the couch had a ceramic base and a silken shade. A string had been tied to the lamp chain and the end of the string pinned to the arm of the couch with a golden safety pin. When Mrs. Covington reached up to pull the string her hand shook. In the fresh penumbra of light beneath the lamp were a pair of wire eyeglasses, a dish of mints and three bottles of pills. Both the bottles and the pills looked plastic.
I tried to get comfortable but couldn’t. “I’ve been asked by Chet Herk at the paper to try to locate your husband,” I began. “I believe he talked to you about it, is that right?”
“I believe so.”
“I thought you might have some information I could use.”
“I doubt it,” she said wearily, stupidly. Her tone implied she hadn’t been useful in a decade.
I spoke quickly, before her infectious helplessness spread, rendering her mute. “First of all, no one at the paper had a picture of your husband. I wonder if you would mind lending me one. You’ll get it back in a couple of days, after I have it copied.”
She smiled at me cheerlessly. “I’m not sure, actually, that I have one. I certainly don’t have anything recent. Mark was adamant about that.”
“So I’ve been told.”
She drifted into memory. “I bought a camera once. One of those little ones you can put in your pocket. But it disappeared the next week. Mark said he didn’t know anything about it. He was lying.”
She looked at me directly then, for the first time, as if to tell me she knew how absurd it was for her to be telling me that her husband lied to her, that she knew such a confidence was not appropriate in our circumstances, but that she was beyond caring what I or anyone like me might think of her or of anything else.
“How about some wedding pictures?” I asked. “Anything at all would be helpful.”
“Wedding pictures,” she said listlessly. “Of course. In my circumstances one tends to forget about weddings and things of that sort. It might be fun to see them again.”
She retreated toward the rear of the house, shuffling along in fluffy white slippers, leaving me in the mausoleum that was her living room. Nothing in view indicated who the occupants were or ever had been. The white leatherette Bible on the coffee table was perhaps a clue to what one of them wanted to be, but it seemed too pristine to have ever been anything but a formless hope.
I picked up the pill bottles. Darvon. Percodan. Valium. Nerves and pain. No sleep, no energy, no strength. A prescription personality, identical to those foisted on millions by doctors seeking only to subdue symptoms and drug companies seeking only to broaden dependence on their wares. In any place but their own minds they are indistinguishable from the dope pusher on the corner across from the high school.
My legs felt stiff and atrophied so I got up and walked around the room. Pictures of birds and flowers on the walls. A collection of tea cups. A crocheted sampler that read “God is Love,” suggesting that homilies are more likely to be true if they are written down. No books, no photographs, no souvenirs, no mementos. Time had passed unremarked by anything except the tick of a clock.
Mrs. Covington came back as I completed the circuit. She was clutching a large black book to her chest. The word “Photos” was stamped on the cover in gold. She handed the book to me, insistently. “Look inside,” she demanded. “Look.” Her voice was harsh and urgent.
I opened the cover and turned some pages. Here and there a few snapshots clung to the stiff black pages, one of a church, another of some flowers on an altar, but for the most part the pages were blank except for the little gold triangles that had once anchored the missing pictures to the album. “He took them,” Mrs. Covington said fiercely. “Even the wedding pictures. He took them and didn’t even tell me. My God. Can you imagine?”
I could imagine it as easily as I could breathe; the woman was a magnet for cruelty. I shook my head sympathetically, and it wasn’t entirely an artifice. Mark Covington was becoming less appetizing as the day wore on.
“That’s pretty nasty,” I said. “Could there be any photographs somewhere else?”
She stiffened visibly. “Even if there are I refuse to look for them. If you want to know what my husband looks like just watch for a man that acts as though he hasn’t made a mistake in his entire life except in choosing the woman he married. When you find him, you’ve found Mark.”
“I know a lot of people who’d fit that description.”
“Pity you. I only know one. One is enough.”
I stood up and Mrs. Covington did the same. Her eyes flicked back toward the bedrooms, then returned to my face. I didn’t think it meant anything except that she wanted me to leave. “By the way,” I said, “does your husband have an office here at home?”
“No. He works at the paper. He never brings work home. He rarely brings himself.”
Mrs. Covington obviously didn’t know that her husband rarely appeared at the office. A mystery. E pluribus unum. “Are there any friends of his I should talk to?”
“Friends? Mark didn’t have friends. They were a luxury he could no longer afford, as he put it. His own brother and sister-in-law live half a mile away. We haven’t seen them in two years. Not that I minded,” she added bluntly.
I tried to show some sympathy for her but it was difficult, like trying to show sympathy for a slug. “It can’t be easy, being married to a crusader,” I said.
“Fanatic would be a better word. Mark fancies himself a cowboy, I think. Riding into town all by himself, cleaning up the corruption
, then riding off into the sunset without even waiting for the thanks of the poor townspeople. Of course he does have his name painted on his saddle.”
“Your husband sounds a bit romantic.”
“He’s a child, is what he is. If you knew his mother you’d understand how he got that way.”
I didn’t want to get into that at all. “What do you think happened to him?”
“Nothing. I think he just left.”
“Left what?”
“Everything. Me, for starters. His job. His mistress. His car payments.”
The litany of her husband’s abandonments seemed enervating. For a moment I thought she was going to fall. I put a hand out to steady her. Through the thin, cool robe her arm felt like a stick of bamboo. “I think you better leave now,” she said wearily. “I need a nap.”
“You’ve already had a nap.”
“So? I’ll have another. I like naps. Is that a crime? Is it a crime that a woman’s husband leaves her? Is it? Why don’t you investigate that crime, huh? There’s a crime for you.”
I moved toward the door, aware of the hysteria behind me, left like an excess pickle on the Blue Plate Special. I pushed open the screen, then turned back to her. “Just a couple of things. You said ‘mistress.’ Does your husband have a mistress?”
“Of course he does.”
“Who is she?”
She shrugged. “Any name I’d give you would be at least a year out of date. I stopped keeping track some time ago. There seemed little point in being Mark’s scorekeeper.”
“What about his car? Is it here?”
“Out in the drive. The beige one.”
“May I look in it?”
“Why? Are you a used car dealer? You don’t look much like a used car dealer, Mr. Tanner.”
It was a joke, a small one, but it was the only likeable thing I’d seen her do. “I don’t deal in used cars, Mrs. Covington,” I said. “I deal in used lives.”
“Well, you’ve come to the right place,” she said, then laughed roughly at the jape. “The car’s unlocked. Have a ball. Don’t wake me when it’s over.”
Death Bed Page 14