by Rod Reynolds
As much as I tried, I couldn’t make those notions stick. For all his faults, Robinson wore his heart on his sleeve, and I didn’t think him capable of masking his intentions that way. His plea had struck me as earnest, and in the end I came to believe he needed my help.
When I’d stripped the rest of it away, all that was left was cowardice. Same as always. The thought of going to a place so close to Texarkana terrified me, and once I’d recognised what was holding me back, I had no choice but to go. I was done with letting fear dictate my course.
I’d first talked to Lizzie three days ago. I’d said nothing before then because I saw no point in troubling her with it when I’d dismissed the whole stupid notion from the get-go. It hurt to tell her what I was intending, just as she was starting to see a future that wouldn’t always be tainted with darkness.
Lizzie had kept her own counsel while I talked, letting me tell it at my pace. The telephone call. Going back on my decision. My reservations. My fear. When I was through, she’d said I was crazy.
‘If he’s in trouble, you don’t have to be the one to ride to the rescue.’
‘It’s more complicated than that. You remember what he was like, he’s not the kind to ask for help for himself. He talked about girls turning up dead, evidence to show me.’
‘And that’s enough for you to come running?’
‘Listen to what he’s saying.’ I stood up, rubbing the back of my neck. ‘What if it’s connected?’
Her eyes were locked on mine. ‘Connected to what?’
‘To Texarkana. That was the implication. Why else would he come to me?’
She turned away, and I caught her glance at the picture of Alice. ‘We’re here now. That’s behind us.’
I recalled the way the newspapers had reported on the killings after the fact – Richard Davis as the lone crazy, responsible for all the murders. No mention of Winfield Callaway or Sheriff Bailey’s involvement, or their past crimes; the cover-up in place. Their deaths were written up as being the result of a robbery gone bad. No connection was made between the two happenings. I never knew if Robinson went to Callaway’s house that morning. Someone in Texarkana had to have orchestrated the lies that came after, and it was alarming to question now whether Robinson had ever tried to piece together the truth – or if he’d gone along willingly with the fabrications. ‘Doesn’t mean it’s over.’
‘Then that just speaks to the risk you’re taking. They have long memories over there—’
‘I’m not going to Texarkana. It’s not the same thing.’
‘You just said it’s connected.’ She watched me, waiting for me to say something.
‘I said it could be—’ She gave me a hard stare that stopped me trying to back away from my own words. ‘Look, I know there’s a risk,’ I said. ‘But it’s a small one—’
‘And still you’re willing to go? Everything we’ve built here . . .’
‘It doesn’t have to change any of that. I’ll be back in a few days.’
‘You can’t know that.’
I walked into the dinette, Lizzie following after me. ‘Whatever’s going on there, I can’t just stand by if people are dying.’
‘How do you know you can trust him? You know what that man did, he’s a liar and—’ She cut herself off, her emotions starting to bubble over. She smoothed her skirt, buying a moment to compose herself, then took my face in her hands and kissed me. ‘Don’t go.’
I hugged her, held her body against mine because I couldn’t bring myself to look her in the eye. ‘I have to.’
*
Coming to the end of Bathhouse Row, I asked the cab driver where I could find a public telephone. He veered across two lanes and drew up in front of one of the giant buildings at the north end of the street – a hotel he called the Arlington – and said there were kiosks off the lobby. I stepped out of the car and looked up at the two towers atop the hotel above me, stretching into the night sky like battlements. There was a staircase leading up to the main entrance. I climbed it and went inside.
The interior was as grand as the exterior, all art deco elegance: pastel walls jazzed up with colourful murals depicting some kind of jungle scene; chandeliers and rotating fans that dropped miles from the high, domed ceiling; sweeping staircases with wrought-iron balustrades that led to a mezzanine lounge.
I crossed the lobby and found the telephones, pulled out the number Robinson had given me, and dialled. Strange: the operator came back to say she couldn’t connect me because the line was dead. I asked her to try again, but got the same result.
I ran my hand over my face and checked my watch. Close to eleven, Central Time. Fourteen hours since I left home. Dog-tired.
Robinson had promised to fix me up with a room, but he never told me where. We’d spoken only twice, and he’d been cagey both times. The first call had ended with him reeling off a number to contact him at, and telling me to be sure to ask for Jimmy – no surname. ‘That’s how they know me here.’ The second time we spoke was when I’d called to tell him that I’d agree to come. That was when he’d promised to arrange lodging for me. He’d been adamant it wasn’t safe for me to stay in the same place as him, and refused to tell me where he was at. I’d chalked all of it up to his paranoia, and now I was kicking myself for playing his games. I went back outside into the night and asked the cab driver to take me to a motel; somewhere away from all the neon.
*
The Mountain Motor Court was a mile north of downtown, a horseshoe-shaped building around a gravel and dirt parking lot. There must have been twenty rooms, but only three were occupied, judging by the cars in the lot. I went into the proprietor’s office and paid for two nights. I asked him if there was a telephone I could use, but he shook his head, said they’d take messages for me but that they didn’t allow guests to make calls on their line. I went out to pay the cab driver and asked him to pick me up at seven the next morning.
My room was at the far end of the parking lot. It was dark inside even with all the lamps turned on, the pine board walls stained a rich brown. There was a wooden chair tucked into a table, two beds, and not much else in the way of furniture. The carpet was olive green – a reminder of home. Bare as it was, it was clean and warm. I walked to the window at the back and cracked the drapes; it looked out onto dense pinewoods, hard to make anything out in the haunting darkness of the trees. I went to the bathroom to wash my face, then I lay down on the nearest bed and thought of Lizzie. For just a moment, the chatter of the katydids outside sounded like the ocean on a calm night.
*
Hunger woke me at six the next morning. I realised I hadn’t eaten since the layover in Dallas the day before. The small breakfast room next to the motel office had warm biscuits and bad coffee, and I tucked into both before the cab showed up to collect me.
We drove back to downtown and the driver dropped me just along from the Arlington. Daylight stripped Central Avenue of its air of neon vice, and the grand bathhouses looked picturesque in near-silhouette, a watery sun rising behind the mountain that backstopped them. The magnolia trees along the street were verdant in the morning light.
I went inside the hotel and tried Robinson’s number again, but the line was still dead. I asked the operator what address it connected to; I took it down when she gave it to me, then went back to the car and handed the scrap of paper to the driver.
‘This where your friend is staying?’
‘I think so. You know the place?’
He turned in his seat to face me. ‘Sure, this here a bar and boarding house, name of Duke’s. You spoken to your friend the last day or more?’
I was reaching to pull the door shut. Something in his voice made me stop. ‘No, why?’
He cupped his hand over his mouth before he spoke. ‘This place burned down three nights ago.’
Chapter Two
Robinson’s boarding house was a half-dozen blocks away down Central Avenue – ‘near the black section’. The driver talked as we drove
, but his words offered no reassurance.
‘Fire started in one of the rooms upstairs. Believe a man died – what I heard.’
‘You know his name?’
‘No, sir.’
‘What about a description?’
He looked at me in the rearview, shaking his head. ‘Sorry.’
Questions came to me all at once. ‘Are the cops involved? How’d it start?’
‘Way it was told to me, was supposed to be an accident, but I don’t know no more than that.’ He glanced back at me, said, ‘Could be it wasn’t your friend.’
I looked out the window and said nothing.
We pulled up at the address a minute later and I jumped out. Duke’s ran to three storeys, the bottom floor occupied by a saloon. The windows on the second floor were boarded up, the brickwork around them blackened where the flames had licked at it. The front door was ajar.
Inside, the smell of smoke was overpowering; the floor and furniture were covered in wet ash and soot, and the ceiling was scorched and cracked from the heat above. Grey water stains ran down the walls, but the mirrored backbar was still standing, liquor bottles intact. It seemed the fire had been mostly contained upstairs.
A man in filthy overalls was sweeping wet ash into a pile in one corner of the room. I called out to him from the doorway. ‘This your place, friend?’
He glanced over but didn’t stop sweeping. ‘What’s left of it.’
I picked through the debris halfway to him, coming to a stop by the bar. ‘I’m looking for someone – Jimmy Robinson.’
‘Ain’t know no Robinson. You mean Jimmy Clark?’
I frowned, then remembered Robinson telling me to ask for him by his first name only, and I wondered if he’d given a false surname. I described him briefly, and the man stilled his broom.
‘That’s him. He a friend of yours or the like?’
I nodded, the truthful answer too complicated to broach. ‘Yes.’
He looked over to me again, meeting my eyes this time before he looked away. ‘I’m sorry to be the one has to tell you this, but Jimmy passed in the fire.’
I steadied myself on the bar rail, my thoughts thrown into chaos. ‘Goddammit—’
I felt a twitch in my stomach telling me to run, to wheel around and get as far away from Hot Springs as I could. Go back to California, to Lizzie and the Journal and a safe life. But the feeling was cut with guilt – a sense that things could have worked out different if I’d been as quick to act in the first place. That maybe Robinson would still be alive if I’d come sooner.
The man leaned his broom against the wall and went behind the bar. He produced two cups that looked clean enough, turned and poured coffee into each. He spooned three sugars into one and handed it to me. ‘Here, you come over pale.’ I pulled some money from my pocket but he pushed my hand away. ‘On me.’
I nodded and gulped down two mouthfuls. Even given the hour, I wanted something stronger. ‘What the hell happened?’
He held his drink with both hands, staring at it. He wore a rough denim shirt, unbuttoned at the collar, and the sleeves rolled back. His hair was black and unkempt, greying around the temples. There was a tattoo on his forearm, just above his wrist – a small heart with a word across it too faded to make out. ‘There ain’t too much I can tell you. Fire started sometime overnight Tuesday. Jimmy – he was drinking down here like always, and when I closed up for the night he took himself up to his room. Had a half a bottle of bonded with him – but it ain’t like he never done that before. They suppose he passed out with a cigarette in his hand, dropped it, and that’s what set the fire.’ He took a sip, his mug now dirtied by soot-blackened fingers. ‘That’s what the fire department told me, anyhow. They said the smoke would’ve done for him before he would’ve come round.’
I reached a hand to my throat. The taste of smoke seemed to coat my tongue and the inside of my mouth. I saw Robinson lying on his bed suffocating, never having a chance to escape, never even knowing. It seemed impossible that I’d spoken to him only days ago. I closed my eyes to shut it all out. When I opened them again, the man was watching me.
‘How long was he staying here?’ I said.
‘Going on three weeks.’
‘You have any idea what he was doing?’
It was a direct question too many, and the man straightened. ‘You a friend of Jimmy’s you said?’
‘A friend, yeah. He asked me to meet him here, I came in from California last night.’ I offered my hand. ‘Name’s Yates.’
He hesitated before he shook it. ‘Clay Tucker.’
I waited, my last question hanging there.
He took another mouthful of coffee, trying to see out the silence, but he gave up when he realised I’d wait all day. ‘Didn’t much concern myself with his business.’
I glanced around the bar, taking in the damage; water was still dripping from the ceiling in one spot. ‘Did he associate with anyone while he was here in town? Is there someone else I could ask?’
He splayed his fingers on the bar surface. ‘No one I know of. Kept to himself pretty much. Don’t mean this as a slur, but he wasn’t the sort to invite conversation.’
It sounded like he was brushing me off, but I couldn’t tell if it was just cussedness at not wanting to talk to me. I drained the rest of my coffee; my mind was racing, casting around for any kind of footing. ‘Can I take a look at his room?’
He shook his head. ‘They had it boarded up, and the staircase ain’t safe. What you want to do that for, anyhow?’
I still hadn’t marshalled my thoughts enough to give him an answer. ‘Was anyone else hurt in the fire?’
He set his cup down, shaking his head. ‘No – and it’s a goddamn miracle. Wasn’t no one else staying here, praise Jesus.’
I got up to leave, a nasty feeling prickling in my gut. ‘Sorry about your bar.’
‘Not as damn sorry as I am.’
I caught the edge to his voice and turned back to him. But instead of anger, his face was drawn with regret, and he was staring at the wall behind me. His eyes darted back to mine. ‘Look, you might could try the diner a couple blocks down.’ He pointed to indicate which way. ‘Jimmy went there most mornings. Maybe . . . I don’t know.’
I nodded in acknowledgement and made for the door.
*
I wanted to go back to the Arlingon Hotel – call Lizzie, tell her I’d be coming home. She’d be relieved, and I wanted to hear it – a measure of comfort in a town that felt even more hostile and isolated now than it had an hour earlier.
I started walking, but the sense of unease inside me festered. I felt bad for Robinson. Most of the time I’d known him in Texarkana, I’d wanted to knock him on his ass, but by the end I’d come to understand that it was fear made him the way he was. He didn’t deserve to die like that – alone in a strange town, in a room above a dive bar, suffocating on black smoke. Maybe no one gets what they deserve in this life.
I looked up and saw the diner Tucker had mentioned was a few yards along from me. The lot between it and me was vacant, had been flattened and cleared to use as a makeshift parking lot; without thinking, I started making my way across it, weaving between the automobiles towards the entrance.
The smell of grease and eggs hit me as soon as I walked inside. The counter stools were full so I went to the chipped service hatch and hooked the counterman. I forked over a dollar and dropped the name Jimmy Clark on him. Blank look. I tried Robinson then too, but got the same empty stare. When I described him, though, the man nodded his head.
‘I think I know the fellow. Keeps him some strange hours.’
His use of the present tense jarred. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Comes in all times of the day and night. I see him here at four in the morning some days, and back again at seven for coffee. Other times it’s the middle of the afternoon before he shows up, or not at all. Never eats a bite, always black coffee.’
‘You ever talk to him?’
&nbs
p; The man crumpled his face. ‘Some folk ain’t much for talking. I got him pegged for a gambler, way he lives. What you want him for?’
My mouth curled down, sensing I was at a dead end, no appetite for re-hashing the details of Robinson’s death with another stranger. ‘He ever come in with anyone else? Or talk to any of your waitresses? The other customers?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. Keeps to his own self.’
‘Just drinks his coffee.’
The man nodded along. ‘Always got a pen in his hand, scribbling away. I thought as likely he was keeping a ledger. What he won and lost – all the serious ones do that.’
‘Gamblers.’ I said it under my breath; it was as good as any description of the man I’d known.
‘What’s your name, fellow? I’ll remember you to him next time he’s in.’
I saw Jimmy surrounded by flames. Lifeless. ‘Don’t trouble yourself.’
‘You want me to pass him a message for you at least?’
I stepped away from the counter to leave, but something made me stop and go back. ‘Yeah. Tell him I’m sorry I was late.’
*
Double-timing it back to the Arlington, I followed Central Avenue north, passing a parade of seedy hotels, dime-cigar stores and liquor holes. After a few minutes walking, Bathhouse Row came in sight and I started noticing electioneering posters affixed to the utility poles, urging support for the ‘GI Ticket’ in the upcoming election. I got the gist quick enough – they were a band of war veterans that were running for office on an anti-corruption platform. I wondered what chance they had in a town that set the bar as low as this.
I kept going, battling my own thoughts. Part of my brain saw motive in everything. If Robinson was investigating a spate of murders like he told me, then it stood to reason there was a party out there with reason to want him stopped. And that was without giving consideration to the trail of blood that led all the way back to Texarkana. I thought again about having tipped him to the slaughter at Winfield Callaway’s house the morning I’d left town. If he’d gone out there and saw what happened, the knowledge made him a danger to whoever was telling the lies that followed. And that was true whether he was complicit in the cover-up or not.