Life's Work

by Jonathan Valin

  “Bill didn’t mention Kaplan on Monday night, did he?”

  Bluerock shook his head. “Just Jewel.”

  “That kind of surprises me,” I said. “Kaplan implied that he’d been in constant contact with Bill. And from what I hear, Bill had good reasons to stay in touch with him.”

  “What did you hear?” Bluerock asked ominously.

  “That Bill had a nose problem—at least, before he met C.W. And that Kaplan or somebody at the gym was his supplier.”

  Bluerock pulled himself up on the couch with a jerk and stared at me for a long, unsettling moment. “You know, sport, guys can get killed for spreading rumors like that.”

  “I know that,” I said. “Is it true?”

  “I’m not one of Walt’s disciples. How the hell should I know if it’s true?” he said defensively.

  I took that as a probable yes. “You know, I’m not going to arrest Parks, Blue. I’m just trying to find him.”

  “Then what do you care whether Bill has a nose problem or not?”

  “Because if he does, Kaplan’s going to care—a lot. Walt has already made it pretty clear that he doesn’t want me on this case. Of course, he didn’t tell me why. He just said I was butting in where I didn’t belong.”

  “You are, sport,” Bluerock said. “You really are. Look, Harry, I don’t think you have any idea of what you’re getting into. Three of my teammates have already been busted for possession of cocaine, and a lot of other people are getting mighty goddamn paranoid. You’re not dealing with school kids, sport, snotty college punks who do a line or two on the weekends. The guys you’re talking about are big, dangerous cats. Believe me when I tell you that you would not stand a chance against either one of them. Kaplan would eat you alive and spit out the parts he didn’t like. And Bill—Bill is the toughest son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever met.”

  “I’m thin, but I’m wiry,” I said meekly.

  Bluerock laughed at me. “I’m going to do you a favor, Harry. I guess I owe you one. You go ahead and find Bill, if you can. Maybe he did go to Missoula. Or maybe he’s shacked up with C.W. You’re better positioned to find out than I am. But when you do find him, you call me. Understand? You don’t try to talk things over with Bill, you don’t call Petrie, and you sure as hell don’t call Walt. You call me. Maybe I can keep you from getting killed.”

  “You think it’s that serious, then?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” he said, shaking his head. “But the way people are worked up, it fucking well could be.”

  13

  IT WAS a little past two thirty when I got back to the Delores. By then, I was too damned tired to care about the summer heat, which had moved into my apartment for the month of July, or about C.W. O’Hara, Bill Parks, and Walt Kaplan. I sat down on the couch, thinking that I would make the trip to the bedroom in easy stages, unbuttoned my shirt, and fell asleep where I was sitting. At three A.M. the ringing of the telephone woke me with a start.

  Even hard-boiled detectives associate late-night phone calls with catastrophic news, and I could feel my heart pounding as I walked over to the desk and picked up the receiver. In the back of my mind, I was wondering who had died.

  I didn’t even have a chance to say hello. The woman on the other end was too perturbed to exchange courtesies. In fact, she was close to hysteria. It took me almost a minute to realize that the voice belonged to Laurel Jones. A minute later, I was out the door and on my way to Newport.

  ******

  She hadn’t been collected enough to make good sense. It had to do with Parks and with C.W. and with our conversation earlier that night. The gist of it was that Laurel had talked to C.W. that evening. She’d paid her a visit, in spite of the fact that I’d asked her to wait. And on that visit, something had gone very badly wrong, so wrong that it had virtually unhinged Laurel. I was afraid that Parks or Kaplan had beat her up or threatened to beat her up, and that that was what had terrified her. I cursed myself for giving the girl any encouragement to act as a go-between.

  I was so furious with myself, that I was a hazard behind the wheel, making it over the river and into Newport in less than six minutes. I caromed through Newport’s maze of decrepit, one-way streets to the red-light district on York. At that hour the legitimate shops were locked and lit for the night. The rest of them—the strip-and-clip joints—were wide open. I shot down York, and eventually the neon storefronts gave way to gaslights and maple-shaded tenements. Two twenty-five was just one more brick apartment house in a long row of apartments, three blocks south of the unmarked dividing line that ran like a part in Newport’s hair, separating the respectable side of town from the unkempt one. I double-parked on the street and ran up a short flight of steps to a courtyard with a mass of hollyhocks in its center. A U-shaped building rather like the Delores surrounded the court, with a lobby door in each of the wings. I tried the wing on the right and got lucky. Laurel Jones/Number Six was written in neat script on a card in one of the brass mailboxes. There were two apartments per floor and two flights to each landing, which meant that it was six flights to Laurel Jones. By the time I finished bounding to the top landing, my lungs were on fire and my face was pouring sweat.

  I pounded on Laurel’s shiny mahogany door. A frightened little voice that sounded like Laurel with all the gumption let out asked, “Who’s there?”

  “Harry!” I shouted. “For chrissake, open the door!” I heard chains sliding in locks, then the door opened and Laurel ran out—straight into my arms.

  She came flying toward me so quickly that I didn’t get a chance to examine her face. And then she wouldn’t let go for a minute—head buried in my chest, arms wrapped around my neck.

  I held her for a long moment then gently pushed her away and tilted her face up to the light. I’d been sure that she’d been worked over by Parks or by Kaplan, but there were no marks on her face or her forearms.

  I thanked God for big favors and asked her what had happened.

  “I couldn’t...” Her voice failed, and she took a couple of deep breaths. “I couldn’t get hold of you.” She stared at me, her blue eyes wet with tears. “I tried calling, at one and one thirty and two and two thirty. Where were you?”

  Her voice was so plaintive, her pretty doll-like face so full of disappointment, that I felt as if I’d truly let her down—as if I should have been around to look after her. As if I’d contracted to do so earlier that night.

  “I’m sorry, Laurel,” I said guiltily. “I was looking for Parks.”

  Her face shook when I mentioned his name. “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, God. I don’t know what to do.”

  I wiped the tears from her eyes with my fingertips.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I said. “Whatever happened, I’ll take care of it.” I glanced over her shoulder at the open apartment door. “Do you want to go inside?”

  She gasped. “God, no. I’ve been sitting in there for two hours.”

  “Then let’s go out.”

  Laurel stared fearfully down the stairwell.

  “My car’s right in front. Everything will be fine.”

  She nodded weakly. “Okay,” she said in a tiny voice.

  ******

  We got to the car without any trouble, although from the way Laurel was acting I thought we might be attacked at any moment. She was so distraught that I had to remind myself that this was no teenager, scared of her own shadow. This was a tough, streetwise hooker, who’d been making her own way in a very hard world. Whatever had her so frightened must have been pretty goddamn unpleasant. And to be honest, the prospect of finding out what it was chilled me, too.

  I put Laurel in the front seat of the car, got in myself, and started back up York toward the red lights. The bustle and glare of the clubs seemed to calm Laurel down a bit. By the time we got to Fifth Street, the color had returned to her cheeks and she’d stopped shaking so violently.

  I turned west on Fifth toward the suspension bridge.

  “Where are we
going?” Laurel said in a faraway voice.

  “To my apartment,” I said. “You’ll be all right there.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I guess we better go to C.W.’s place first,” she whispered.

  “Why?”

  “I guess there’s something you’d better see.”

  “What?” I said. “What happened tonight, for chrissake?”

  Laurel held up a hand, as if she couldn’t bring herself to talk about it yet. “Just don’t ask me any more questions for a while. Okay?”

  I looked over at her. She was wearing her version of a game face. She was living it out—whatever it was.

  I did as she asked and let her alone.

  Once we’d crossed the bridge into Cincinnati, Laurel told me to turn west onto River Road. I followed her directions, taking Sixth Street to the underpass and then dipping down toward the Ohio. To the south I could see the city lights, guttering like windblown candles in the deep black river current. Then the row houses started up on either side of the road, dark and boarded up, most of them, with spaces between the rows where the river lights made the only light on the street.

  We kept heading west, through Riverview to Anderson Ferry. By then we’d gone better than five miles out of the city, and Laurel had had a chance to calm down.

  “How much farther?” I said to her.

  “Just outside Harrison—about fifteen more miles.”

  “And what are we going to find there?”

  “I don’t know,” Laurel said. “I mean, I don’t know what we’re going to find. I didn’t stay long enough to see.”

  “You went out there tonight?”

  She nodded. “After you let me off.” She gave me an apologetic look. “I had to talk to her, Harry. She’s my friend. And I felt guilty for telling you all that stuff without explaining it to her first.”

  “You could have waited, Laurel,” I said wearily, “like I asked you to do. You could have gotten yourself killed tonight.”

  “I think somebody already did,” she whispered.

  I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and stared grimly at the dark road unfolding before us.

  “I guess you better explain this,” I said after a moment. “I don’t want to walk into a murder with my eyes shut.”

  Laurel sat back on the seat, stretching her legs to the floorboards as if she wanted to push herself right through the cushion into another life. “I thought you could help them,” she said in a tiny voice. “I didn’t know Bill had left camp until you told me. C.W. never said anything about it. I thought maybe if you could put Bill back on track with the team, he might ease up on C.W. about the other things.”

  “What other things?” I asked.

  “They’d been fighting all week. About the baby, mostly. It wasn’t growing right or something. And that pissed the shit out of Bill. I guess ‘cause he never wanted a kid in the first place. And then Bill’s mom started jumping all over C.W.’s case. And Bill’s agent started telling him all sorts of bad things about C.W.”

  “What things?”

  “I don’t know. Just bad-mouthing her, I guess. Saying that she was bringing him down, sapping his strength. It got to the point on Monday where C.W. said that Bill wouldn’t even stay in the same room with her. He’d just sit up all night, alone, doing exercises in the mirror and popping pills. The last thing she needed was to have Bill blame her for his troubles with the Cougars too.”

  “Did you talk to C.W. tonight?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “She didn’t answer the door. I went around back to make sure nobody was home, ‘cause sometimes they can’t hear you knock if they’re in the kitchen. The back door was open, so I went in.”

  Laurel began to tremble. “Something terrible’d happened, Harry. I mean, there was stuff all over the floor...everything broken...and there was this knife. And there was blood,” she said, with a thrill of horror in her voice. “Christ, so much blood! I—I just ran. I drove home and called you.”

  I pulled her toward me.

  “I think she’s dead,” Laurel said, leaning heavily against my side. “I think the bastard flipped out and killed her.”

  “We’ll take a look,” I told her.

  ******

  We hit a patch of river fog somewhere south of Saylor Park, and for a few minutes I had to concentrate completely on the road, on the reflectors and signs glittering in the headlights. In a way it was a relief to turn my mind to something other than the ugly mayhem that was waiting for us at the end of the trip. Whatever we found at C.W. O’Hara’s house, I figured that Bill Parks was probably going to be out of my hands by dawn and back where I supposed he had always belonged—with the cops. That part was all right with me. I didn’t know how it was going to sit with Otto or with Hugh Petrie. But, frankly, I didn’t want to confront the son-of-a-bitch. In fact, the thing that worried me was the possibility that Parks might still be waiting in C.W.’s home, sitting all alone in the dark, practicing curls in front of a mirror.

  The fog lifted about three miles south of the I-275 turnoff. Laurel directed me onto the expressway and then off again onto a jagged state route, and from there to a two-lane highway running north above the Little Miami River. A tree-covered hillside rose up on the left of the roadbed and fell away, in a talus of roadside rubble, toward the river on the right. We passed a couple of deserted shacks, then Laurel put her hand on my arm and whispered, “Slow down.”

  I slowed to a crawl and glanced nervously from side to side, searching for the next turn-off.

  “There’s a gravel driveway about a hundred yards up the road on your left,” Laurel said.

  Almost at once, my lights caught on the gravel, as if someone had tossed a handful of it at the car. I turned left off the road onto a hillside drive. There was a rusted mailbox on a post at the foot of the driveway, with a name painted on the flag—O’Hara. I stopped beside it, putting the transmission in Park, and stared up the gravel lane. It climbed the hill at a steep angle for about two hundred feet, then disappeared into a thick dark woods.

  “How far does this go before we get to the house?” I said to Laurel.

  “A couple hundred feet.” she said.

  I could tell from her voice that she was very frightened.

  “Is there any other way up or down?”

  “No.”

  “Can you turn around up there? Or do you have to back out?”

  “There’s a turnaround by the garage,” Laurel said.

  I took a deep breath and glanced at the girl, who was staring intently through the windshield at the gravel driveway. “It would be much better if you weren’t here, Laurel. In fact, you could go to the cops right now if you’re convinced a murder has been committed.”

  “I don’t know,” she said nervously. “I didn’t see a body. Just the blood.”

  “You could still go to the cops with that.”

  “But what if he just beat her up or something?” she said. “He’s done that plenty of times before. C.W.’d kill my ass if I called the cops on Bill.”

  “All right,” I said. “Are you sure you want to go up there with me? You sure you don’t want to wait somewhere else while I take a look?”

  “I guess I’ve got to know for sure,” she said. “Anyway, I don’t want to be anywhere by myself.”

  I reached over to the glove compartment and pressed the button. The door fell open above Laurel’s knee. I groped around inside and pulled out the Colt Gold Cup.

  Laurel gave me a terrified look, as if she were afraid I was going to turn the weapon on her.

  “He might still be in there, Laurel,” I said, cocking the piece, putting on the safety, and sticking the pistol in my belt. “You sure about the cops?”

  She nodded. “I don’t want to get involved with cops.” She laughed, a little hysterically. “I don’t want to be involved in this, at all. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I don’t. If she is dead in there, Harry, you’ve got to promise to keep my name
out of it. You gotta promise me, Harry.”

  “She’s your friend, Laurel,” I said, giving her a look.

  She stared back at me defiantly. “Yeah, and I’m here, trying to help. Which is the last place on earth I want to be, believe me. But if C.W. is dead, it’s not going to make a bit of difference to her what I do.” She looked scared to death and fiercely belligerent at the same time. “I’ve still got plans. I’ve still got my dreams and my life. If the wrong people find out I was connected to this...”

  I felt like lecturing her on the bloody idiocy that her friend had probably brought down on her own head by trying to realize the same dreams. But I didn’t do it. There wasn’t enough time, and she didn’t want to hear it anyway. “Okay, Laurel. I’ll try to keep you clean. Just one thing, though. When we get up there, you do exactly what I say. You hear me?”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I promise.”

  I clicked off the headlights, flipped on the parking lights, and started up the gravel drive.

  14

  THERE WAS a ranch house at the top of the drive, surrounded by the thick woods of the hillside. I stopped the car on the gravel about twenty yards away from it and backed around so that the Pinto was facing down the driveway. After dousing the lights, I turned the engine off and got out. Laurel got out on her side, and for a moment we stood there, staring silently at the house.

  There was enough of a moon beaming down to light up the shingled roof of the ranch and the unpainted pine-board garage to its right. There was no other light coming from the building or from the woods. Once I shut the car off, there was very little noise either, just the woodland sounds of the crickets and of the hot summer wind in the pines. Somewhere off in the trees a branch creaked suddenly, like someone turning over in bed. Both Laurel and I jumped.