The Infinite Blacktop

by Sara Gran

  And maybe it was time twisting reality into what I wanted it to be but I was almost sure, now, twenty-five years later, that the return address was a PO box in Las Vegas.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE CASE OF THE INFINITE BLACKTOP

  * * *

  Las Vegas, 2011

  I was on my way out of my hotel room when another bellhop knocked. He had a big padded FedEx envelope for me from Claude. I went back in, made more coffee, and carefully slid the contents out and looked it all over.

  Christmas for outlaws: a passport and ATM card and credit card in the name of Kitty McCain, along with a bunch of memorabilia I wouldn’t need—photos of Kitty’s kids, utility bills, a lease for an apartment that did not exist in Albany, California. Those were for another kind of emergency. And thrifty Kitty had somewhere between five and ten grand in the bank that no one would be tracing, following, or watching.

  When I opened my cheap new laptop, I found another gift: Claude had sent the scans of the last Cynthia Silverton Mystery Digest.

  At the Nero’s Business Corner Conveniently Located by the Emperor’s Lounge I printed out the scans Claude had sent me. Once printed, it took me a few minutes to find the ad—the one I’d answered a few days before the man in the Lincoln had tried to kill me.

  BE A DETECTIVE!

  Money! Excitement! Women and men admire detectives. Everyone looks up to someone with knowledge and education. Our home-study course offers the chance to earn your detective’s badge from the comfort of your own home.

  The address was a PO box about a mile from the strip.

  I walked across the street to the Excelsior, walked through the casino and the lobby into the parking lot, stole a Toyota, stopped to buy another burner phone at a convenience store, and got back to work.

  The address from the ad in the Cynthia Silverton was a PO box in a strip mall on the corner of a loud, busy six-lane avenue and a short, quiet, forgotten street of one run-down apartment complex, two shabby and possibly-abandoned houses, and four empty lots.

  The mall had a bright streetlight and a few permanently closed storefronts and a few that were open in general but closed at the moment. A party supply store. A battery store. A tropical fish store.

  And a postal shop. The kind of place with PO boxes. This was where I’d mailed the letter to. The reply address from the BE A DETECTIVE ad.

  Why had it ever existed? And why was it still here more than thirty years later?

  Let’s say it was Jay Gleason’s PO box. Let’s say he’d tried to kill me yesterday. Let’s say he was maybe getting ready for a second attempt now.

  Why? What did it all mean?

  The parking lot held thirteen spaces. Each was empty. I parked across three of them and got out of the car and went over and looked at the PO box place.

  Morning had not yet really begun and maybe once the day was in full swing it would be less ominous, but I doubted it. In any case, closed strip malls had their own strange aura, radiating failure and boredom on the surface, promising potential secrets and treasures underneath. The mailbox place all the more so. It had a plate glass window with an accordion security gate pulled shut over the glass. I went over and peered in. Up close it looked exactly like it had from a distance: like a shabby little mailbox place with mailboxes along the left wall and shipping supplies on the right.

  The lock on the door itself was a cheap little number I could have opened in a minute or two with a ballpoint pen. The lock on the gate was different. It was a real lock, an expensive lock. And new.

  Behind the locks the shop was closed. Not just for the day. Closed for a long time. Inside was a row of mailboxes leaning away from the wall and a dusty sales counter. From the dust around the place I was guessing it’d been closed to the general public for a few years, at least.

  But the floor was different. I couldn’t make out distinct footprints, but the more I looked at the floor, the more I saw that it was less dusty in the middle, more so around the edges.

  I stared at the floor for another minute. I was missing something, but it was a minute before I knew what.

  The mail.

  There was a slot in the gate and behind that a slot in the door for mail. Obviously, a mailbox joint, even a closed one, would get a lot of mail. Obviously they would also get flyers and circulars and coupon booklets.

  There was nothing under the slot. Just an undefined area of about a square foot or two. An undefined area with no dust.

  Someone was still picking up the mail.

  Someone had picked up the letter I’d mailed to this address.

  And someone who looked an awful lot like Jay Gleason had tried to kill me after I’d sent that letter.

  * * *

  I texted Claude the address and asked him to find out who owned the building and who leased the space. I walked around for a while but didn’t see anything else interesting.

  In the cool gray morning I went back to the hotel. In the early dawn the strip was empty and peaceful. The sand under the asphalt breathed with relief. At dawn the casino was as quiet as it ever was, just the light murmuring of addicts and the hum and ding of the machines.

  I couldn’t think and I could hardly see. I went back to my room, drank some water, made myself eat some peanuts, took a few more pills, and checked my email on my phone.

  Claude had sent me a very good list of short-run printers that were around when the Cynthia Silverton comics were published and were still around now.

  I started again.

  * * *

  The first printer was not the place. It was run by a short, cheerful, Orthodox Jewish man named Ray. Ray was kind and invited me into his messy office and insisted that I sit down and talk to him like an actual human being, which was the last thing I felt like at the moment. I knew I should slow down inside, loosen the gears that were wound so tightly inside me. I was rushing through everything, missing the signs. But I couldn’t. I was scared.

  I showed Ray the scan I’d printed out of the comic book. I liked his office. Stacks of letterhead, business cards, and brochures towered around us. It was like a cocoon of paper, a hedge against the outside world.

  “Not us,” he said after a few pages. “Very creative work. Very nice. You’re sure it was done here in Las Vegas?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “But I strongly suspect.”

  He took the papers and looked at them carefully, and then looked again.

  “Bound?” he asked.

  “Stapled,” I said.

  “You know the print run?” he asked.

  I didn’t.

  He looked it through a third time, closed his eyes for a moment, and then opened them and said, “Try DeLuxe over in Henderson. Not technically Las Vegas but everyone over there says that’s where they are. For the prestige. Everyone wants to say they’re in Las Vegas, but no one wants to really be in Las Vegas.”

  I thought that was a pretty good summary of everything else, too. I thanked him and left.

  DeLuxe was also the next stop on Claude’s list. The office was actually in the same building as the presses, which, through a few layers of cinder block, produced a pleasant hum/vibration that seemed to slow my gears a little. The office side of the building was spotless and organized, with no towers of ephemera, which made me distrust it immediately.

  The manager’s name was Rob. He wore a pale blue oxford shirt, undone at the neck, and khaki-type pants and short hair. He reminded me of a man I’d read about in a story once; a man whose hands stay clean no matter what happens to him or what he does. By the end of the story the man kills a woman and rips open her torso and plunges his hands inside to see if they’d come out covered with blood. But as he pulls his hands out from her bloody interior, somehow they come out spotless and pure. But the man is, of course, no longer a man, or at least no longer the kind of man he was a few pages back, and so the whole thing is for naught, as he’s now something like a monster. Although one with very clean hands.

  I didn’t thi
nk Rob had plunged his hands into any bloody torsos recently, but I didn’t really like him anyway. He had all his information on a computer and in three and a half minutes confirmed that the Cynthia Silverton comics had not, in fact, been printed by DeLuxe.

  I stood on one side of a high reception-type desk. Rob stood on the other. I missed Ray and his messy office and yarmulke.

  “So I guess that’s it,” Rob said, trying to smile.

  I didn’t move. An idea was scratching at the edge of my consciousness, almost ready to hatch.

  “If there’s nothing else,” Rob said.

  I still didn’t move. The idea scratched a little harder and pushed and—

  Rob gave one more good solid try of getting rid of me.

  “I guess we’re—”

  But I interrupted him. “Just one more thing,” I said. “And it would be such a huge help.”

  He gave me his almost-smile again.

  “Well the thing is,” I said, trying to make up a decent story as I went along, “I’m making a movie. I’m making a movie about those books. And if I could talk to someone who printed them, it would be great to get you guys in the movie. When I come back with the crew. Next month.”

  “I’m sure,” Rob said, “we can find a way to help you out.”

  I asked Rob if I could speak to the oldest person he had working on the machines. I didn’t know the printing lingo but wished that I did. Rob said yes anyway.

  He opened a door off the reception area that reminded me of the door in car rental places that separated the garage from the office—like a door to another world, one with more dirt and loud noises and higher ceilings. The next room—the printer’s work floor—was far more interesting than the first, filled with giant machines and men and women doing interesting things to and with the machines. I took out my phone and shot a bunch of pictures for the nonexistent movie. I couldn’t hear Rob over the sound of the machines but he gestured me toward a little break room toward the back.

  I went to the break room. There was a big table, some folding chairs, an electronic time-card register, and a kitchenette. A woman was in there. She was about fifty or sixty and wore a light blue smock, stained with black smudges, over stretch pants and an oversized T-shirt with a drawing of a hummingbird on it. Her hair was curled in a way I hadn’t seen in years. The hummingbird’s tail had been jazzed up a bit more than nature would have.

  The woman sat at the break table eating pasta with tomato sauce out of a plastic container. She had, apparently, been wearing pink lipstick before she started eating, and the base of the tines of her plastic fork was smudged pink.

  She smiled at me.

  “I like your shirt,” I said.

  She looked down to remind herself what shirt she was wearing and smiled.

  “These guys!” she said. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Please do,” I said. I sat down at the table, a few chairs down and across from her.

  “I started feeding these little guys a few years back,” she said. “I live in the Mayfield Parks. I’m sure you don’t know it. It’s a little mobile home community just eleven miles out of the city limits. My kids say, ‘Mom, why don’t you just get a real house already? You know we’ll help.’ I tell them, what do I need all that space for? All the cleaning. I don’t want to clean. I’d rather spend my time with these guys. So anyway, out in the desert, people don’t understand, that’s ground zero for these guys. People think of hummingbirds, you know, in the gardens, in the forests. But boy do we have plenty in the desert. So anyway, a few years back I started putting up some feeders for these guys out in front of my house. Now, the first day, no one came. The second day, one little guy came. The third day, about four little guys came. And then by the fifth day, I had so many they were fighting over the sugar, and I had to put up another feeder.

  “And now look.”

  The woman reached into her pocket and took out a phone and tapped through to something and then handed it to me.

  I took her phone. It was warm from her hand. On the phone was a photo of the woman standing in front of a tidy mobile home. She wore loose, cheap, shorts, her hummingbird T-shirt, and dark sunglasses. Her right hand was upturned in front of her, with her palm cupped. In the cup of her palm was a spoonful of sugar water. Perched on either side of her hand was a small green and red hummingbird, iridescent, drinking the sugar water.

  “Wow,” I said, and meant it. “What do they feel like? Their feet?”

  She smiled and made a gesture like a shiver was going up her spine.

  “Scratchy!” she said, laughing a little.

  I laughed with her. It was the first time I’d laughed since the crash.

  “Can I show you something?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “I would love that. Here I am on my break and it’s so nice that you’re here.”

  I showed her the Cynthia Silverton pages.

  “I think these were printed in Las Vegas,” I said. “In about 1980. Do you have any idea who could have printed them?”

  She looked at them very carefully and then looked again.

  “Well aren’t these something,” she said. “I do not know who printed them. It wasn’t here. See these gutters?”

  She pointed to the inner margins of the pages, where there was a series of small colored circles I hadn’t noticed.

  “That’s the color proofing. We don’t do it like that here. Never did. We do it in the bottom margins. But I can tell you who does know.”

  I looked at her.

  “Howie knows,” she said. “I’ll bet you a silver dollar. Howie knows.”

  Rob came in the room. Trailing behind him was a fiftyish African American man with a confused look on his face.

  Rob said, “Well, this here is—”

  “Oh Rob,” the hummingbird lady said. “We don’t need Peter. Hi, Peter.”

  “Hey, Mattie,” the fiftyish African American man said to the hummingbird lady.

  Now Rob looked confused, and a little annoyed. So did Peter.

  “Peter’s the oldest person here,” Rob said. “You asked for the oldest person here.”

  “I don’t understand,” Peter said.

  “Well, just,” Mattie said. She turned to me. “Peter hasn’t been with us that long. He was in die cutting up until just four years back. Right, Peter?”

  “That is true,” Peter said.

  “Sorry, Peter,” I said.

  “Sorry, Peter,” Mattie said.

  “So how can I meet Howie?” I asked Mattie.

  “Well,” she said, “if you want to meet Howie, you can come to church this weekend. That’s how I know Howie. From church.”

  It turned out Mattie knew Howie from church, and from nowhere else. She didn’t know his last name or where he lived. “We’re not that kind of church,” she said. “No offense.” What she did know was that Howie had worked at different printers for forty years in a dozen different jobs, collected vintage printing equipment, and had self-published a book on the history of printing in Nevada. Mattie knew this because they both went to the potluck after church on Sundays. Somehow they’d gotten to talking, and their mutual interest in printing had come up, and now it was a regular after-church topic. Nearly every Sunday they spent a few minutes talking about Howie’s many projects or the latest industry scuttlebutt.

  “And you know,” Mattie said, “he’s very much the authority on the topic. I’m lucky he’s in my church or he probably wouldn’t talk to me!”

  But she said it with a little chuckle that said Of course he’d talk to me! He’s Howie!

  “So do you think you can film here?” Rob asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “So I could come on Sunday?” I asked Mattie.

  “Of course,” she said. “But we have a prayer group tonight. He isn’t always there, but we could try.”

  She got my number and texted me the address. “But don’t give him any of that monkey business about a movie.” She laughed. “Not in churc
h! You’ll burn a hole right in the floor. Maybe we’ll all just fall straight down.”

  Rob looked to the floor, and looked confused. Mattie and Peter laughed, and kept laughing as I left.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE MYSTERY OF THE CBSIS

  * * *

  Los Angeles, 1999

  The Richter file on Merritt’s case was a living paradox, full and empty at the same time. Here was Merritt Underwood re-created as a series of numbers—what he paid for his house in Topanga, his bank balances, his test scores from art school, the amount of cholesterol per liter of Merritt’s blood. There were about three hundred pages to sift through, many of them redundant and most of them useless.

  I looked at his grades from art school. An incomplete for photography. An A on his senior thesis. When Merritt died his blood alcohol level was .5. His iron levels were low. His testosterone was high.

  It was 128 pages into the file before I found something interesting—a report from the mechanic who examined the car Merritt was driving when he died. The Richter report on the accident was technical and dull and useless. All I took from it was the name of the mechanic—Marcus Mikkelson—and where to find him.

  I tracked Marcus down in his garage in Atwater Village. The Water it was At was the Los Angeles River, a trickle through a paved riverbed across the street from the garage. He was a plump, seemingly happy man about forty with nightmarishly bad teeth who remembered every gear and belt and screw of every car he’d worked on.

  “Oh yeah,” Marcus said when I asked him about Merritt. “I remember it very well. I don’t need to look at the file. Tires were ripped to shreds. Both the right tires. Horrible, just horrible. Guy’s driving down the canyon, it’s midnight, from what I gather he’d been drinking, shouldn’t’ve been behind the wheel to begin with, and then both right tires go out. Bam. Bang. Heads right off the cliff, down the canyon, crashes at the bottom. Terrible. Just terrible.”

  “You think someone could have rigged the car?” I asked.