“How long do you think you could go without pretending to be clever? I don’t want you to investigate Castelar’s murder. The police have a good idea who did it, and they’ve already inaugurated a search for him.”
“Not Castelar? Then—”
“Not that Castelar. Not the father, but the daughter. Get it? It’s Kate. She’s turned up missing again. And as far as anyone knows, you’re the last to have seen her.”
CHAPTER TWO
It so happens that I hadn’t kidnaped Kate Castelar, or killed her, or even so much as lobbed a spitball at her. Yet I felt the blood rush to my head when Kennerly told me I may have been the last to have seen her yesterday. The result, no doubt, of having read too many mystery novels in which the noble detective is accused of a crime he didn’t commit and can clear himself only by cracking the case himself while dodging cops who have orders to shoot first and ask questions never. Once I realized that I wasn’t being accused, merely informed, I drifted earthward again.
But not before doing a mental fast-scan through the previous afternoon.
I was grappling with a box of corn flakes when Kennerly called. Though it was well past noon, I had been up only a few minutes—Jen and I had had a late night, and she, in fact, was still copping zees in the other room—and while I waited for water to boil for coffee, I did my morning calisthenics with the cereal box. I was trying to get the top up without tearing it in half and thus destroying its handy reclosing feature. About the time I was wondering whether anyone had ever thought of using cereal box-top glue, the strongest adhesive known to man, to fasten those heat-resistant tiles to the space shuttles, the telephone rang. Rather, it bleated. Jen had decided I needed one of those new one-piece jobs that trills or coos electronically instead of ringing.
Whatever it does, it did. I jumped. The box top ripped, and with it the waxed-paper lining it had been glued to. And little flakie-wakies flew everywhere. I estimated six months to track them all down.
I grabbed the phone on the second warble.
“All right, already, you don’t have to take my whole head off,” Kennerly said easily. “You literary giants are a temperamental lot, aren’t you?”
“Who asked you?” I growled.
Kennerly laughed mildly, the way he seemed to do everything. I’ve seen this small, dapper, sixtyish man in court, grilling witnesses until they were nothing but cinders, and never raising his voice. In his quiet, understated, ever-so-proper way, Mike Kennerly was one of the twenty best lawyers in the country. One of the national lawyers’ magazines had made it official about a year back. But some of us had suspected it all along.
Back in the not-so-old days, when I starved as a private investigator instead of as a free-lance writer, I did quite a little work for Kennerly. Tracking down eyewitnesses, finding experts—“hired guns”—to testify, tracing the occasional heir, that type thing. But I had retired from the sleuthing dodge, except for some infrequent lapses, and Kennerly and I almost never crossed paths anymore. Omaha’s not all that big a city, but big enough, apparently. Kennerly and I made all the usual noises about how long it’s been and how we should get together sometime.
“I’d like that, I really would,” Kennerly said. “But right now I’m up to my Adam’s apple in this asbestos thing, and I don’t expect to have a spare moment before Memorial Day, if you can believe it. In fact, I’m due back in court in just a few minutes, and then that’s going to eat the rest of the day.”
“I guess somebody’s got to stand up and defend those blue-suit types. Get them off the hook and back into the executive suite.”
“Michael M. Kennerly, defender of the rich, oppressor of the weak. Listen, I didn’t call just to chat. I’ve got a little job for you, if you’re not busy this afternoon. And if you can still bring yourself to sully your hands with honest labor. It’ll take you a couple of hours, tops, and since it’s such short notice, I’ll double the going rate. Interested?”
I did a little mental arithmetic—a little was all it took—and decided I’d better get interested even if I weren’t. My checking account was back on the critical list and needed a quick transfusion of cash to give it the will to live. I had a couple of magazine assignments to polish off and polish up, and a batch of query letters to type and mail. And I was supposed to be working on the sequel to The Book, my major opus, which a devil-may-care publisher was bringing out in the spring. The truth, however, was that I was expending the most energy on concocting reasons not to do any solid work on The Next Book—if you don’t try, you can’t fail—and that, plus everything else, prompted me to tell Kennerly to give me the story. “Not for my own sake,” I assured him, “it’s just that my landlord tends to get kind of edgy at about this time of the month, and liberal applications of cash seem to be the only thing that helps.”
Kennerly chuckled again. “What a relief. I was afraid you’d be too busy with publishers, agents, and film producers to waste time on a runaway kid.”
“Oddly enough, I find myself between literary luncheons at the moment, so I can just manage to squeeze you in.” I didn’t know where Kennerly was getting his information, but if he was even one-quarter serious, he had been badly misinformed. Sure, I had gotten a nice little dividend when I signed the contract for The Book. Six figures—if you count the right side of the decimal point. But life had changed in fewer ways than you might expect or I might have liked. I still scraped along six or eight inches above the poverty line. I still lived in the same cramped apartment in the same not-quite-bad neighborhood on Decatur Street. I still drove the same wheezing old Chevy. I still hadn’t heard from Clint Eastwood, begging me to let him make a blockbuster movie based on my detective novel. And so I still routinely racked up ten-and twelve-hour days trying to make it as a free-lance writer.
And when that wasn’t enough, I still took on the odd bit of investigative work.
Officially, I wasn’t supposed to like doing it. The master plan was to get me out of that line and into the writing business. Anything that interfered with the latter or dragged me back to the former was to be shunned. Unofficially, however, my reluctance to give the PI permit a workout varied greatly in some kind of proportion to the number of checks I expected in the mail at any given time.
At this given time that number was exactly zero.
Besides, I didn’t mind runaways that much—at one time, in fact, a large portion of my small business consisted of just that work—and if Kennerly was right I could punch this one out in no time and renew my flagging acquaintance with the typewriter.
And at double fee …
So I told him to lay it on me and he did. That’s when I first heard the name Jack Castelar.
“I’ve known him forever,” Kennerly told me. “We went to school together. He’s the president of a bank you probably haven’t heard of either, the West Omaha State Bank and Trust, out toward Bennington a ways.” Bennington was, and is, north and west of Omaha. “Small, but profitable,” Kennerly said of the bank. “It’s mainly agricultural banking out there, of course, and you know how farming has its ups and downs, but somehow Jack does all right. It’s a solid business, founded by an uncle or great-uncle, I think, back in the teens. Survived the Depression. Still owned almost entirely by the family.”
Besides the bank, Castelar had a wife, Emily, and three kids, Kate, Vince, and Amy. The runaway was the oldest of them—well, after the wife—Kate, who was twenty-three. “I really don’t know the details,” Kennerly said in that muted tone of voice you automatically adopt when you call from one of those half-booth monstrosities they stick pay phones in now. “Kate has been spending quite a lot of time with a fellow that Jack and Emily—well, ‘disapprove of’ is the nice way to put it, but ‘despise’ is probably more accurate. Walt Jennings. He’s ten, twelve years older than Kate, has a reputation as a roughneck, a drifter, has never held a job longer than six consecutive months. That type.”
“I sympathize,” I said sympathetically, “but if the girl’s twe
nty-three then she’s not a girl, she’s a woman, and she can make her own choices. Like the men she wants to see, the hours she wants to keep, whether she wants to leave home …”
“Yes, but that’s not how it is in this case. Let me back up.
“As you might guess, there have been quite a few arguments over the past few weeks about this … relationship. Mainly between Kate and her mother. Oh, Jack’s not fond of this Jennings fellow—believe me, there’s no love lost between those two—but he usually ends up as mediator between Kate and Emily, just to try and keep some peace in the house.”
The two women had gone at it again that morning, with vigor. It seems that Kate had been out until past four with Walt Jennings, and Emily had had some problems with that. She shared her opinions with her daughter, who in turn had some opinions of her own to share. And this time there was no one to peel them apart and send them to separate corners: Castelar was in Denver on business, had been for a couple of days, and wouldn’t be back in the Big O until later that evening.
“Evidently the argument escalated into a shouting match that ended only when Kate stormed out of the house, vowing never to return,” said Kennerly. “And Emily, who is rather high-strung under the best of circumstances—”
“Which these were not.”
“—got on the phone to Denver, got Jack pulled out of his conference, and demanded he do something.”
“Uh-huh. A trifle difficult, all considered.”
“Just a tad. Anyhow, I’m sure you get the picture by now …”
“Jack tried to calm Emily, failed, promised to get you to do the aforementioned ‘something’ …”
“… called my office, which relayed the message here when we recessed for lunch, yes. Essentially, Jack wants me to make sure Kate doesn’t do something crazy—you know, like run off with the guy—before he can talk to her. But I don’t have time to go chase after her, and I’ve got all my regular people tied up on this case, too. So I’m asking you.”
My head was fairly spinning with the number of calls that had shot back and forth in a short span of time. No one was wasting any minutes, that was for sure—and that’s not always a good thing in situations like this. I said, “Far be it from me to argue myself out of a check, but it sounds like the kid just needs time to chill out. This happens all the time with runaways. They get mad, they leave, they swear they’ll never darken the doorstep again—but leave them alone and they’ll come home. Wagging their tails behind them.”
“You’re probably right.” His voice said he thought I was probably wrong. “But Emily Castelar is, as I mentioned, an extremely nervous woman. She won’t relax until her daughter is safely back.”
“Mike, what’s it been, a couple of hours?”
“I know, I know. Indulge me, will you? Go after her. Talk to her. Get her to come home—or, failing that, get her set up someplace where we’ll know she’ll be all right until Jack gets home tonight. In fact, as I think about it, that might be the best bet all around. It’ll pre-empt any more fights between Emily and Kate. Yes, do that. Find her, set her up in a hotel, bill it to my office, and have her stay put until her father can come talk to her. Then Emily can relax and Jack can relax and I can relax and just have a really nice afternoon in court. Will you do this for me?”
It sounded like a waste of time, but I suppose it’s never a waste as long as someone else is picking up the tab.
“Okay,” I sighed. “If that’s how you want to spend your money. Give me the address so I can go talk to the bereaved mother, get a snapshot, find out where the kid might have gone—”
“No need for all that,” Kennerly interrupted. “We know where she’s gone. At least, we know where she said she was going: to the boyfriend’s.”
“Really rubbing Mama’s nose in it.” That, too, was fairly typical with these star-crossed lovers.
“Something like that.” Kennerly gave me an address for Walt Jennings. I jotted it on a paper napkin, nearly bleeding my felt-tipped pen dry in the process. He also gave me a good description of Kate Castelar, the clothes she was wearing, and the car she was driving—make, model, and license number.
“What, you don’t know which side of the street she parked on?—You know, since you know where she is and all, you could probably save your client some money if you just went and picked her up yourself.”
“Are you kidding? I bill out at five times what you cost. And if your conscience really bothers you, just look on it as a belated Christmas present from your Uncle Mike: easy money.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Uncle Mike” was right: It was a gift, sure enough. Less than sixty minutes after I put down the phone I was standing alongside Kate Castelar’s maroon Cutlass. Which, conveniently, contained Kate herself. Easy money.
I had made coffee in the infusion pot, using the good Kona beans that someone had given me, grabbed a quick shower, and jotted a note to Jen, who looked so warm and soft and peaceful cocooned in flannel sheets that I couldn’t possibly bring myself to wake her. I estimated that my wife and I had spent two months together, total, in the past three years. And yet, every time she showed up—like this time, unannounced, blowing in on the Christmas snows—it immediately seemed right, as if everything fit, as if no time had passed, as if she had never been gone to who-knew-where with who-knew-who.
But I felt, I sensed, I knew that our idyll was again coming to an end. We were about to go on hiatus, as they say of television shows that may or may not be back in the fall. It would be the same as always: Jen would express her boredom with and contempt for Omaha, the Midwest, the continental United States, you name it. And I would express my unwillingness to spend my life leapfrogging the globe in a futile and never-ending attempt to be always at the in place. So she would go and I would stay. Neither of us liked the arrangement, but neither of us would budge. And neither of us would be the first to end, truly end it. At least, neither of us had so far.
I poured half the coffee into a large thermal mug, found my keys, and went out in search of distressed damsels.
The concrete stairs outside of my apartment building were snow-packed and slippery; when I grabbed the handrail I could feel the bitter coldness of the steel throbbing right through my glove. Steam roiled off the surface of the coffee mug like smoke from a burning building. I had my doubts about the Chevy but, while it didn’t think much of the idea, it did crank eventually and we creakingly headed up the Decatur hill.
Southbound 480 was virtually deserted. I caught it at Hamilton Street and followed it down to the Kennedy Expressway, which took me to this little dilapidated neighborhood not far from the old stockyards.
There isn’t much to the Omaha yards these days. Not like when I was a cowboy-crazy kid, and the place rivaled the Chicago yards. Its decline was sad in a way, although the people who had to live in the adjacent neighborhoods during the summer months might not have agreed. I found myself wondering what the Chicago stockyards were like now, but it was too damn cold for sentimental journeys. And I had work to do. Being a trained investigator and everything, I found Walt Jennings’s street without undue trouble.
The street was gray and narrow and didn’t go anywhere; the houses were gray and narrow and were occupied by people who weren’t going anywhere, or had already been. I thought maybe on a warm and sunny day the block would look better. Maybe not. The Jennings place was no better or worse than any of its neighbors. It sat next to one of those funny bunker-style houses that people built during the Second World War, the kind you were supposed to put a real house on top of when you were sure Omaha wouldn’t be a candidate for blitzkrieg. This was before they built SAC headquarters outside of town, putting us right up at the top of the list for the next Big One. When that one comes, the few unconverted underground houses you occasionally come across aren’t going to fare any better than the average dwelling.
I put the car up against where the curb would have been if not for six inches of dirty snow, across the street from Jennings’s p
lace, across the street from Kate’s, or Kate’s dad’s, Olds. I don’t like to park my car too close to cars like that one; it aggravates the poor old thing’s inferiority complex.
Reluctantly, for the heater had only just begun to thaw me out, I climbed out, letting the engine run to boost the battery. The wind was coming up good now, telling me that it was time to break out the parka—my trusty corduroy coat just wasn’t up to this kind of assault. Too bad: It looked great, especially over my brown cord sport coat, tan chamois shirt, and new blue jeans with the cuffs rolled up to show off the flannel lining. My teeth may have started chattering before I got the car door closed behind me, but at least I had the satisfaction of knowing that I looked preppy as hell. Except my sport coat had no leather patches on the elbows, cuss it.
Mike Kennerly’s description had been good. The young woman behind the wheel of the big car could have been no one but Kate Castelar. She was a pretty girl with dark brown hair, small, regular features, and a serious set to her narrow mouth. As I came across the street I could see she wore one of those short down-filled jackets with a ski-lift ticket dangling from the plastic zipper. It was green—the jacket, I mean, not the ticket, which was blue—and in it she looked like the Michelin man. She sat with her head back against the headrest, arms folded around her, eyes closed. You didn’t have to be a detective to see she had been crying.
I tapped on the window and she jumped, looked at me accusatorily with red-rimmed eyes. I tried a winning smile. It didn’t help. Blame it on the three-day-old beard I was sporting. It was coming in all right, but I still felt like a bum every time I caught my reflection in a shop window. In a couple of weeks, though, I figured I’d stop looking like a panhandler and start looking like the published author I was about to become.
Meanwhile, I could attest that a new beard affords almost no insulation whatever. I stamped my feet and clapped my arms around me once or twice. “Pretty cold,” I said loudly, still smiling. The idea was for her to take the hint and unlock the door for me. I guess that was dumb to expect. But she did hit the electric switch on her armrest and let her window down two inches. She said nothing.
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