Fire Lake

by Jonathan Valin

  I stepped outside and walked across the lot, dragging my shoes through the dirty snow to wash off the blood. I glanced at the motel cottages when I got to the car. They looked as deserted as they had the night before.

  Getting in the Pinto, I sped out of the lot.

  11

  I STOPPED at the Frisch’s Mainliner in Fairfax and phoned Station X from an icy phone booth outside the restaurant. I told them to check the office storeroom at the Encantada Motel in Miamiville. I didn’t tell them what they’d find. After hanging up on the desk sergeant, I dug another quarter from my pants and called the Clarion. It was almost four A.M., but what I’d found at the Encantada wouldn’t wait.

  Karen answered the phone on the sixth ring. Her voice was shot full of anxiety.

  “It’s me,” I said. “Harry.”

  “Christ, what time is it?” she said.

  “Late. Karen...”

  I suddenly realized that I didn’t know what to say to her. That I didn’t know what any of it meant. I only knew that Lonnie was in deep, deep trouble.

  “Harry?” Karen said with concern. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “A man’s been killed,” I said. “The clerk at the motel.”

  I heard her suck in her breath. “And Lonnie?” she said, still holding her breath.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I found his license on the clerk’s desk.”

  “Oh, my God,” she said with horror. “You’re not saying that Lonnie murdered him, are you?” “I’m saying that I found his license there and took it with me.” My voice sounded out of control. I could hear it myself. I drummed my fingers on the icy glass of the phone booth and told myself to calm down.

  “I don’t know if he killed him, Karen,” I said after a time. “Maybe it was meant to look that way. Maybe whoever broke into my apartment planted the license to incriminate Lonnie. I just don’t know.”

  “What the hell has he gotten us into?” Karen said in a stricken voice.

  “I don’t know,” I said again. “But it’s pretty goddamn awful.”

  ******

  I told Karen I was going home—to get some sleep. She asked me if I thought that was a good idea. And I didn’t know what to say. If my place had been searched for drugs, if Jenkins had been murdered because of the same drugs, then going back to the Delores probably wasn’t safe. The trouble was that I didn’t know if anyplace was safe anymore. The only person who could tell me that was Lonnie. And he was either completely out of his mind, or on the run, or dead too. Carved up like Jenkins had been and dumped in the river.

  One thing was certain. Someone had been very pissed off at Claude. Unless you were crazy, you didn’t make the kind of example that was made of Jenkins because of a grudge. You did it to set a mark, to scare other people into toeing the line, to make sure that mistakes didn’t happen again. Unless you were crazy.

  I let Karen talk me into spending what was left of the night in her hotel room. It was less risky than going home. And I figured I was going to need some sleep before facing whatever was in store on Saturday. Besides, part of me wanted to spend the night with her, even if it was in separate beds.

  It took me another thirty minutes to drive from Fairfax to the Clarion. I parked in a garage across from the hotel. Maybe it was paranoia, but I was damn careful about walking over to the Clarion lobby. To be doubly safe, I took the lobby elevator to the floor above Karen’s, then walked down the stairwell to her room.

  She’d apparently remained awake after my call, because she answered my knock immediately. She was wearing a terry robe, and she smelled, beneath it, of night sweat and nerves. Her pretty face was leaden with fatigue. Her long brown hair, undone for the night, fell to her shoulders in an uncombed tangle.

  “Excuse the way I look,” she said nervously.

  She ushered me through the door. Her robe parted slightly as she waved me in, and I caught a glimpse of the tops of her breasts, white as snow where a bathing suit had shielded them from the sun. She smiled ruefully when she realized I was staring at her, and closed her robe gently with one hand. “It’s a funny time to be thinking about that.”

  I nodded. “Funny is not the right word.”

  I walked over to the far bed and sat down heavily on the mattress.

  “You look wrung out,” Karen said, sitting down across from me on her bed.

  “I am wrung out. This has been a very bad night.”

  “Poor Harry,” she said with genuine sympathy. “You don’t deserve this.”

  I agreed with her.

  Karen dropped her eyes to the floor. “What are we going to do?” she said with a hopeless look. “I mean, about Lonnie?”

  “We’re going to find out what happened to him,” I said confidently, although I didn’t feel much confidence.

  “How?” Karen said.

  “He must have some other friends here, in town. Old hippies. Ladies. Dope friends. Somebody. Tomorrow, we’ll go looking for them.”

  “I think I remember a few people,” she said. “But they might not be around anymore. It’s been fourteen years.” She folded her legs, Indian style, and tucked the robe in tightly beneath her. “Maybe we ought to get in touch with some of Lonnie’s old friends in St. Louis. He might have made some contact there, before coming here.”

  “He did have that bus ticket,” I agreed. “Well check it out.”

  I took off my coat and started to unbutton my shirt, as if I were at home, alone. I stopped and glanced at Karen. She was staring at me. It wasn’t exactly an inviting look, but it wasn’t uninterested, either.

  “I haven’t watched a man...undress in quite a while,” she said, almost as if she were reading my mind. She ran a hand through her hair again. “I guess we need some ground rules.”

  “Turn your back?” I said. “Hang a blanket between the beds?”

  She laughed. “This isn’t 1934. And I’m not Claudette Colbert.”

  “Then what?”

  “I used to know how to handle this kind of scene,” she said with a touching look of perplexity, “but it’s not 1969 anymore.”

  “What would you have done in ‘69?”

  She smiled at me wickedly. “You don’t want to know.”

  Rolling on her side, she reached up to the lamp and flicked it off. The room went dark.

  “That’s one solution,” I said.

  I heard her laugh softly and then I heard the bedclothes rustle as she settled herself in bed.

  I finished stripping down in the dark. I pulled the Gold Cup out of its holster and tucked it beneath my pillow. It felt like a little stone under my head. I lay there with my eyes open for a few minutes, then pulled the blankets up over my shoulders.

  “Harry, Lonnie didn’t kill that clerk,” Karen said, in a voice so full of certainty that it startled me as much as if she’d turned the lights back on. “He’d never do something like that. He just isn’t that kind of man.”

  “He may have changed in two years, Karen,” I said.

  “No,” she said firmly. “That’s Lonnie’s whole problem. He doesn’t know how to change.”

  It was an ironic thing to wish for, but I hoped she was right.

  12

  I DREAMED of Lonnie—a curiously placid dream at the start, right out of our Lyon Street days. We were painting the apartment. That was the first thing you did back then—paint. Lonnie wanted to paint the walls electric blue. I wanted them white. We split the difference. As we were painting, Karen walked in. In the dream, she looked young and fresh and sexy. She smiled at me and went into Lonnie’s room. I was intensely jealous of the fact that she’d chosen to go into Lonnie’s room rather than mine. I went over to his door and opened it. Karen and Lonnie were lying on Lonnie’s bed. For some reason, I didn’t realize they were making love and I kept walking over to the bed. Karen looked up at me from the bed and smiled. When I caught my mistake, I backed out of the room and closed the door behind me. As I was going to my room I heard someone cry out from Lonni
e’s room. I turned around and went back to the door, but I couldn’t open it anymore. It was coated with ice. I tried peeking through the window, but the blinds were closed. Then someone inside Lonnie’s room started screaming horribly. I pulled at the door and slammed it with my fist. But it wouldn’t budge. Claude Jenkins came up behind me, his shirt red with blood, and told me that it was too late—that they were dead. “That’s the price you pay,” he said with a terrible grin. And I woke up.

  It took me a few seconds to remember where I was. I glanced over at Karen’s bed. It was empty—the blanket scattered and the sheets a swirl of white, like drifted snow.

  I felt my heart race. For a moment I thought she was dead, like in the dream. Then I heard the shower going and the dream faded quickly, leaving me feeling a vague mingling of want and dread.

  I glanced at the clock on the nightstand—it was half past eight. I thought about catching a couple more hours of sleep. But the room was hot and it smelled, like the blankets, of creosote and dust. And I didn’t want to have any more dreams.

  As I lay there, letting the sleep clear from my head, Karen stepped out of the john. She was naked, except for a towel that she’d wrapped, turban-like, around her head. She walked over to the bureau and opened a drawer. Then she glanced up in the bureau mirror and saw me staring at her. She made a startled face and put one hand over her breasts and the other over her hips. She stared at me for a long moment—in the mirror—then slowly dropped her hands and turned around to face me. She pulled the towel from her head, shook her wet hair, and gave me a long, contemplative look. At that moment, I didn’t think I’d ever wanted a woman more.

  After a time, Karen started walking slowly toward my bed. I watched her with pleasure—her breasts, her legs, her pretty, pouty face. She was a beautiful woman. Without a word, she came up beside me, so close I could smell the soap she’d used on her skin. I reached out for her hand. She stared at my hand for a second, curiously, uncertainly. And stared into my face with the same look. She looked down at herself—at her naked body. Then glanced at me again. She started to say something—to talk us out of it, I thought. I didn’t give her that chance.

  I threw the bedclothes back and grabbed her hand, pulling her down on top of me. She was still wet from the shower. I could feel that wetness on my flesh. She felt cool and clean. I ran a hand through her damp hair, and she nuzzled her face against my chest, tentatively. She looked up at me suddenly—looked me straight in the eyes—and her own eyes lost their tentative look and grew hazy, hot and certain. I kissed her passionately. And then we were on each other, and I made love to her with a fierceness that I hadn’t felt since I was a kid.

  I simply couldn’t get enough of her. Or she of me. We did everything we could think of. And a few things you only think of. When we were through, my whole body smelled of her—salty-sweet—and the cool shower drops on her flesh had boiled away and turned to sweat.

  We’d literally worn each other out. For a while we just lay there, staring at the ceiling, catching our breath. After a time she rolled on top of me, working her hips gently against mine and smiling at me with her whole face—mouth, eyes.

  “That was pretty nice,” she said, running a finger along my upper lip.

  “It was better than that,” I said, smiling back at her.

  She pressed into me with her hips.

  “Again?” I said, putting my hands on her buttocks and pulling her to me.

  She laid her head on my chest. “Tonight,” she said. “As much as you want.”

  “Forgot what you were missing, huh?” I said.

  “Oh, I didn’t forget,” she said softly. “Like I told you, I just don’t want to get involved again.”

  “Then why do this?”

  “I can’t speak for you,” she said with a laugh. “As for me, I’m scared and lonesome and, when it comes down to it, I guess I still am pretty goddamn sixties when it comes to men. Besides, I felt like we knew each other, even though we’d just met.”

  It was strange, but I’d had the same feeling of connection, of relatedness. The fact that we were more or less of the sixties generation was part of it. But I couldn’t help thinking that the fact that we were both connected to Lonnie was a bigger part of it—that it was the guilty burden of Lonnie himself that made us feel as if we’d spent time together.

  Thinking about Lonnie stirred my conscience enough to make me blush and duck my head. “You feel bad about...this?” I looked down at the rumpled sheets covering our legs.

  “A little,” she said. She glanced at me furtively. “Do you?”

  I nodded. “Technically, you’re still his wife. He still needs your help. And mine.”

  “I’m sick of giving him help,” Karen said bitterly.

  “We can’t just let him go,” I said, even though my heart wasn’t in it—just my conscience and that old tug of the past.

  “I guess we can’t,” Karen said with a sigh. She glanced up at me. “But what the hell are we going to do?”

  That was the question, all right.

  I climbed out of bed. “I’m going to take a shower. While I’m in there, I want you to think of some names. Some people Lonnie might have run to, if he was desperate.”

  She nodded. “Then what?”

  “Then,” I said, staring at her, “I’m going to ask you to do me a favor.”

  She grinned at me knowingly. “What’s that?”

  “I want you to go back to St. Louis for a while,” I said to her. “Look after your kids.”

  Her smile faded. “You don’t want to be with me again?”

  “I don’t want you to get hurt,” I said gently. “As soon as I’ve found Lonnie, it’ll be different.”

  Karen eyed me uncertainly. “What makes you say I’ll get hurt?”

  I sat down on the bed again and put my arm around her shoulder. “If we assume that Lonnie didn’t kill Jenkins—”

  “He didn’t,” Karen said with utter certainty.

  “Then whoever did, whoever left Lonnie’s license at the motel and searched my apartment last night, may think that I’m in it with Lonnie—whatever it is. And they may make the same assumption about you. I don’t want to scare you too much, but believe me, if you saw what they did to Jenkins, you’d know why that worries me.”

  Karen shivered. “What could Lonnie have done to make someone so vicious?”

  I’d been thinking about that ever since I’d discovered the systematic wreckage in my apartment. A botched drug deal was the obvious answer. Since Lonnie had only been out of Lexington for a couple of weeks, the drugs couldn’t have been his own. Which meant that he’d been acting as a middleman for someone else.

  “Has Lonnie ever acted as a mule in a drug deal?” I asked Karen.

  Her face reddened. “We both have,” she said with embarrassment. “In ‘73 and ‘74, when Lonnie was down on his luck, we use to go to New York regularly to cop for a druggist in Forest Park. It was a way to pay the tab for our habits.”

  “Did he ever screw up when he was carrying?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. “It was the one thing he was absolutely reliable about.”

  “What would have happened if he had screwed up?” I asked.

  She stared at me for a long moment. “I see where you’re heading, Harry. But I don’t know how to answer you. Back then, heroin was a communal thing, the way coke is now. All the dopers more or less knew all the other dopers on the block. No one ever tried to take anyone else off.” She turned her face away from me. “I don’t like talking about this in front of you. I think it makes you hate me. It makes me hate myself.”

  “It’s old business,” I said, touching her on the cheek.

  She didn’t say anything.

  I pulled her face around and kissed her on the mouth. She resisted the kiss for a moment, then opened her mouth and kissed me passionately. When we broke off, she smiled at me, as if the kiss had made her feel better.

  “Look,” Karen said, “I’ll go
back to St. Louis tomorrow, if you think I should. I’ll do anything you want. But first I want one night with you. One whole night. Okay?”

  I smiled and said, “Okay.”

  13

  WHEN I came back out of the shower, Karen was sitting on the bed, talking on the phone. She waved her hand at me, as if to say that she’d only be another moment. She was partly dressed, in a white cotton blouse and bikini underpants. I got an erection staring at her. She noticed and laughed into the phone.

  “No, sweetheart,” she said, still smiling at me. “I’m not laughing at you. Mommy’s got to go now. Take good care of your sister. And I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She hung up. “You need a hand?” she said to me.

  “If we get started again, we’ll never stop.”

  “Yes,” she said, looking a little perplexed. “It’s weird, isn’t it. Like 1969 again.”

  “Worrying about Lonnie has made us regress,” I said.

  “You think?”

  “A little. But there’s something else going on here.” I glanced down at myself and Karen laughed.

  “Face it, Harry,” she said. “You’ve got the hots for me.”

  “Is that all right?”

  “I think it’s great,” she said with a smile.

  Karen kept smiling at me as I walked over to my bed. The only clothes I had were the ones I’d worn the night before. I picked up the trousers and stared at the bloody cuffs. Karen’s smile died immediately.

  “God,” she said, “is that blood?”

  I nodded. Reaching into my pants pocket, I pulled out Lonnie’s bloodstained driver’s license. Karen turned her face away.

  “Why did they kill that man?” she said in a shaken voice.

  “I don’t know, for sure,” I said. “But if Lonnie was acting as a mule, and he got clipped at the Encantada by Claude for the buy money or the drugs themselves, it could explain a lot of things. What we really need to know is, who Lonnie was supposed to be copping for.”