by S. J. Rozan
Outside, the view was over a treeless field curving gently up away from the house. The sky was silvery at the horizon, with heavy iron clouds above.
I’d finished the bread and was halfway through the coffee when the kitchen door opened again and a different young woman came through. She was in her early twenties, I judged, and heavy, as Ellie had said; but she moved with graceful ease, self-assured and quiet. Her white kitchen jacket contrasted with her rich, shoulder-length chestnut hair. Her eyes were large and dark, and there was a scattering of freckles on her high cheeks.
I stood. “Alice Brown?”
“Yes, I’m Alice Brown,” she said, looking at me not with hostility but with a clear reserve. Maybe it was just her way; or maybe she had some idea why I was there.
“My name is Bill Smith,” I said. “Please, sit down.” I held the chair for her and she sat, her back straight, her shoulders relaxed. She folded her hands loosely on the table, gave me a direct gaze.
“I’m a friend of Jimmy Antonelli’s,” I said as I sat again. “It’s important that I speak to him, and I think you know where he is.”
“Jimmy,” she said. She dropped her eyes to the tabletop. “No, I don’t know where he is.”
“I’m a friend of his,” I repeated. “He’s in trouble. Maybe he deserves it, maybe not. Either way, maybe I can help.”
“I know who you are,” she said evenly. “But I can’t help you.”
“Tony thought you might.”
“Oh.” She smiled a little. “I like Tony. I wish he and Jimmy had gotten along better.” She stood abruptly, went behind the counter, made a business of making herself a cup of sweet-smelling herbal tea. “Do you want more coffee?” she asked.
“Please. It’s terrific coffee.”
She brought the pot over, poured, returned the pot to the heat, sat again. She sipped her tea. I waited to see what it was all about.
“Jimmy talked about you a lot,” she said, cupping her tea in both hands. “He said you were the only other person who ever took him seriously. He said you didn’t make him feel like a punk.”
“What did he mean, the only other person?”
“Besides me. I was the other one.”
I didn’t say anything. She went on, “I suppose Tony told you Jimmy was living here with me for a while.”
“This is your house?”
She nodded. “I grew up here. I live alone here now; my father died a year ago.” Her face said she still wasn’t used to it.
“I’m sorry.”
She smiled softly. “Thank you.”
I drank my coffee. “The bakery is yours, then?”
“Laura’s and Joanie’s and mine. That was Joanie you met when you came in.”
“And Jimmy?”
She was quiet for a moment, looking out the window. Then she went on. “I got to know Jimmy in the fall. We needed a delivery van and none of us knows about cars. I take my Plymouth to the garage where Jimmy works. I could tell he knew what he was doing, so I asked him to help us find a used van and put it in shape. That’s how we got to know each other, driving around looking at vans. At first he did his tough-guy act, but I wasn’t interested. Finally we started to just talk. We talked a lot. He wasn’t used to that, he said. He said nobody had ever cared what he had to say, except you.”
“He never gave anybody much of a chance.”
“That’s what I told him.”
Outside the window the wind ruffled the grasses. I said, “And he moved in with you?”
“Just before Christmas. I knew his reputation, but I didn’t care. I knew Jimmy, I thought. And you know what?”
“What?”
“I was right. It wasn’t a mistake and I’m not sorry.”
“But something must have gone wrong.”
She nodded. “He wasn’t ready. He just wasn’t ready. He started seeing someone else. It didn’t last long, a couple of weeks. It was over by the time I found out. He felt terrible about it, he said. It was just something that happened, it didn’t mean anything. But I told him I didn’t even want to start playing that game. I told him to leave.”
“When was that?”
She swirled the floating leaves around in the bottom of her teacup, watched their patterns as they settled. “That he moved out? Maybe a week ago.”
“Who was the someone else?”
She pushed her teacup away. “Maybe I’m talking too much.”
“You haven’t said anything that could hurt Jimmy,” I said. She didn’t answer. “Please,” I said. “It’s important.”
“Her name is Ginny Sanderson.”
“Mark Sanderson’s daughter?”
“Do you know her?” she asked, eyebrows raised.
“No. But her father is looking for her. She hasn’t been home for a couple of days.”
Her answer surprised me: “Would you go home, if he were your father?”
I asked, “Do you think she’s with Jimmy?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“He . . .” she hesitated. “He said she’d dropped him for somebody else.”
“Do you know who?”
She shook her head.
“And you don’t think she and Jimmy could have gotten back together?”
“No,” again.
“Alice,” I said, “I’ve got to find him. I’m not the only person looking for him. A man’s been killed. The police are calling it a homicide and they think Jimmy’s involved.”
“I know.” Her fair, clear skin flushed a deep red. “I mean, I know about the killing, and I know it happened at Tony’s bar. It was on the news. The man who was killed—Jimmy had talked about him. He talked about all those people. I told him he didn’t have to explain things to me, but he said he wanted me to know.” She looked at me seriously. “He said that was over. He said he wants something different now.” She added quietly, “I hope he finds it.”
She peered through the window to the pale horizon, but I didn’t think she was watching the clouds. Her dark eyes turned back to me. “I don’t think Jimmy killed that man.”
“Why do you say that, if you haven’t seen him?”
She didn’t answer right away. Finally she said, “You don’t think he did either.” It wasn’t a question.
I said, “I want to talk to him.”
She gave a small shrug, spread her hands helplessly.
“If he does get in touch with you, will you tell him I’m here and I want to help?”
She nodded.
“My cell phone number is on the card. Or you can always reach me at Antonelli’s. Jimmy knows that.” I stood. She stood too, and hesitated; then she offered me her hand. We shook; her skin was soft and smooth. She smiled a quiet smile which didn’t so much light up her face as allow it to glow softly, from within.
I went back down the porch steps and out to my car. The wind had come up and the clouds had thickened. I drove out of the lot and down the driveway, turning left onto Winterhill Road, the way I had come. The land up here on the ridge was gently rolling. I looked for a spot to pull off and I found a good one, behind a little slope about two hundred yards from the house. The road curved here; someone concentrating on driving, especially at dusk, might pass a parked car and never even notice.
I pushed the seat back, stretched my legs. I turned the CD player on, slipped in the disc of Uchida playing my Mozart Adagio. I could never hope to play with the control she had, the enormous technical mastery that made the piano respond to her precise intention every time, but I could learn from it. My fingers started to feel the music, to move the way your foot will move to where the brake pedal should be when someone else is driving the car. The Baldwin in the cabin, recently tuned, had sounded good these last two nights in the cedar-scented darkness. Now, in the still car, the tips of my fingers, looking for the smoothness and hard edges of ivory and ebony, found only denim and leather and the coldness of the air.
Color drained from the fields and the sky as the day
grew old around me. I turned the car on twice, to get a little heat, trying to thaw that deep bone chill that can come from sitting in the cold, not moving. I kept reaching for a cigarette, remembering I had none, cursing first silently, then out loud.
Three cars passed me during the time I sat there, two from the east, one from the west. With each I turned off the tape, listened with the window open for the sound of brakes or slamming doors. In the wide, treeless emptiness the wind, blowing east, would have brought me those sounds, but there was nothing, so I stayed where I was and I waited.
It was longer than I thought, almost two hours, the day close to darkness, when the yellow Horizon I’d been waiting for whisked by. It had been the only Plymouth in the Winterhill lot. I started the car, pulled out without haste. I wanted plenty of room between us on roads as deserted as these.
She drove down into Jefferson and beyond it, picking up 2 heading east. There was a Stewart’s a few miles along and she stopped there. I pulled into the lot, engine idling while I watched her shop under the harsh convenience-store light.
She was wearing a blue parka, her glossy chestnut hair half hidden under a blue knit hat. She filled a basket and it didn’t take long. Cold cuts, milk, coffee, a six-pack of Bud. After a moment’s hesitation, a second six-pack. Something from the sandwich counter in the back, microwaved before it was wrapped and handed to her. At the checkout she bought the Mountain Eagle and the Albany paper, and added a carton of Salems.
Maybe she’d pick me up a pack of Kents, if I asked.
She loaded the paper bag into her trunk, rolled out of the parking lot. She turned north on 30 as far as Middleburgh, then suddenly left it and started threading her way over back roads. I kept my distance. She wasn’t acting as though it had occurred to her she might be tailed; she hadn’t even scanned the Stewart’s lot. But she wasn’t stupid and I didn’t want to scare her off.
She knew the roads well, choosing the better-paved shortcuts, working her way north. I kept her in sight close enough so I wouldn’t lose her when she made a turn, but no closer. A couple of times I killed my lights, not for long, just long enough so that she’d think the headlights in her mirror belonged to three or four different cars, if she thought about it at all.
About half an hour after we’d left 30, twisting and turning along dark roads where the trees crowded close, she turned onto a well-kept county road and I suddenly caught on. She drove west about two hundred yards. I didn’t follow her, just watched as she turned left into a space in the trees that was a road only if you thought it was. I didn’t need to follow her now; I knew where she was going.
After the Plymouth’s tail lights disappeared I parked on the shoulder across from the mouth of the hardscrabble road she’d turned up. I locked up the car, started to pick my way. I had the flashlight from the car and I needed it. The sky was a thick steel gray, no moon, no stars. Branches pressed against its underside. The darkness around me started at the edge of the flashlight beam and was complete.
There were no night sounds, no birds; just my footsteps scraping softly, as softly as I could manage, up the stony road.
The road wasn’t long; I knew it wasn’t. I switched off the flashlight as I came near the top. The path leveled out and the trees stopped abruptly, staying behind. In the darkness there were darker shadows, but mostly there was a sudden feeling of openness, an empty plain where, if I stood long enough, I would begin to be able to see what I knew was there.
Close in, there would be piles of boulders and slag standing on the dead earth; farther off, a pit, an enormous hole maybe five hundred yards across and half that deep, sudden and sharp-sided and filled with inky water. Beyond the pit, a wall of rock, thin trees scratching for a living. On top of the wall was a road that ran straight along the top of the mountain. The only way to get here from that road was to scramble down the rocks.
About a third of the way around the pit there was a bigger road than the one I’d come up, and there were three other pits like this one, vast canyons separated from each other by ridges which in places narrowed to ten feet. When this pit was active the gravel trucks had used that other road, kicking up dust, rumbling through the daytime hours with loads of stone crushed and ground to order in a towering collection of connected timber structures that clung to the side of the hill. Fist size, egg size, pea size, dust: there was nowhere in this part of the state that gravel from this quarry hadn’t been used to build roads, line drainage ditches, mix into concrete.
This pit was abandoned now, and so were two of the others, but the fourth—the one MacGregor had said was close to played-out, too—was for now still working, lower down on the hill. Each of the exhausted pits was as huge and desolate as this one, and each, as it was abandoned and the dewatering pumps removed, filled with water from the interrupted springs that bled down the face of the rock. The local kids used these pits to swim in in the summer, diving from the rocks into the cold, bottomless pools. It had been one of those kids who, early last August, on the last warm night of the year, had discovered something strange here: a late-model Nissan Sentra come to rest on a ledge a few feet below the surface.
To my right two cars were parked: the yellow Plymouth, and a familiar Dodge Ram van. The van’s rear windows were hung with Mylar shades from which a stag on a huge boulder stared, impassive, over a winter scene as desolate as this.
Just beyond the cars a dilapidated shack with a tin roof leaned into the night. Light shone through its grimy windows, reflecting weakly off the cars’ chrome trim.
My footsteps were silent walking up to the shack. It seemed likely that Jimmy was armed, and though he wouldn’t shoot me if he knew it was me, he was liable to be jumpy as hell.
I stopped about ten feet from the door, stood facing it. Anyone looking out through the glass could have seen me clearly then, a tall, solid shape on the barren plain. Inside my gloves, my palms were sweating.
“Jimmy!” My voice echoed off the rock wall, repeating, fading, dying. The light in the shack went out; nothing else happened. “Jimmy!” I called again. “It’s Bill Smith. I’m alone. Let me in.”
Nothing, again.
Then Jimmy’s voice, loud, tough, and blustery. “Mr. S.! Talk to me! You alone?”
“I said I was. Let me in.”
I waited. The door creaked open; the doorway gaped emptily. I walked forward, stepped through into the darkness. The door slammed shut and the blinding beam of a powerful flashlight hit me full in the face.
I jerked, raised my hand to block the glare. The beam switched off and the small flame of a match lit a kerosene lamp. Wavering shadows were thrown against the bare walls, shadows of two figures standing, some distance apart, before me.
“Jesus,” I said, trying to clear my eyes.
“Had to make sure.” Jimmy’s voice, nonchalant.
“You know a lot of guys my size that sound like me?”
“You never know.”
We faced each other across the small, dusty room. In the flickering light Jimmy looked drawn and tired, his stubble-covered face smudged with dirt; but the grin, the cocky set of his shoulders under the plaid-lined parka were the same as always, the same as they’d been on the kid I’d taught to hit a baseball and to drive a nail straight and to split a log without chopping his own foot off.
And to shoot. I’d taught him that, too.
Loosely by his side Jimmy held an old Winchester. 30-30, maybe the one Tony had given him when he was twelve. The shack smelled of stale beer, kerosene, and disuse. Shadows danced on the walls, moved over our faces. It struck me then how much Jimmy looked like Tony: the same short, powerful build, the same square jaw and dark, unyielding eyes. But where Tony looked as if he’d been put together by a rockslide, Jimmy had been carved more carefully. His nose was straighter than Tony’s, his eyes set less deep; but the take-it-or-leave-it in them was Tony’s, too.
To Jimmy’s right, next to the wall, Alice Brown stood with her arms wrapped around her. She had taken off her ha
t, but not her parka; the potbellied woodstove in the corner wasn’t giving off enough heat for that. She was watching me with guarded eyes.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I didn’t believe you.”
“You had no reason to,” she answered calmly.
“I wanted to. But I couldn’t afford it.”
“I had to make sure Jimmy wanted to see you,” she said.
I turned back to Jimmy. “Did you?”
“Hell, yes!” Jimmy leaned the rifle against the wall, reached into the Stewart’s bag on a rickety table by the stove. He pulled out a six-pack, freed a can from its plastic collar, tossed it to me. He held out another, said “Allie?” in an unsure voice. Alice shook her head.
I dropped onto an upended wooden box, popped the top of the beer. Jimmy leaned against the table. There was one spindly chair in the room and he gestured Alice to it with his beer and a tentative smile.
“No,” she said, with no smile at all.
So the chair stayed empty as I sat and Jimmy leaned and Alice stood. On the table next to the Stewart’s bag was a half-eaten meatball hero, melted cheese and tomato sauce congealing on aluminum foil. “You mind if I finish this?” Jimmy asked me. “I’m starving.”
“Go ahead,” I said. He scooped up the sandwich, bit into it. Tomato sauce dripped on the floor, kicked up tiny craters in the dust. I asked, “When was the last time you ate?”
“Yesterday,” he said, his mouth full of bread and meatballs. “Lunch.”
I put my beer can on the floor, went to the table, took the carton of Salems from the bag. I shook out a pack, found a book of matches in the bottom of the bag. I lit a Salem as I sat down again.
Jimmy watched me. “You hate those,” he said.
“Damn right,” I answered.
I smoked and Jimmy ate. I asked, “Where were you yesterday?”
“Here,” he said, wiped his mouth on a wadded-up paper napkin. “Been here for a few days.”
“How many?”
He looked uncomfortable. “About a week,” he answered. “Since Allie threw me out.”
Over by the wall, Alice dropped her arms, turned around to stare out the window at the impenetrable darkness.