A Stranger Lies There

by Stephen Santogrossi

  I brought the legs to another bench, where I’d left the molded drawer fronts I recently assembled and shaped. Those needed some light sanding to smooth out the seams, but I decided to finish off the legs I’d just put down instead. I found the headset radio and turned on KCLB-FM. John O started a set about drug abuse with a Guns N’ Roses song called “The Garden.” I wondered if Deirdre was listening inside.

  I began the final shaping of one of the dresser legs by tightening a vise around the lag screw bored into it. Picked up a wood rasp to round the foot, turned up the music a little and set to work. I’d just gotten into a rhythm of short, even strokes in time with the music when I thought of something that had been bothering me since yesterday, niggling at the back of my brain.

  I put the file down and removed my headphones, not bothering to switch the radio off. I went into the house. Deirdre was in the bedroom with the TV on and no sound, and I got no response from her when I turned it off. She was asleep on top of the covers, the house still warm at this hour. I watched her for a moment. Her breathing was deep and peaceful. A faint smile on her face. What was she dreaming about?

  The clock on her side of the bed glowed a liquid green. Almost ten. It sat on one of the night tables I’d built when Deirdre moved in, and I remembered the time a few months later when she spilled nail polish remover on the tabletop. It damaged the finish and left an ugly mark. Deirdre had been upset for hours, crying that she’d ruined the only bedroom set we would ever have. Before then, I’d been unsure of her thoughts on marriage. The following day I proposed.

  I went out the front door into the electric desert night. My car was sitting at the curb. I opened the trunk and peered inside, searching for the heavy duty flashlight we kept there for emergencies.

  The flashlight hadn’t been used in years and I hoped the batteries weren’t dead. But the light barreled out brightly, stabbing the darkness. I hurried across the street to where Branson and I had talked yesterday morning. I pointed the flashlight into the gutter, sliding the beam back and forth. Nothing. I wondered if I had the right spot, looked up at the house and knew I did. Remembered the wind blowing Branson’s cigarette ash and widened my search. A moment later, found what I was looking for.

  It was in the street now, flattened by a few tires. An empty matchbook. I turned it over and saw

  BLUE BIRD MOTEL

  INDIO, CA

  in blue letters across the front. A small bird between the name and the location. The cardboard had been dimpled from the gravel in the street. One of those narrow ones, looked like eight matches, all gone now.

  The cops had missed it. They probably hadn’t come anywhere near it, other than when Branson had parked here, since it was across the street and two houses away. I looked up and down the block. Nothing moved. The wind had died down, and an expectant pause seemed to hang over the area. The hair on my arms was standing up, as if there were a static charge trembling in the atmosphere.

  I sat down at the curb, thinking. The matchbook didn’t appear to be very old despite having been run over. I tried to remember what Branson used to light up yesterday. Saw him flick a lighter and put it back in his pocket. So I knew the matchbook wasn’t his.

  Pure luck that I’d found it. My eyes had seen it yesterday, but my brain hadn’t. Rattled around upstairs for two days, until my hands were busy and my mind was relaxed. But where did it come from? Did it even matter?

  I decided to do my thinking inside. Locking the front door behind me, I went into the kitchen and put the flashlight and the matchbook on the counter. The phone was sitting there, now without its mating handset. That was still lying in pieces on the floor, under the dent in the wall on the other side of the kitchen. In the shadowed room, the hole looked deeper than I knew it was. I went over and inspected the drywall, running my fingers over the damage. A little of it flaked away and fell to the floor in tiny chunks next to the broken phone, tapping the polished hardwood as they landed. The sound was amplified by the silence of the rest of the house. The harm I’d done to the wall looked repairable, but I couldn’t say the same for the phone. I picked it up and laid it on the kitchen table where it sat in silent rebuke.

  There was a bottle of bourbon on one of the top shelves. I poured three fingers in a glass, and sat down at the table with the drink and the matchbook. Absently turned it over in my hand, as though I was doing a card trick. I gulped half the bourbon and it burned on the way down.

  The Blue Bird Motel. I’d never heard of it. Probably a low-rent, pay-by-the-week or -month place off the beaten track, light-years away from the glitzy resorts that populated the Palm Springs area. The fact that it was in Indio, and not part of a chain, suggested that.

  Again I wondered if the matchbook had anything to do with anything. Probably just a random piece of trash. But the cardboard was still shiny and stiff, the only mark of wear being the pavement dimples. So it hadn’t been there too long.

  If the matchbook belonged to the murder victim, then he was staying at the Blue Bird. That much was obvious. A drug addict would fit, paying weekly rent in a run-down motel. Comes out here for Deirdre’s help, maybe had some inside information on the area’s drug trade. Which would explain someone trying to stop him.

  I saw the guy standing outside, getting his nerve up. Smoking. Empty matchbook discarded. Or being dropped in a struggle and blowing down the street. Any number of things. The matchbook may have been the culprit’s. If the death wasn’t drug-related, that left Turret in the scenario I’d related to Deirdre this morning. Maybe the boy was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Saw Turret lurking and was killed because of it.

  The police hadn’t found a vehicle belonging to the victim, though. If he’d driven here, he probably wasn’t alone. Someone had taken the car after what happened. The killer himself? A companion who escaped?

  One thing was certain. I wouldn’t find out just sitting here. I should call the cops and tell them about finding the matchbook.

  Which now had my fingerprints all over it. I hadn’t thought of that, and silently cursed myself. At the very least, Branson would be furious with me for contaminating a piece of potential evidence. He wouldn’t hesitate to make things tough for me, judging from his outburst this morning. And I should have kept my mouth shut as I was leaving the interrogation room.

  I wondered where in Indio the Blue Bird was. Got the phone book and opened it to the Yellow Pages. The place was nowhere to be found, which didn’t surprise me given my earlier guess about it. I flipped to the white pages, the fine print straining my eyes in the dimly lit kitchen.

  There. Halfway down the page. Indio was a thirty-minute drive south on I-10 or one hour if you followed Palm Canyon Drive as it curved against the base of the mountains through most of the other valley cities.

  An obvious choice presented itself. Call the cops or check it out myself first. Maybe if I pursued it on my own, I’d find that the Blue Bird had nothing to do with the murder and I wouldn’t have to risk Branson’s ire for no reason.

  Then the possibility of Turret being involved hit me again. Maybe he was the smoker. Maybe he was staying at the motel right now. I could make a quick call and find out if he was registered there, but I didn’t want to chance alerting him in any way. If Turret was behind this, and I could surprise him, take him down myself … the idea had a certain mano a mano appeal to it. And boy, did he have it coming from me—an old score I’d never imagined being able to settle.

  In the end, my earlier decision to stay out of the case wasn’t a factor. Here was a gift from the karmic gods. I couldn’t say no.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I tried not to think about what I was doing, afraid that if I debated the pros and cons any further, good sense would prevail or I would chicken out entirely. Still, I took more time than I needed to moving around the house, making sure the windows were shut and locked, closing and locking the sliding glass door in the kitchen. I wrote Deirdre a note saying I went out for a drink and would be back arou
nd two. Left it on her night table in the small pool of light from the bedside lamp. I lied because I knew she wouldn’t approve of what I was doing, convincing myself if the trip proved fruitless there was no reason to upset her. Like most married men with their wives, I was afraid of Deirdre.

  I made a last circuit of the house, then checked the inside door lock in the shop. Just before I shut the light off, something occurred to me. In one of the bench drawers were some gloves I used for staining furniture and I grabbed a pair to take with me. Probably wouldn’t need them, but if it came to it, I wanted to be more careful than I’d been with the matchbook. In the living room, I set the burglar alarm to allow movement inside for Deirdre but no outside entry, then double locked the front door behind me.

  Outside in the car, I clicked on the dome light and found a map in the glove compartment. I checked the address I’d written down on a scrap of paper. The Blue Bird was on Highway 86 in Indio, just off the Dillon Road exit from the interstate. I started the car, telling myself I was doing the right thing. The engine came to life immediately. I felt bad about not talking it over with Deirdre, but I knew that one word from her would keep me home tonight.

  Rolling silently over the empty streets, the nighttime breeze whispered through the open windows and dried the sweat on my skin. For all my attempts to avoid thinking about it, I was still apprehensive about what to do once I got to the motel. Check things out first, try to determine if Turret was staying there. I resigned myself to telling the cops what I’d found no matter what happened, despite my earlier inclination to avoid that if I could. I’d just have to deal with Branson and his attitude. So that was settled.

  I turned on the radio, finding KCLB again. The overnight guy, known as the “Night Manager,” introduced a band called Mazzy Star. He described them as a cross between the Velvet Underground and the Doors. Their chiming guitars and echoing voices blended together into a woozy, hypnotic sound that soothed my jangling nerves as the freeway on-ramp came up. The traveler’s stop was still open, but only a few gas station and restaurant customers were visible, wraithlike figures in the sodium glow shuffling to and from their vehicles.

  I got on the freeway going east. The engine heaved briskly up to speed as the wind and the music on the radio filled the car. Mazzy Star was still on, and the song featured a spooky organ sound that was like the Doors at their most psychedelic. It brought back a smoky, hallucinatory night I’d experienced some thirty years ago, a party where the drugs and alcohol were freely offered and nonstop. Loud music had pounded my eardrums all evening, until a bizarre conversation with Glenn Turret later on in a quiet corner of the house.

  On a fishing trip with his parents, he’d watched the lifeguards administer CPR to someone who’d almost drowned. The victim survived, and Turret remembered wondering what it felt like to have that much power in a life or death situation. He went on and on about the godlike qualities of those lifeguards. If I hadn’t been so stoned at the time, maybe the story would have scared me.

  Twenty minutes later, I was at the Highway 111 turnoff. The bright lights of the Indian casinos glared in my windshield as I made a right off the highway and entered the city of Indio.

  Indio is a dusty old place with a grungy southwestern flavor that I normally found appealing. On more carefree evenings, Deirdre and I would drive past the quaint old buildings here, through relaxed, siesta-like streets, catching the aromas of Mexican cooking on the musty, crop-scented air. Sometimes we’d hear ranchera music drifting in the wind, and watch the falling sunlight burnish the town a twilight gold.

  Now the area was enshrouded in darkness that felt stifling in my unease, and I had to force myself to go on. I turned off the radio and slid through the dim city light toward the motel. The Union Pacific tracks at Indio Boulevard jarred me to attention; I made a right just after them, following the boulevard as it turned into Highway 86. The Blue Bird would be just a few blocks down, I remembered from the map. I slowed down a bit, squinted at the address numbers on my left. To the right, the railroad tracks paralleled the road. The silent hulks of two boxcars, massive and dark, sat on some siding next to the tracks, sentries standing guard.

  In the light from a streetlamp, I verified the address number I’d written down. 82-420. I was still in the 83s. A little farther on, across more tracks, was a U.S. Border Patrol office, and the police station I knew, was just a few blocks east. That made me nervous. If I’d given myself half a chance, I would have turned around and abandoned the whole venture. Instead, I concentrated on the street numbers.

  I entered the 82-000 block, then passed under Golf Center Parkway. The Amtrak station loomed on my right, followed by another bridge overhead, this time for Jackson Street, and I thought maybe I’d missed it. If I hit Monroe, I’d definitely gone too far.

  Suddenly, it appeared. Its name was lit up in pale blue letters under the jaundiced light from the streetlamps. “By the week or month.” I read further, and saw that no credit card logos were present. I tried to swallow the lump in my throat as I went by, taking in the scene as it rolled across my field of view like a painted canvas backdrop on a movie set.

  The Blue Bird was a small place set back from the street by a shallow parking area. Weeds shot up through cracks in the concrete. A dusty old Plymouth that looked as if it hadn’t been moved in months sat in front of the office, inert under a thick coat of dirt. A tumbleweed had blown up against its side. The only other vehicle was parked in front of one of the rooms. A small pickup truck with an old camper shell on its back.

  The building itself was a one-story strip of about fifteen rooms badly in need of a facelift. Disheveled and run-down, paint faded and peeling. A dozen or so roof tiles missing, probably blown off in the gusty winds that sometimes hit this area. The office at the far left end was well-lit, with a neon vacancy sign hanging in the window. About half the rooms’ porchlights were burned out though, including number 2 with the pickup truck in front. Its front door was in shadow, the curtains in the unlighted window closed. The porchlight for number 12 was illuminated, the room faintly lit behind closed curtains.

  I slowly accelerated past the Blue Bird and made a U-turn up the block, hugging the curb as I inched closer to the motel. I stopped two doors away and turned off the engine, my heartbeat going up a few notches. It was now or never, I thought, and got out of the car.

  I started toward the motel as nonchalantly as I could. Passed an auto body shop, then the pest control business next door. When I reached the motel parking lot, I realized I’d left the gloves on the front seat of my car. Cursing under my breath, I wheeled around, feeling naked and exposed, and saw my headlights going full-blast, shining like beacons by the side of the road. Hurrying back to the car, I realized I wasn’t made for this. I’d brought gloves for the remote possibility of a surreptitious search, but no weapon if I had to deal with Turret. Not smart. But the frustration I felt pumped me up and gave me a reckless courage. I switched off the headlights and grabbed the gloves, stuffing them in my pocket as I approached the motel again. I noticed that all the rooms except 2 and 12 had their curtains open wide to the night. The place was practically empty.

  I wasn’t expecting that. I decided not to talk to anyone in the office just yet. Instead, I’d knock at the doors of the two rooms that looked occupied. If Turret answered one of them, I’d take him down immediately—I’d been in enough fights in prison to be confident in that area. Plus I’d have the element of surprise. If someone else answered, I’d apologize and say I had the wrong room. Either way, I’d bring in the cops afterward. I’d try number 12 first, since it was the one with a light on.

  When I reached the door, I paused to give the parking lot and street one last look.

  Nobody.

  I knocked, more tentatively then I’d planned. “Manager,” I called out, improvising. I turned away from the window in case Turret peeked out.

  No response.

  Another three knocks, this time louder. “Manager.”

 
; Still nothing.

  Looking around again, I saw that number 2 remained dark and undisturbed. No swaying curtains from curious neighbors. The empty street and quiet parking lot seemed to urge me on.

  Five firm knocks got nothing but silence from room 12. Surprising, given the light behind the curtains. Thought I’d see about number 2 with the truck in front. I turned to go that way, then, on a whim, tried the door in front of me instead.

  Unlocked. An even bigger surprise. I hesitated. Looked around once more and found myself alone, still. I almost wanted someone to notice me and demand what the hell I was doing.

  Okay, think. Light’s on inside but the door’s unlocked. No car out front and no response to my knock. Seemed a little off. The room was either empty, or the occupant was asleep or taking a shower or something and hadn’t heard the door. But why was the door unlocked if the person had left? Who sleeps with the lights on? And a knock should have wakened him if he was sleeping. Unless … unless there was something wrong.

  I wasn’t thinking of Turret now, I was thinking of the kid on my front lawn. Decided I should just go in, make sure no one needed help. If I heard the shower, I’d be out of there.

  I pushed the door open. Nobody greeted me with an angry question. I didn’t hear running water.

  “Hello? Anybody here?” If someone was, they weren’t answering. Or couldn’t.

  My shadow extended into the dimly lit room from the bright porchlight, and I was inside before I knew it. I shut the door behind me. Snapped the deadbolt home and paused a moment to let my eyes adjust to the light. The bedroom was empty. I crossed to the bathroom quickly to check there, with the same result.

  No one here. A musty smell of old carpet and unlaundered linen, as if the window hadn’t been opened in a long time. And smoke. Place like this probably let you smoke all you want. I went back to the door, thinking I should leave. Turned around instead, gave the room a closer look. It was larger than it seemed from outside, about fifteen by twenty feet. A double bed on the left, against the wall and parallel to the front window. Two small night tables with lamps flanked the headboard. Across the room on the right, a small closet with a flimsy, louvered wooden door that folded shut in two sections, next to an ancient TV on a stand. Against the back wall and directly facing me, a table and mirror that reflected where I stood unmoving at the door. The mirror was too short to catch the uneasiness on my face. A chair stood on one side of the table.