What she hadn't done was take the hint and hire him to run off whoever was giving her a problem; she'd just said it was living alone that frightened her. And maybe that's the way it was.
Z bent his knee again. Better. The pills were doing their job.
Just for good measure, he chewed up another couple of aspirin; sucked them down.
Moving his knee again, it felt OK. OK in the sense it would never get any better.
Gritting his teeth, he slid out of the covers and eased himself up on the linoleum floor, the slick floor shivering cold. He'd heard they didn't make linoleum any more, and certainly not in the shade of purple to match the walls.
His feet adjusting to the chill (by going numb,) no one to see him, he let himself limp to the bathroom.
Showered, teeth brushed, shaved, hair combed -- all without looking -- he finally found the courage to stare at himself in the steamy bathroom mirror.
God, he was ugly! Limp, iron gray hair; lines in his face gone deep as August cracks in a Kansas prairie; under it all, a Dick Tracy jaw that still had some skin attached; narrow, mucus-colored eyes.
At least he'd found employment where ugly was an asset. Reared up like a grizzly, looked larger than his six feet plus. Even bigger with his paunchy, two hundred twenty pounds. Big and ugly.
Plus a croaking voice as a bonus extra. (Another couple of hits on the old squawk box and he'd be down to a whisper.)
He made himself look in the mirror again ... to find he didn't look his age. ... More like twice his age.
His body wisping steam on reentry into the cold bedroom, Z got his good blue suit out of the closet. Had to look your best when you were going on campus, Susan had said.
Dressed, he slipped the change from the dresser top into his pants pockets. Also his lighter, billfold, and keys.
Putting on the suit helped. Then again, dressed up like people, even chimps looked human.
Giving himself a final once-over in the dresser mirror ... deciding he didn't seem too frightening ... Z brightened with an idea. He'd get his pay, then go to the Nelson to have lunch in the gallery's Rozzelle Court. Expensive, but what the hell. Lunch, and then lose himself for an hour in all that beauty.
No matter what else happened (or didn't happen) with Susan, he had her to thank for the Nelson Art Gallery. When the job she'd hired him to do had gone wrong, to help him recover from the gunshot wound, the doctor proscribed walking as the best way to recuperate, Susan suggesting he shuffle through the gallery. Too weak to argue with either of them, he'd given in.
Slow-walking in the gallery for those two months had him falling in love with art, Z first liking the suits of Medieval armor. As a knight in steel, Z guessed he'd feel ... invulnerable -- the way a green, high school football player felt in pads. You never thought about your knees when you were in high school.
High school. The good old days when being dumb was your shield against the world.
He'd then become fascinated with the life-sized marble lion in the Ancient room.
Now, everything in the gallery interested him. Living the hand-to-mouth life he did -- dealing with the worst kind of people -- he needed beauty in his life ... for balance.
"Satisfied" with the way he looked, Z limped down the short hall into the kitchenette, where he hung his coat over the back of a straight chair at the dinette table.
As always, got the bread, grape jelly, Skippy smooth, and a can of Diet Coke from the fridge. No decisions to be made here. That was all the food he kept in the house.
A peanut butter and jelly sandwich for breakfast, and when low on money, the same for his other meals. He used to feel bad about eating so much peanut butter until he read that a doctor had invented the sticky stuff as a way to get more protein into the diet of the poor, making it obvious that peanut butter and a poverty-stricken Bob Zapolska were meant to "stick together."
Toast the bread? Not today, though he did that sometimes, for variety.
Sandwich on a paper plate, Diet Coke hissed open, both transferred to the table, and he was ready to build his morning fire.
Stepping to the wood box, he got a handful of kindling and stuffed it in the stand-alone fireplace he'd put in the 10 X 12 living room. Stooping again, he picked up the jar of kerosene from under the circular fireplace rim and splashed a little coal oil on the stovewood. The fire "primed," first tossing in a couple of split oak logs, he fished out his lighter and touched off the coal oil.
He'd installed the black steel fireplace himself; had even climbed the rose trellis outside his door to fix the chimney pipe through the tar paper roof of his add-on apartment. And never regretted the money he spent.
Nothing like a fire to take the chill off winter mornings.
Trying to be as honest as his Mom had wanted him to be, Z had to admit that he built a fire every day in the summer, too. Had plugged up both living room windows with air conditioners -- to cool down the summer fire's heat.
The flames catching, kindling popping -- smelling of white pine -- oak bark beginning to blaze, he looked at his watch, holding it at arm's length .....
With the little hand nearing 10:00, he'd better speed up if he was to get to his office before 11:00.
Z's true office was his answering machine. Oh, he'd rented a tiny two-holer of a workplace in the cheap rent district on Chouteau. Had even added a second desk just inside the splintered door for a "soon-to-be-hired" secretary. In reality, though, his business was a couple of phone numbers in the Yellow Pages: one for Robert Zapolska Detective Agency -- the other for Robert Zapolska Security Systems Installation. You didn't have a lot of walk-in business in either the detective or the security game.
Still, he liked having what office there was; gave him a reason to get out in the mornings; provided him with another place to read in peace.
But first things first. Like getting the paper so he could eat.
Hurrying, Z got his heavy coat from the divan where he'd thrown it last night, and struggled into the coat. Scarf stuffed in. Gloves on. But no hat. (A real man didn't need a hat.)
Three, painful steps, plus a ham-handed twist of the door knob put him out the front (side) door.
Shutting the door, swinging right, he started the long walk to the front to retrieve the Star, refusing to let himself limp -- never could tell who was watching out a window -- the weak sunlight reflecting from ice patches on the walk, making it easier to dodge them. Little snow so far. None left on the ground.
Z hated winter because his nose got so cold he couldn't smell; in summer, liked to make a game out of guessing odors – helped pass the time on stakeout.
The old trees along the curb cut off most of the raw, January wind.
Back straight, hands in his pockets, Z tried not to limp down the crumbled concrete leading to the front of the moldering, brown house that, for longer than even it remembered, had been chopped into cheap apartments.
Strange, how every twist in a person's life forced you down a path that led you to where you were at the moment. Looking back, it seemed to have been ordained that he move into this two-room-with-kitchenette apartment.
A "dry spell" a couple of years ago had him living in his office until he got a call from an old lady named Urquhart. It seemed that a street gang was keeping her awake "to all hours" and would he do something about that. She'd read his ad in the yellow pages. (The detective ad that concluded with: "Inexpensive. Results Guaranteed.")
He'd quoted her a price she could live with.
The "gang" turning out to be some kids playing basketball in the alley behind the old lady's apartment house on North Troost, the guys stringing lights so they could play at night. (The night Z went to have a talk with them, he'd gotten a laugh out of watching them play. A bunch of slow, short, white kids. Playing basketball.)
He'd watched awhile from the shadows until he'd identified the "gang's" leader; called him over; tried, gently, to talk a little sense into him.
Now when Bob Zapolska was a punk kid, get
ting a lecture from Frankenstein's monster would have given him the picture. Quick! But not with today's youth. (Z realized the smart-mouthed kid could have been in his 20s, everyone looking young to an aging P.I.) Anyway, Z's little talk about how kids should respect helpless old ladies hadn't done the trick. (Since when had today's kids started saying "piss off" and "fuck off" to grownups?)
In short, Z had to figure another way to convince the "gang leader" to give up late night B-ball. Thinking about that made Z smile. It must have been a shock when the kid woke up to find that mournfully deflated basketball on the pillow beside his head, a wicked looking butcher knife stuck in the ball. (Almost as scary as finding a horse head in your bed.) What was important was that "beheading" the basketball had gotten results.
Instead of paying her bill in cash -- it turned out Mary didn't have the money after all -- the old lady offered him a discount on an apartment. Said it'd make her feel safe to have him, "permanent-like," on the premises.
So, he'd moved in. Low rent? Translate no rent most of the time.
Not paying made Z feel guilty, though, a sick old lady like that. Fat. One leg lost to diabetes.
On the other hand, putting in the fireplace had made up for some of the rent. Still, he was determined that part of what the secretary paid him today would go to Mrs. Urquhart.
Rounding the broad front porch but with still a ways to walk to get the paper, the idea of getting paid had brightened his spirits so much he'd begun to consider having another go at the Rental Equipment case.
An old guy had come to Easy Rental to get a jack hammer, large ventilator fan, three powerful halogen lights, four kerosene heaters, and a hell of a lot of heavy-duty electric cable. Then disappeared as if he'd fallen off the edge of the earth. It seemed the thief had used a stolen driver's license when signing the rental form.
Easy Rental's owner had called the cops.
When that didn't get him his merchandise back, he'd called the Bob Zapolska Agency.
All Z had done was the same thing the police did: interview the owner of the driver's license. Walters. Hiram Walters, who said he'd lost his license at a party he'd gone to; a blowout for the staff of Bateman College, a doings where he'd had too much to drink. (The drunk part, Z could belief, the man's cirrhosis-yellow skin and cherry tomato nose saying the guy abused the bottle.)
And that was it, Z's investigation stopping there (just like the cop's had,) a failure particularly unfortunate in Z's case since he didn't get paid until the equipment was returned.
A year ago. And in all this time, the vanished goods had never turned up.
What was so irritating was there had to be a clue in the odd bunch of items the robber stole. Had to be. All Z could come up with, though, was the image of a modern caveman "building" a second bedroom with the jackhammer; ventilating it with the fan; lighting and heating supplied by the halogens and heaters. The cable? For tapping into someone else's power source? (Sometimes the best sense you could make was nonsense, given the sad condition of the world.)
All the way down the walk of Mary Urquhart's grand-house-gone-bad, bending down on his good right leg, Z picked up one of the three papers there. (He got one paper, Mary a second, the Rogers family on the second floor, the third.)
Pivoting neatly on his stiff leg to make it seem more useful than it was, he started back.
Grumbling.
For he'd just remembered that the damn newspaper owners had axed the evening paper. Oh, there'd been a smokescreen at the time, about how having only a morning paper would make everyone's life better in Kansas City. They'd even named the morning paper with the name of the evening paper, the Star!
Bull shit! (Z tried never to swear. Not even to himself. His Mom had drilled it into him that people who swore did so because they had limited vocabularies. It was just that canceling the evening Star was one of those messing-around-with-your-life issues that provoked a man's passions.) All that smoke and mirrors about how one paper was going to be so much better, about how surveys showed no one in Kansas City cared about the evening paper, that everybody was getting their evening news on TV. Bull! The owners had axed the evening paper to cut costs, thinking everybody was so dumb they wouldn't notice.
That was mainly what was wrong with America. People couldn't leave things the way they were!
Z had tried to be reasonable about this, had tried to cope. First, by dividing the paper by sections, reading some parts in the morning, others in the evening. But that didn't work. (Who wanted to read local and national news one time of day and the rest of the paper another?)
Next, he'd tried tearing the paper in half at the fold, reading the upper half of the paper in the morning, the lower half in the evening. And while that worked pretty well for the comics, it didn't work for news. (Unless half a story was more than you wanted to know.) He'd thought of calling the Star and suggesting they print all of a story either in the top half of the paper or in the bottom half, so people tearing the paper in two like he was, would have complete articles to read -- some in the morning, some at night. But he knew they wouldn't listen to him. People with big money didn't listen to the little guy. Never had.
Thinking about the paper problem long enough to get him up the path, Z pawed open his apartment door and was quickly inside, the cold shut out once more.
Leaning across the coffee table to drape his coat on his davenport, he moved forward to sit at the two-seater dining table. Stripping off the paper's rubber band as he settled in, he turned to toss the band in the fireplace.
Burning rubber. You could never mistake that smell.
All preparations made, he spread the news beside his sandwich and coke.
Behind him, the fire was blazing, the rivets in the sheet iron firebox snapping as the heated steel expanded.
Satisfied that things were as they should be, he took a big bite of sandwich, washed it down with a swig of Coke, and was ready to read his paper -- back to front like any sensible person. (The end of an article was where you found most of the information.)
Even before he could flop the paper over, though, a bold, front page headline caught his eye.
ART THEFT AT THE GALLERY
The Nelson?
According to a spokesman for the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, the gallery's most famous Monet was stolen sometime Wednesday night. The "Boulevard des Capucines"....
Z almost upset his coke. He knew that painting; it was his favorite in all the gallery! In the Impressionist room. In fact, there was a bench in front of the "Boulevard" where Z sat to gaze at the "Boulevard." And they let somebody steal it!?
Cat quick, Z was up and pacing, his lighter in hand, thumb flipping the spark wheel. Flame on. Flame off. Flame on.....
Steal his favorite painting, would they! Not without big Bob Zapolska doing something about that!.........................
But ... what?
* * * * *
Chapter 3
By the time Z had read the rest of the paper, rolling up a section at a time, twisting it, and placing it in the fireplace like he always did, he'd settled down. Checking out the rest of the art theft report had been a waste of time, however. All that seemed to be known was that, night before last, a substitute painting of the "Boulevard des Capucines" had been taped in the picture's place, the real "Boulevard" spirited off. The theft discovered too late to make it into yesterday morning's paper, and hadn't been in the evening addition because THOSE RICH BASTARDS HAD STOPPED PRINTING AN EVENING PAPER! Probably been on TV last night, for those who liked their news to be brief and mostly wrong.
Oh, there was a speculation that one of the Nelson's own guards might have stolen the painting, a quick check of gallery personnel finding a missing guard named George Hobson. There was even a theory that a terrorist had kidnapped both the painting and the guard.
Anyone knowing of the whereabouts of Mr. Hobson -- thought to be in his seventies -- was urged to call the police hot line. (No picture yet available).
What it
all came down to was that somebody had cut the Monet out of its frame and stolen the painting.
On the other hand, if there were puzzle pieces the police were not revealing -- as was often the case -- Z had a way of finding out. He could call Teddy Newbold.
He hated to do that. Ted's rat-faced captain -- an incompetent named Scherer -- didn't like Bob Zapolska; didn't want Ted having anything to do with Z. An attitude problem on the part of Captain Scherer that could be traced to that time Z had turned up evidence that the Betterton woman (who Scherer had taken noisy credit for arresting) wasn't a drug dealer, after all, spoiling the bust that was to be Captain Scherer's ticket to Clay County politics. Too bad.
This was one time, though, when Z was going to put in a call to Ted; take advantage of their high school friendship.
At the same time, he had to be careful not to get Teddy in trouble -- which wasn't easy. To be fair, it wasn't so much that Ted was dumb. He'd managed to finish a year of college before he became a cop. It was just that, when trouble came knocking, it generally paid a call on Ted.
In and out of high school, Z had been Ted's "fixer." Even the yardage Ted piled up as a running back was do to the blocking of Z and Andy Smith, the two of them pounding holes in the line a lovesick moose could amble through.
One way to look at it was that Z was still making "holes" for Ted by calling in tips Teddy could use. In return, Teddy was good for that odd bit of information that police departments turned up.
Z got up and edged behind the rickety coffee table to sink down on the worn sofa beside his coat, the divan's springs declaring their immediate surrender. Picking up the receiver, he dialed the regular Gladstone police number, Gladstone, the KC suburb where Z lived.
"Gladstone police." In the usual, underpaid, female voice.
"Could you connect me with Detective Newbold?"
"Who's calling, please?"
"Just say, one of the Musketeers."
"Give me your name, please, sir."
Of Mice and Murderers Page 3