“Something I found on the seat,” I said. “A picture.”
“Let me see it,” he said, holding out his hand.
I handed him the picture. “Why, it’s that girl, isn’t it? The one you came with?”
I nodded.
“How did it get inside there?” he said, looking confused.
“It belonged to Lonnie Jackowski—Karen’s ex-husband.”
“I remember the son of a bitch from back in the sixties,” Gearheart said with disgust. “He was a dirty hippie creep.”
I was getting a little sick of his irascibility. I’d known a number of older men who put on the same act. But in his case it wasn’t an act—his bitterness went all the way to the bone.
“Could I have the photo back?” I said to him. “Karen might want it.”
He handed it to me reluctantly. “He never cleans that damn truck up,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s probably been sitting there since he came home on Saturday morning.”
“Lonnie didn’t come home with him, did he?” I asked.
“How the hell would I know?” Gearheart said. “Jon didn’t get back until dawn. Probably high on something too. I can tell. I am a doctor, you know.”
“Good for you,” I said.
He glared at me.
I turned away from him and walked across the frozen snow to the porch. Before I went inside, I stuck the photograph in my pocket.
******
Karen, Sy, and Leanne’s mother were gathered in the living room, off a short entry hall to the right of the front door. It was a handsome room, paneled in oak and decorated in masculine-looking leather furniture. A few hunting trophies were hung on the walls, along with a gun rack full of shotguns and deer rifles. A huge stone fireplace occupied one side of the room; a couple of logs were burning colorfully on the andirons. Through the windows I could see Gearheart polishing his Buick in the front yard.
“I gave Leanne a call,” Mrs. Gearheart said as I walked in. “She was delighted you and Karen are here. She’s going to drop the children off with Jon’s mother and come right out. Jon has some work to do, so I’m afraid he won’t be with her.”
I glanced at Karen, who gave me a look as if to say, “What could I do?”
I sat down beside Karen on a tuxedo couch.
“How do you like the farm?” Mrs. Gearheart asked.
“It’s very pretty,” I said.
“Expensive to keep though,” Mrs. Gearheart said, shaking her head with rueful amusement. “As I was telling Karen, Jon has spent a fortune renovating this house. He’s planning to landscape the entire grounds as well. He likes playing the county squire. Sometimes I wonder where he finds the money.”
After coming across Lonnie’s photo in Silverstein’s Jeep, I had an idea about where Jon found some of his money, although I couldn’t say anything in front of Mrs. Gearheart.
“Sy tells us that Jon has invested heavily in real estate out here,” I said to her.
She nodded. “He’s been picking up old farms for a song and then leasing them for industrial use. I think Jon really enjoys wheeling and dealing, and he’s very good at it. He just has a way with people. The mall you passed on Wooster Pike, outside of Milford—that is one of Jon’s properties. And he has part-ownership of the land that the Miamiville Cinemas are on.”
She gave me a sidelong look to see if she was boring me with her chatter. I smiled broadly and rocked forward on the couch, as if I were deeply interested in what she’d been saying. She obviously enjoyed talking about her son-in-law. And was just as obviously avoiding any talk about her daughter.
“Are you an investor, Mr. Stoner?” she asked.
“I’ve done a little dabbling in real estate,” I said.
“Then you really ought to sit down with Jon and talk. He knows any number of properties around here that are good buys.” She laughed suddenly, putting a hand over her mouth, as if she’d made a rude noise. “Although even Jon makes mistakes. He once bought a farm up the road from here because of its water rights, and the well ran dry. And then there’s that motel in Miamiville.”
Both Karen and I must have bolted a little on the sofa, because Mrs. Gearheart got a startled look on her face.
“Did I say something wrong?” she said.
“No, we passed a run-down motel on the way over here,” I said. “On Wooster Pike.”
“The Encantada,” Mrs. Gearheart said with a laugh. “That’s the one! It’s a disreputable-looking place, isn’t it?”
Karen and I nodded.
Mrs. Gearheart shook her head. “I don’t know why he hangs on to it. He says he likes owning a bar. He goes to visit there a few times a week—just to sit. It gives him a kick, I think, to be a barkeep.”
A teakettle began screaming somewhere in the house. Mrs. Gearheart got up from her chair. “That’s the hot water,” she said. “Is coffee all right with everyone?”
We all nodded.
“I’ll just be a moment, then,” Mrs. Gearheart said. She walked off through the living room archway, leaving us alone.
42
AS SOON as Mrs. Gearheart had left the room, Karen turned to me with a triumphant look on her face. “You heard that,” she whispered. “It’s Jon’s fucking motel. It was Jon’s dope that Lonnie was carrying.”
I nodded, “I was wrong. There is a connection.”
“What connection?” Levy said looking confused. “So he owns a motel? So what?”
“It’s the motel that the drug transaction was supposed to take place in, Sy,” I said, trying to explain it to him. “It’s where Lonnie was ripped off and where Jenkins was murdered.”
“In Jon’s motel!” he said, shocked. “But what makes you think he knew about it?”
“Of course he knew about it,” Karen snapped. “Lonnie didn’t pick that place out of thin air. He was told to go there by Jon. It was all arranged.”
“Saying so isn’t proof, doll,” Levy persisted. “Where’s the evidence? Where’s the connection between Lonnie and Jon?”
“Here.” I pulled the photograph out of my pocket. “I found this in Jon’s Jeep.”
I didn’t try to explain what it meant. I just handed the photograph to Karen.
She stared at the picture for a long time, then dropped it to her lap. “Oh, God,” she said in a heartbroken voice.
“Karen?” Levy said with concern. “What is it?”
“It’s a picture of Karen and her kids,” I said to him.
“Oh, yeah. Lonnie showed it to me on Wednesday, when he came to the studio. How did it get in Jon’s Jeep?”
I glanced at Karen, who was staring into space. Her eyes were filled with tears.
I sighed heavily. “Silverstein must have had Lonnie in that Jeep sometime on Friday night, Sy.”
“But I thought you said that Lonnie ran to Norvelle’s house on Friday night. How did he end up in Jon’s car...” Sy’s voice died off as he made the point for himself. “You mean Jon was involved in the scheme to rip Lonnie off?”
I nodded, keeping an eye on Karen, who was still staring emptily into space—a blasted look on her face.
“Jon,” Levy said, shaking his head mournfully. “I don’t think I believe it. Why would he do such a thing to an old friend?”
“You’d have to ask him,” I said. “But the answer is probably money. Real estate is a high-profile business. It takes a lot of working capital to create the right impression. Maybe Jon needed the bread from a drug deal to finance some of this.” I waved my hand around the luxe little room we were sitting in. “Maybe he wanted some revenge too. Leanne apparently never forgot her first love—or let Jon forget him. And from what you told us, Silverstein had one other pretty good reason to remember Lonnie Jackowski.”
“You mean Leanne’s habit?” Levy said.
I nodded.
“But Lonnie,” Levy said. “If Jon was working with Norvelle and Cal, what happened to Lonnie?”
“They killed him,” Karen said hoarsely, sha
king herself as if she were waking from a bad dream. She wiped her eyes with her fingers. “Lonnie’s dead.”
“Karen...”
I put my hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged it off.
“So you were right, Harry,” she said, turning to me with a sick, accusatory look. “You were right all along.”
“I didn’t want him dead, Karen,” I said, feeling guilty in spite of myself.
“Sure you did,” she said with an eerie look. “We all did. And now it’s true. He wouldn’t have left this behind him, not unless...” Her voice trailed off and she sat there staring at nothing.
I wanted to reach out to her again. To touch her. To hold her. But she didn’t want me to touch her.
Gearheart came walking through the front door suddenly. Once again he didn’t give us a look. “Sophy?” he bellowed.
“In the kitchen,” Sophy Gearheart called out.
We heard dishes rattling and then Mrs. Gearheart came walking through the archway into the living room, carrying cups on a tray. She glanced at her husband.
“Do you want some coffee, Alex?” she said to her husband. “I made plenty.”
He nodded a little sullenly, took off his topcoat, and hung it on a peg by the door.
Sophy Gearheart passed out the cups to each of us. Glancing at Karen, she said, “Are you all right, honey?”
Karen focused her red eyes on Sophy Gearheart. “I’d like to use your bathroom, if that’s okay?”
“Sure,” Mrs. Gearheart said with concern. “Upstairs on your right.”
Karen got up. The photograph slid off her lap and floated to the pegged hardwood floor. She stepped over it, carelessly, as she walked out of the room. Sophy and her husband watched her leave.
“She’s been crying,” Gearheart said brusquely.
Sophy gave him an angry look. “Do you have to say everything that comes into your mind?”
“She’s upset about her ex-husband,” I said to them.
“Why?” Gearheart said.
“It’s none of our business why,” his wife snapped at him. “Just drink your coffee.”
******
We sat in the living room for about ten minutes. Sy Levy tried to keep us amused with stories from the old days. But neither of the Gearhearts seemed much interested in the old days. And all I could think about was Karen.
After a time I excused myself and went upstairs. As I got to the top landing, I could hear Karen talking on a phone in one of the bedrooms. I stopped outside the door and listened. She was talking to one of her kids.
“Of course I do, sweetheart,” she said. “I’ll show you when I come home.” She looked up and saw me standing in the doorway. “I’ll see you tonight, baby, if I can.”
She hung up the phone and stared at me, guiltily. “You heard?”
I nodded. “You’re going home.”
“If the cops let me. And it’s okay with you.”
“What do I have to do with it?” I said bitterly.
“Oh, Harry,” she said, her face falling. “Don’t be that way.”
“I’m sorry, Karen,” I said. “I just thought we had something going here.”
“We do,” she said, with that same look of pain. “But try to understand that I’ve been dreading this day for almost eighteen years. Now that it’s finally come...I need some time to react. I need to see my kids again. My house. My job. I need to visit my own life and put some distance between me and this...nightmare.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” She walked over to me and touched me gently on the cheek.
Karen smiled at me sadly. It was a loving smile, but there was nothing in it that said she might change her mind and stay. Or that she owed me any more of an explanation than the one she’d just given me.
She kissed me on the mouth, then walked out of the room.
I stood there for a moment, thinking about that first night in the hotel, and knew that the feeling we’d shared—that larkish feeling of playing hooky from the decade, of going back to some common ground in the past—just wasn’t there for her anymore. Lonnie’s murder had changed it. It had changed the way she looked at me. It had broken the connection.
43
I WENT back to the living room and sat down again on the couch beside Karen. The Gearhearts stared at us morbidly. A few minutes passed, slowly, then a car came up the lane into the yard.
“That must be Leanne,” Sophy said with a vaguely troubled look on her face. She stared at her husband meaningfully and he returned the look. I wasn’t sure what the silent communication meant until Leanne came through the door. Then I knew.
She was stoned. I could see it at once. I’d seen it before—in her office. I just hadn’t understood it then. Nor had she been as stoned then as she was now. Her marvelous eyes were as sleepy and glazed-looking as those of the junkies I’d seen in LeRoi’s Silver Star. Her mouth hung loosely open, in a grotesque parody of a congenial smile. Even her movements were awkward and encumbered, as if she were caught in the fur coat she was wearing. She tried to take the coat off by the door, grew frustrated in the attempt, and gave up. Walking tipsily across the room, she knelt down on the floor in front of her father, and tried to embrace him.
“Daddy!” she said in a slurred voice.
Gearheart pushed her away from him—hard. Sophy Gearheart clapped a hand to her mouth. And Leanne looked shocked, as if he had doused her with water.
Gearheart eyed Leanne coldly. “I’m going upstairs,” he said with disgust.
He got up and walked out of the room. Leanne watched him from where she was kneeling on the floor. “That’s my daddy, folks,” she said in a hurt voice. “You remember my daddy, don’t you, Karen?”
Karen stared at her sadly. Sophy Gearheart got up and left the room, following her husband upstairs. In a moment we could hear their voices—raised in anger.
Leanne stared after them, through the archway, as if she wanted to cry. If we hadn’t been there, I think she would have cried. Instead, she pulled herself together with a visible effort—standing up, rocking for a moment drunkenly on her feet, then walking over to a chair and sitting down hard.
She didn’t say anything for a while. Nobody said anything. It was a scene that had probably been played out a hundred times before—in front of her parents, her husband, her children. But it hadn’t been played out in front of guests, and Leanne must have been feeling the humiliation doubly, because of me and Karen. Her face had turned a bright red and her eyes had sobered up, as if the high she’d been on had just escaped her.
“I didn’t think you’d come to the farm,” she said, staring dully at the floor.
“We had to,” I said.
Both Karen and Levy jerked forward.
“Harry,” Karen said in a sharply warning voice. And Levy gave me a look, as if to say that now was not the time. But I didn’t really care about hurting Leanne Silverstein’s feelings. After what Karen had told me, I didn’t care about anyone at that moment. I just wanted to find out how much Leanne knew about the drug deal—how deep the corruption ran. Most of all, I wanted to find her husband.
“What do you mean, had to?” Leanne said, looking up at me with her shell-shocked face.
“Your husband is a drug dealer, Mrs. Silverstein.”
“Christ,” Levy said, slapping the arm of his chair, “you got no heart in you at all.”
Leanne glanced at Levy, then back at me. “Drug dealer?” she said. “Jon?”
“He and his partners ripped Lonnie off at that motel Jon owns—the Encantada.”
Leanne laughed nervously. “You’re crazy! Jon wouldn’t do that!”
“Oh, but he did,” I said. I leaned over and picked up the photograph from the floor.
Karen put her hand on my arm. “Do we have to do this now?” she whispered fiercely.
“Do you want to know the truth?” I replied, just as fiercely.
She didn’t answer me for a second. “I don’t know,” she finally
said. “What difference does it make anymore?”
“Have you forgotten about LeRoi and Jordan?” I said. I turned back to Leanne Silverstein again. She was wobbling unsteadily on the chair, trying like hell to keep her attention focused on me.
I said, “Lonnie was given two thousand dollars by your husband, as a down payment on some crack. He was supposed to deliver the crack to Jon at the Encantada Motel. But he was ripped off for the drugs before he could deliver. Ripped off by your friend Norvelle, by Norvelle’s roommate, Cal, and by a guy named Claude Jenkins.”
Leanne Silverstein blinked with her whole face. “Jenkins? He was the night clerk at Jon’s motel. He was killed in a robbery.”
I nodded. “Norvelle and Cal killed him for the drugs he was holding—Lonnie’s drugs. They were in it together, Mrs. Silverstein. Jon too.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said, looking horrified. “Jon wouldn’t hurt anybody. And we didn’t see Lonnie last week. We haven’t seen him since 1969.”
“Jon saw him,” I said. “On Wednesday, at the Bijou—your day off. Jon used him to buy crack from a connection in Avondale.”
She shook her head defiantly.
“C’mon, Leanne,” I said. “How do you think Jon gets the money to pay for this? How do you think he pays for your habit?”
She flinched as if I’d slapped her. “I don’t know,” she said, “I don’t know about his business.”
“Sure, you do,” I said. “You just don’t want to admit it.”
“I...” She glanced at the front door nervously. “I think maybe you better go.”
“We’ll go, all right,” I said in a tough voice. “We’ll go to the cops. And they’ll come back here with a warrant for your husband. He used Lonnie, Leanne, and then he killed him.”
“You bastard!” Levy shouted, rising from his chair.
Leanne’s defenses collapsed all at once. She slumped in the chair, covered her eyes with her right hand, and began to sob miserably. “I love Lonnie. Jon knows that. He would never hurt him. You must be wrong. It has to be a mistake.”
I handed her the photograph. “I found that in your husband’s Jeep, Mrs. Silverstein. Lonnie had it on him on Friday night.”
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