The road soon put me out onto the clear bluff where the house sat, and ended abruptly just beyond the house. No other building stood up here, not even one as badly careworn as the old house. Many years ago, I imagined, the seclusion of the place was indicative of exclusivity, of the social and financial status of its owner. It must have had a remarkable view. Today, however, the view was of bleak, lifeless, undesirable property, and the solitude seemed to indicate only neglect, decline, a figurative as well as literal end of the road.
I braked and gazed up at the place. It stared back vacantly, like a skull. A little tremor, a frisson of excitement, anxiety, anticipation, slid like an ice cube down my spine. I told myself this couldn’t possibly be it, there was no chance in a million of finding Jennings or Kate or both behind that dingy stucco façade. Nebraska’s Theory of Diminished Expectations: Anticipate nothing, and you’ll never be disappointed.
Yeah, well, it’s a swell theory.
A few battered old cars rested at the side of the road; mine felt right at home among them. A few more hollowed shells and decaying remnants littered the surrounding lots, resting among the tall ice-encrusted weeds thrusting upward through the snow, collecting thick coats of silver and white over equally thick coats of rust.
I got out and looked around. It was the wide-open spaces, sort of, and yet the indigo sky seemed very close, as if it might crash in on me without warning. Against it the building stood forebodingly, and the flecks of snow dancing about it now seemed threatening, not picturesque. The cold night air was neither crisp nor bracing; it was a lifeless cold, the bitter chill of death.
“Got to stop staying up for those late horror shows,” I breathed on a halfhearted chuckle of self-derision. I shivered into the fur lining of my parka and trooped up the unshoveled walk to the unshoveled steps to a sagging porch.
The building was not entirely dark; a dim yellow light burned behind the grimy drapery on the large leaded-glass window in the front door. I waited uncertainly a minute, then tried the heavy old door. It was unlocked. I went in.
It was easy to imagine how the house had once been. The door opened onto a large, high-ceilinged room that had, in another life, been a spacious and elegant entrance hall. I could imagine it with polished hardwood on the floor and gleaming wainscoting on the wall. I couldn’t easily imagine this, but I could imagine it. Now, however, the room was given over to a scarred and stained desk-and-pigeonhole arrangement that had the look of being rescued from some ancient and long-vacant hotel mere seconds before the wrecking ball descended. The flooring was dull and cracked linoleum; the walls, woodwork, fixtures, and all, had been very badly painted very long ago in some color I would not hazard a guess at. The ceiling bore the evidence of leaking pipes.
I removed my hat, shook off the snow that had collected on it, and took a deep breath. Not too bad; I’d been in worse, in places that reeked of old sweat, of stale wine and putrefied food and sewage, of vomit and urine and other things not worth dwelling on. Here there was only the smell of stale smoke, of dust, and the mustiness of forgotten humanity.
The room was deserted.
I poked my head through the open archway to the left of the entry and into the darkened space that had once been the living room and, behind it, the dining room. The two rooms were now filled with old chairs and benches of the sort you used to see in bus depots—I always wondered what had become of them—attentively facing an old black-and-white console TV at the far end. The set was on but the volume was down; the seats were empty except for one bench occupied by an old man sprawled in soundless slumber.
I turned at the sound of footsteps on the once-grand stairs behind the front desk. An emaciated old black man with nappy white hair and a day’s worth of stubble hobbled slowly down the stairs, his hand—which looked like it had been carved from teak—tight on the wooden banisters. “Yeah,” he said without inflection when he’d come down far enough to catch sight of me.
“I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for someone who might be staying here; he’d’ve most likely checked in last night or this morning, early.”
“No fooling? A private investigator?”
I looked at him. He wasn’t being smart. “No fooling,” I said, and showed him my I.D. He took it and looked at it and admired it as if it were a picture of my grandkids.
“Huh.” He handed it back. “I don’t remember there ever being a private investigator in here before,” he said reminiscently, lines of concentration joining the permanent creases in his dark face. “And I’ve been here since ’54. June. Some cops, and lots of people from the county, but no private investigator.” He put the accent on the in. “You say you’re looking for someone …”
I nodded, and reached around for the newspaper I’d noticed on the high desk’s work counter. I folded it away from the sports pages back to page one and held it out to the old man with my thumb on Jennings’s mug shots. “Him. Like I said, he’d’ve just showed up last night or today.”
He carefully extracted a pair of glasses from one of the two front pockets on his old plaid shirt and positioned them on his flat nose. The glasses were an old-fashioned style, black plastic that turned transparent below the frames and halfway back on the bows. One of the bows was held in place with electrician’s tape that partly obscured a dirty lens.
He peered closely at the newsprint. “I saw this,” he said ruminatively, “I saw it on the ten o’clock news on the tee vee. Real strange thing, in’t it? But this man—Walter Jennings—no, sir, never seen him.”
“You’re sure, Mr.—”
“Boyd, Howard Boyd. But everyone calls me Pete.”
I looked at him. “Why?”
He screwed up his face again. “I don’t know. If I ever did know, I’ve forgotten. But everyone does.”
“Uh-huh. Well—Pete—are you sure? Maybe he checked in when someone else was watching the desk.”
Pete Boyd laughed briefly. It was curiously high-pitched, compared to his speaking voice. “There is no someone else. I’m the general manager, desk clerk, bookkeeper, bellhop, and janitor, too. But you’re welcome to check.” He went around the desk and lifted a scratched and dented recipe box onto the writing counter. I doubted seriously that Jennings would have used his real name, but I gamely opened the box and riffled through the dog-eared cards anyway.
I stopped and looked up at him. “Pete, according to this, no one’s checked in for more than a month.”
Boyd nodded cheerfully. “I could of told you that.”
“Then why didn’t you?”
“You’d of wanted to look anyway,” he said, and he was probably right. “You know, son, we don’t get a lot of the tourist trade here.”
I forced a smile and handed back the file box. “Tell me, Pete, when you do have people checking in, what do they do if you’re not around?”
Again the laugh. “I’m always around.”
“You must sleep sometime …”
“Well, then, that’s what this is for.” He pressed a cracked plastic doorbell bolted to the desktop near my elbow. Far away a buzzer sounded.
I said, “Then this front door’s always unlocked?”
“Pret’ much always. Nothing here to steal.”
“But someone could come in while you were asleep, take a key from a box, and get a room without registering or waking you.”
He rubbed his whiskery chin. “I s’pose. A’course, I’d find out come Tuesday, when they bring their sheets and towels down for clean ones—if I din’t notice them comin’ and goin’ before then. I’m good with faces, I am, and I think I’d know someone who din’t belong here.”
“This one”—I tapped the newspaper—“wouldn’t be coming or going much, and when he did he’d want to make sure no one saw him. Plus, he may have someone with him, a girl, a young woman.”
Pete found this amusing in the extreme. He bent way over and laughed at the worn linoleum behind his work station. “I’m sorry, mister,” he managed to get out when
he was about through. He removed his glasses and wiped at one eye with a grayish handkerchief. “But no woman ever stays here, no young one, at least.” He returned the glasses to their pocket and leaned his bony elbows on the lower counter. “Look, son, I think you’re confused. You think this is a hotel. Well, it isn’t. I mean, it is and it isn’t. Mainly it’s just a place for tired old men—old, or old before their time—to come when there’s no place else to go. If they got a couple of bucks, they can stay upstairs in a room. When they run out of bucks, I let them sleep down here for a while.” He shrugged. “That’s it. Nobody comes here ’cause they want to. Anyone told you otherwise, they were putting you on.”
I was beginning to suspect that was the awful truth, but I wasn’t ready to admit it. Instead I said, “Mind if I look around anyway?”
“Shee-it,” Boyd breathed without malice and he pushed himself upright and came around the desk. “Come on.”
I followed him up the old steps and down the short halls on the top two floors. Once they had no doubt held sitting rooms and spacious bedrooms; now they had been subdivided into smaller, much smaller units; the few that had been left a reasonable size because the placement of doorways or stairs made subdivision impossible were crammed with narrow old beds or thin mattresses on the floors.
Boyd knew the registry by heart. At the door of each occupied room he’d murmur the name of the tenant, half to himself, half for my benefit. He refused to use his master key on any of these doors. “You don’t need to look inside,” he said irritatedly after my third or fourth request. “I know who’s in there and it ain’t the fellow you want.” But he was perfectly willing to let me into any and all of the several rooms that were supposed to be vacant. Each of them was, and obviously so.
Finally there was no place to go but back downstairs, me feeling foolish, him looking amused.
“Sorry you didn’t find your man, son.” His voice was gentle but at the same time mirthful. “I knew you was wastin’ your time, but …”
“I get paid for it; I’m sorry to have wasted your time. Let me reimburse you a little …” I reached into my pants pocket and came out with a ten, which I proffered.
He looked at it, looked at me. In his dark old head Boyd’s eyes were liquid, bright and shining, like a kid’s on Christmas morning. He spoke slowly, in a low conspiratorial rumble. “If it’s all the same to you, son—I’d rather have me a smoke.”
I smiled. He didn’t mean he’d rather have a Lucky. Either way, he was out of luck. “Fresh out,” I said. “Hamilton’s it.”
“Well, then, okay.” The bill disappeared into his shirt.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
So now the question, I reflected as I stood on the old house’s front port, was whether the Fat Lady had deliberately sent me on this fool’s errand.
I tended to think so—I mean, look at the sort of woman we were talking about—but what would she have gained by having me run out here looking for wild geese? I was already heading out her door when she decided to give me the info, so it wasn’t that she was trying to get rid of me. If she was worried about being soiled with the dust my search for Jennings would raise, this certainly wasn’t going to placate me. If this was supposed to have been a setup, if guns were supposed to have been waiting for me in one of the dingy, dirty upstairs rooms, it hadn’t come off very well—luckily for me, since the possibility only now popped into my pointy little head.
No, I decided; the Fat Lady had wanted me to stay the hell out of her business and, after my award-winning performance in her office, figured that the best way to ensure that was to cooperate a little. Maybe she really thought Jennings might have been here; it was certainly a good place to go if you wanted to be forgotten. Or maybe she was just the type who thinks it’s funny to give rubber bones to starving dogs.
I could have asked the Fat Lady, but if she wasn’t leveling with me before, why would she now? Besides, she had made it more than clear that she didn’t value my friendship or appreciate my company, and I was in no shape for another go-round with Bruno.
Plus it was very late and I was very tired, the snow was coming down even more heavily, and it seemed that the best thing I could do for Kate right now was to go home and catch about ten hours’ worth of safe and restful sleep, sleep, sleep.
Gee, maybe I was becoming irresistibly persuasive in my old age; I sure didn’t put up much of a struggle against my own sales pitch.
I crossed the road to the car, worked my way back to up I-29, followed it west and south to 480, crossed over into Nebraska, and inched along the waxy freeway suspended above Omaha’s downtown. I was almost getting used to having only half a windshield.
I was not yet to Creighton University, beyond which the freeway curved north and vanished into my neighborhood, when I became aware of a car in the center lane, driving in the blind spot behind my left shoulder—a moronic thing to do even when road conditions are good. But then, I’ve known for years that I’m the only one in town who knows how to drive properly. I slowed down to fifty, and so did he. I took my foot off the gas and let her drop to forty-five, which brought the other car up alongside me.
A dark blue Thunderbird, long and shiny, with dark, frosted windows.
I got a very bad feeling in my belly and it didn’t have a thing to do with my injuries.
A glance at the side mirror confirmed my suspicion that the T-bird’s front plate was snow-packed, as its rear plate had been that afternoon. Very thorough.
I took my foot off the accelerator again, just as the T-bird swerved into my lane slightly. From reflex, I jerked the wheel and sent the car onto the narrow shoulder six inches or so, avoiding the collision. My car bounced and bumped in the frozen-melted-frozen snow at the side of the road, but I fought the wheel and kept from smashing into the concrete wall at roadside—or, worse, through the wall and down to the streets below. I couldn’t see what I was doing, naturally, because that was the side of the windshield made virtually opaque by starry cracks and traces of black paint, and I didn’t want to oversteer to the left and end up in the other guy’s front seat, but I managed to wrestle the machine back onto the highway and into the inside lane.
The T-bird had dropped back a few yards. Now it surged forward again. Apparently he—or she, or they: I could see absolutely nothing through the smoked glass—was finished sightseeing and now interested in activity.
I hit the gas and nudged the needle back to fifty-five, but the Thunderbird matched it easily. I didn’t stand much chance of outrunning a powerful car like that, even if I’d been inclined to risk it on that tricky pavement.
He swerved again and this time I was a bit too slow on the uptake. The side of his wraparound front bumper struck my fender with a metallic thunk, and my right front tire detoured off the road again.
We had come up on the south side of the Creighton law school.
I hit the brake. Started to slide. Scraped against the dull gray concrete wall and skidded away, onto the road. Let up on the pedal and spun the wheel a couple of times to match the changing angles of the skid. Risked a very shallow sigh of relief as I saw the spaghetti junction up ahead, where 480 split itself into who knew how many lanes traveling every which way. If I could fake him out there, get him going the wrong way …
My relief was short-lived. The Thunderbird hit me again—or maybe I hit him—and that did it. My nose moved toward the wall. I stood on the brake. The rear of the car swung right and collided, even as I had collected myself to let up on the brake and wind the wheel into the spin. That’s what saved me. The car twisted left, out into the middle traffic lane, and I played the wheel as the machine swished back and forth on that road like the pendulum on a grandfather clock. The car three-sixtied once and tried for another but couldn’t make it. It ended up crosswise on the freeway, the headlights pointed north, the single remaining taillight south.
I slammed the car into park before it stopped rocking, hit the glove-box catch, yanked out the canvas pouch, and shook out th
e .38. This time there was no hesitation, no indecision.
I levered myself out of the passenger-side door so as to keep the Chevy between me and the T-bird, my miscellaneous aches and pains having miraculously vanished. I went automatically into the Weaver position—both arms extended, left hand supporting the right hand holding the gun—then crouched near the back tire and braced my arms against the trunk.
The Thunderbird was stopped in the center lane forty, fifty feet on. I waited perhaps a minute. He didn’t get out, he didn’t back up; and I sure as hell wasn’t coming out from behind my shield. Finally he got bored. I saw the brake lights go out and a plume of white smoke burp from the tail pipe, then an oatmealy snow erupted behind the back tires and he fishtailed on up the freeway, leaving me groping for a suitable metaphor for the incident.
I stood and eased the hammer home and surveyed the damage.
The right side of the car was a mess, but what the hell—compared to the afternoon’s carnage it was nothing, a BB ding following a bazooka strike. The car needed repainting anyhow, and I had other things on my mind. Like why had the T-bird followed me this afternoon? Why had its mission now become more than a simple shadow job? Did it have anything to do with the vandalism to my poor old abused Chevy? Did it have anything to do with my visit to the Fat Lady’s and the merry chase she had sent me on?
Above all, who was behind it?
If I somehow conjured up the answer to that one, I figured, the others should fall into place; and I had a good shot at it. The fluffy wet snow and the warmer temperatures had conspired to denude someone’s carefully concealed rear license plate during the bumps and grinds of our little demolition derby.
I found my notepad and jotted the number while it still figured prominently in my short-term memory.
Moving Targets Page 14