Sisters of the Road

by Barbara Wilson

  “Yeah, but Ted Bundy strangled his victims and Rosalie was knocked out with a crowbar or something.”

  We both looked at the pink-dyed water in the bucket. June dropped her joking tone.

  “Maybe you ought to call the police and tell ’em what you know. Maybe they’ve got something on one of those guys already.”

  “I would—if I knew more, and if I knew where Trish was. Anyway the police won’t be impressed by my suspicions. I’ve got to find out more. I just hope I’m not too late…” I stopped and looked at June. We were both thinking the same thing.

  It was a beautiful cold clear day at the airfield in Issaquah. The women’s skydiving club was assembled and ready to go, parachutes, helmets and boots on.

  “Can’t I just watch you from the ground?” I asked. “I think I’d like that perspective better.”

  “Nobody’s going to push you out,” June assured me from somewhere inside her helmet. Her brown eyes sparkled. “Don’t worry, you’ll love it. The view’s spectacular. We’re really lucky with the weather. You’ll be able to see Mount Rainier.”

  The plane was tinier than I’d imagined. I sat next to the pilot, a taciturn fellow named Alvin with a pustular red face. I hated to think he might be the last thing I saw before we went down.

  We shot up at a forty-five degree angle that brought my stomach level with my eyebrows. I didn’t know how June expected me to see anything. In order to keep breathing I had to keep my eyes closed. The noise was deafening. Finally we straightened out and I risked a peek. It was spectacular all right. Lake Sammamish on one side, the sharp, sparkling white Cascades on the other, and to the south, the massive snow cone of Mount Rainier, looking like something out of Hiroshige.

  “Ya ready, gals?” Alvin called back to June and the others, after he had circled up over the airfield a few times.

  “Yeah.” They got ready and then one of them (in their bulky jump suits it was difficult to see who) moved to the open door.

  Penny had told me she had a safe feeling when she jumped, as if she were being cradled in the wind. I found that impossible to believe. How could anyone feel safe at 10,000 feet? I didn’t feel safe climbing a ladder. And certainly not sitting in the cockpit of this rickety little plane.

  Far below us I saw the bright spread of the parachute drifting like a candy wrapper in the breeze. Two insect legs kicked out, and then she was on the ground, no more than two minutes after she’d jumped. All this fuss for a hundred seconds of weightless fear?

  One after another they jumped and drifted. Alvin hummed a tuneless little tune, and then he brought us down to safety with a bump.

  “Isn’t it great, Pam?” June enthused, gathering up the folds of her parachute. “What a feeling! There’s nothing like it.”

  My legs shook as I walked away from the airplane and towards her. “Yeah, great,” I said weakly.

  “We’re going up again, want to come?”

  “I’d love to, but—I just remembered something important I have to do.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stay alive.”

  When I got home there was a message from Carole on my machine.

  “Hi, uh, hi Pam. Uh, this is Carole. Hi!” She was speaking in the loud, awkward voice people use when they are being tape-recorded with nothing much to say. “Well, I, uh, was wondering. Well, give me a call, okay? This is two p.m., Saturday,” she hastily added and hung up.

  Her normal voice, when I called her back, was warm and lively as usual. She wanted to go to a midnight movie, and, when I expressed some hesitancy about being able to stay awake that long, she described it in such bizarre detail that I began to feel I’d already seen it, or at least Carole’s vision of it, culled from obscure reviews in years past and various hearsay reports.

  “It’s the kind of thing that really gets you thinking, like about past lives and the Apocalypse and brain cannibalism and stuff…”

  “What if we got together earlier?” I suggested, uneagerly. All I really wanted was to go to bed with her, not to become her friend, and as a good feminist, that made me feel guilty. On the other hand, maybe that was all she wanted too. Perhaps by some miracle we could have sex and never speak of it afterwards…not very likely… vivid pictures rose up before me of dramatic tearful scenes in the darkroom, of June’s disgusted face, of Penny and Ray coming home to find another messy collective split. “Maybe we could just go out for dinner, make an early night of it … I’m pretty tired…”

  “Oh, I’d love to come over and go out,” Carole said enthusiastically. “I’ll be by about seven, all right?”

  “All right,” I agreed, wishing there was a pill you could take to induce willpower and caution, and knowing that even if there was, I might not want to swallow it.

  23

  AS SOON AS I HUNG UP I started going through the Yellow Pages calling the art galleries. Most of them claimed never to have heard of Karl Devize, or said they thought he’d gone back to New York, but the smallest and nastiest of them said they did have some of his work and asked me hopefully if I were an interested buyer.

  “I’m actually trying to get his studio address,” I admitted. “It’s kind of a… family emergency.”

  I wondered if real detectives had to lie so much, or if they did it so badly. But perhaps my amateurishness stood me in good stead. Even to myself I sounded like a slightly breathless relative. And I got the address.

  Karl’s studio was at the far end of Belltown, in an old industrial building by the water. It was twilight by the time I got there and a Dickensian salt fog enveloped the waterfront. The dampness crept inside my down parka and into my bones and it was hard to remember that only a few hours ago I’d been up in an almost cloudless blue sky, looking over at Lake Sammamish and the Cascades. Peering into the murky hallway that led to Karl’s studio I wasn’t sure which was worse—sun and vertigo, or gloom and my feet on the ground. I felt frightened of Karl somehow, and far less sure of my ability to handle him compared to Wayne.

  I found his door and knocked, waited and knocked again. I tried the knob and discovered it was unlocked; I was wondering whether to walk in when I heard Karl’s unmistakable squeaky voice call out, “Come in, man, come in.”

  The studio was small and dark and smelled of garbage and cat shit. The windows facing the Sound had been covered with tar paper and the only light came from a couple of table lamps without shades sitting on the floor. They cast small, harsh lights around their perimeters and dimly illuminated the extraordinary array of junk packed into the room. Bed springs and old pipes, car parts, an old wood stove, television sets and radios with their wires sticking out, everything metallic and greasy you could imagine.

  In the middle of this second-hand shop sat Karl in an armchair. He had a white cat on his lap and a bottle of tequila in his hand. From his sunken posture and glazed black eyes it seemed he was well on the way to drunkenness. He didn’t seem to recognize me at all.

  I immediately decided to drop any pretense of being there to take a look at his art. I might have been mistaken, but from what I could see there didn’t seem to be any around.

  “I met you the other night at Wayne’s,” I said. “I’m still looking for Trish Margolin. I know you know her.”

  Karl’s bald head dipped and he stroked the white cat. He didn’t seem surprised that I was there; maybe he was used to women, real or ghostly, popping up in his amateur junk shop to confront him.

  “She’s a nice girl, Trish,” he finally said, placatingly, in his rubber mouse voice that the tequila made even shriller. “They’re both of them nice kids, great kids.”

  This wasn’t what I’d expected at all.

  “Do you know where she is?” I moved towards him a little and stumbled over a piece of pipe. It made me think of Rosalie and how Miranda had said she’d been bludgeoned by a heavy instrument.

  “You’ll have to ask Wayne,” Karl said, peering at me. There was a delayed gleam of recognition in his eyes. “You were over at h
is place the other week, weren’t you?” Instead of making him suspicious, this realization seemed to reassure him and make him more confiding. “Wayne knows, he always knows where Trish is. Weeks can go by, months, Wayne always knows where she is, helps her, takes care of her no matter what trouble she’s in. She’s his girl, his sister you know, sort of. She’s always been his girl, right from when I first moved to Seattle.” Karl looked befuddled as he tried to remember when that might have been, and drank a little more to clear his head. “I thought he had promise, not like some of them in this city. Took him under my wing, taught him everything I know, introduced him to people, helped him get started….”Karl gestured around to his packed studio as if that explained everything. “I came here to kick the art scene in the balls. And I did, I sure as hell made them think again.”

  He’d probably put the tar paper over the windows then—to make sure he wasn’t influenced by the misty sky and sea.

  I took a breath, trying not to smell the garbage, and asked, “Did you know that Trish was working for Wayne?” I was counting on the fact that Karl was too drunk to wonder why I was asking and hoping that he wouldn’t remember enough of the conversation to repeat it to Wayne.

  “Sex is a beautiful thing,” squeaked Karl, and stroked the white cat. “A young girl, a young man… We’re not all young, though,” he added gloomily. “You don’t make money as an artist, not if you’re any good. Now in New York, I sold my paintings for thousands of dollars—I would have sold them anyway, if I’d wanted to sell them, if I thought people deserved to have them. But Seattle is too tight-assed to appreciate the avant-garde. It’s a Boeing Corporation town and what the Boeing directors say is art, everyone thinks is art. The phoney-baloney symphony they’re so proud of, the fucking Pacific Northwest Ballet, and the paintings they can hang on the walls of their boardrooms. Mountains,” he mumbled in conclusion, “everyone wants fucking mountains. I say piss on mountains.”

  “So Wayne needed money and got Trish to work for him.”

  “You’re too uptight, lady,” said Karl regretfully, lifting the bottle to his lips. A trickle wet his silky black beard. “You must be from Seattle. You see things in black and white. There’s nothing wrong with sex. It didn’t bother Trish.”

  “And Rosalie and the others too?”

  “Rosalie?” he sounded bewildered. “There was Abby for a while, but she was a real bitch. Not like Trish. Trish was always Wayne’s girl, she’d do anything for him. It was beautiful.”

  “What happened when Trish went away last year? What did you and Wayne live on then?”

  “Drugs!” Karl gave a rubbery whinny and the white cat yawned. “We lived on drugs and tequila. Girls are just the… the frosting on the cake.”

  “So Wayne is a dealer.”

  “Hey.” Karl looked like he was on the edge of a suspicion for the first time. “Why are you asking me all these questions?”

  I’m not asking…,” I said hastily. “I’m just looking for Trish. Want to tell her something.”

  “Oh….”He seemed mollified, or at least he subsided back in to his alcoholic stupor. “I taught Wayne everything he knows,” he said again. “I was like a father to him. Coke, speed, I got him connections. Like a goddamned father….” Karl rambled down and resumed petting his cat.

  I started to wonder if it was all an act. Wayne’s obvious nervousness, his need to get me out when Karl came into his studio the other day—what had that meant? Karl must know more about Trish and Rosalie than he was letting on. I tried one last question, a wild guess.

  “Did Wayne have a good time in Hawaii?”

  “Hawaii? What was he doing in Hawaii, he wasn’t in Hawaii, was he?” Karl stared at me. “He said he was just going to Portland overnight. But you tell me he was in Hawaii, that little cocksucker.” Karl’s flat black eyes grew moist. I’ve never been to Hawaii. That’s the way, you teach them all you know and then they fucking go to Hawaii. They cut the ground out from under your feet, fucking ungrateful bastards.”

  I couldn’t get any more out of him after that, and I didn’t even feel like trying. The fumes of the garbage and cat shit were starting to get to me, and when I finally stood outside his door, I breathed in long gasps of fresh air.

  But who the hell was Abby?

  24

  I STILL HAD HALF AN HOUR before Carole and I were to meet. I raced home and called June. “Just wanted to make sure you landed all right,” I said. Then I asked her if she knew what cocaine was selling for these days.

  “Pam, you just got back on the ground. Why don’t you stay here?”

  “No, I’m serious. I need to see Wayne again without him thinking I’m looking for Trish.”

  “But Pam, you haven’t watched enough TV to know how to do a drug deal.”

  I had once asked June why she watched so much TV. She’d said it was because there were so many Black actors these days. “I see more Black people on television than I see in downtown Seattle. Every cop show has at least one—hey, sometimes they’re even the co-star, imagine that!”

  Now it turned out that TV might be instructive in other ways, too.

  “You’ll just have to explain it to me,” I said.

  “I can’t figure Karl out,” I told Carole when she arrived, bubbly and a little too cleverly dressed in red stretch pants and a hand-painted linen jacket with enormous padded shoulders. “I’d been imagining he was behind the whole thing, the malevolent kingpin who directed Wayne and Trish to his own evil ends. Now I wonder if he’s not just a drunken failure holding on to Wayne for dear life. But then, why would Wayne have acted afraid of him?”

  “Maybe because Karl knows something. He might not have done anything, but maybe he knows something,” Carole said. She bounced around my apartment looking at things.

  I dismissed this. “I think I got out of him everything he knows. Sex is beautiful, he said, when I was trying to talk to him about Wayne pimping Trish. A young man, a young girl. Pah! Young girls and disgusting old men is more like it.”

  “Sex is beautiful, Pam.” Carole stopped her investigation of my record collection and fixed me with an earnest look. “Don’t you think so?”

  I thought she was hopeless, but that didn’t stop a small rocket from shooting up through one thigh and into my solar plexus. “What do you know about coke, Carole? Ever buy any?”

  “Wow, Pam,” she said, and her blond hair stood up, perky, thrilled. “You’re much more exciting than I ever imagined.”

  I thought about giving Wayne a call before we turned up, but didn’t want to give him the advantage of expecting us. It was going to be hard enough to find out what I wanted to know.

  I drove down to Belltown, carrying on a halfhearted conversation with Carole about drugs. I said that marijuana made me sleepy and coke destroyed the economies of Third World countries so I never touched it, and the last time I’d tried a hallucinogen I’d seen my face staring at me from under Penny’s haircut, so I’d given that up too. Carole said she was just naturally high and she only used drugs as aphrodisiacs.

  Is it any wonder I had ideas?

  We parked and went into the Redmond. I had my life savings, eighty dollars in cash, on me and it made me nervous. The Redmond Apartments weren’t all that safe, even if Wayne did live in splendor on the top floor. I knocked and after regarding us through the peephole a long minute, he opened the door. He was wearing another tropical shirt and over it a loose, nubby-cotton jacket, eggshell-colored.

  “Hi,” he said, without inviting us in. His blue eyes appraised me and, more thoughtfully, Carole. “What can I do for you? Trish hasn’t been by, unfortunately.”

  “Oh, it’s not about that,” I said, trying to look coy and cool at the same time. “But Trish did mention that you sometimes had access to… well, it’s like this. Carole and I are going to a party tonight, and we thought it would be nice to take along a little… I’ve got about sixty dollars to spend… maybe half a gram?”

  Wayne smiled and stepped bac
k so we could come in. All June’s talk about handguns and mass murderers hadn’t exactly reassured me. Nor had reading Trish’s diary. I tried to calm myself by remembering that I was nine years older than Wayne—he was just a kid, what could he do to me? Still it was harder to be engaging now than it had been the first time. I settled for businesslike. “You selling?”

  “Sixty won’t get you half a gram of this stuff,” he said easily. “I only deal in the highest quality. I don’t cut it with speed or junk—it’s practically pure.”

  I looked at Carole; she was standing in front of one of his dog muzzle paintings, in apparent admiration.

  “I could go up to seventy, but I’d have to try it first.”

  “No problem,” he said, opening up a box on the glass coffee table and shaking out a little from a plastic bag. “You have your own razor and stuff or you want me to do it?”

  “Go ahead.” I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, but I didn’t want him to be suspicious. We needed some reason to be there.

  “It’s funny,” said Wayne. The other night when you were here I wouldn’t have figured you were interested in anything like this… Trish tell you I dealt, or what?”

  Careful, I thought. “Not in so many words. She mentioned getting high and I figured you were the source. That’s really why I stopped by with the book. Wanted to check you out.”

  “Oh,” he said, and gave me one of his playboy looks. It sent chills up my spine, but not the right kind. “And you liked what you saw?”

  I stuck to businesslike. “I’m strictly recreational. Too expensive except for special occasions.” I tried not to think of what seventy dollars would buy.

  “You’ll like this stuff,” said Wayne. “It’s worth every penny. Generally it goes for a hundred and fifty a gram, but I’ll knock off ten dollars for you.” He handed me a silver tooter. “Go ahead, try it.”

  I snorted up the line, trying not to look too amateurish, and handed the tooter to Carole, who’d wafted over to the table.