Life in a small town . . .
I’ve lived here for five years, Pellam. But it feels like ten.
“Lunch?” he asked.
She hesitated. Yes, no, yes, no . . . she said, “Uh, I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
Don’t Do a Don’t. She said, “Because this is Cleary.”
He nodded and said, “Got it.”
“Good luck, Pellam.” She walked to the coffee shop.
“Uhm, one thing . . . All I’m interested in is lunch. Nothing more or less than that.”
Meg lifted her hands and dropped them to her sides with faint slaps. “You maybe have the most honorable intentions in the world . . .” She paused, and for a millisecond tried to read his face for his reaction to this. She couldn’t tell. She added, “But Cleary’s still Cleary.”
“Suppose that doesn’t change.”
“Not in your life or mine,” she said and walked into the diner. The screen door snapped shut with a wooden slam.
M&T PHARMACEUTICAL WAS
a one-story cinder block square outside of Cleary. Prefab. It was surrounded by a gravel parking lot, in which sat thirty or forty cars—a lot of old ones, Torinos and Novas, as well as newer Japanese imports. And, Pellam noticed, pickup trucks galore—many of them with back windows smeared from the noses of excited hunting dogs.
Near the main entrance were several marked parking places.
Mr. Torrens
was the first. Beside it was an empty space with a sign that had been painted over. It was probably the spot reserved for Keith’s late partner. This had been L.A., Pellam thought cynically, that space would have been appropriated five minutes after the funeral.
It was late afternoon, dusky, and just as he eased the Winnebago into two of the visitor’s slots, a sodium vapor light on a pole in the middle of the parking lot came on. He walked past the company sign, a swirling design of an M and a T, backlit.
A young receptionist, hair shooting up in a frothy tease, smiled and shoved the Juicy Fruit into the corner of her cheek.
“Hello, Darla,” Pellam said, reading the name off her gold-plate necklace.
“Help you, sir?”
“John Pellam to see Keith Torrens.”
“Yessir, have a seat.”
Pellam sat and thumbed through a pristine copy
of
Chemical Week.
In three minutes, a grinning Keith Torrens walked into the reception area.
“John.” They shook hands. “Good to see you.”
“Thanks for taking the time.”
“Come on, I’ll give you the fast tour.”
Factories generally depressed Pellam—the regimentation, the way machines dictated where people stood and what they did (reflecting some kind of fear, he decided, that if it all fell apart, he’d end up on an assembly line somewhere twisting sheet metal screws into Whirlpools for the rest of his life). M&T, though, was a surprise. It was bright and clean. Filled with spotless white tile, brilliantly lit. The workers wore white jackets, pants and shoes and transparent bluish hats, like shower caps. It looked like a kitchen. Many of the people were bent over conveyor belts, checking machinery, packing cartons, reading computer screens. The equipment was stainless steel and white.
“Quite an operation.”
Keith said, “I’m a small guy. To compete with the Pfizers and Bristol-Myers Squibbs, you’ve got to be efficient. That’s the key word.” Light brown cardboard cartons rose to the ceiling on small elevators and moved along a conveyor overhead until they vanished into the shipping department.
Keith was so excited to show off his company that he talked very quickly; that speed, together with the loud pulse from a dozen different kinds of machines, made it impossible for Pellam to catch more than a few phrases. Still, he smiled and nodded enthusiastically.
They finished the tour and ended up outside Keith’s office. “It’s small but we’re proud of it.”
Pellam said, “I’ll buy your cough syrup next time I get the flu.”
“I’ll give you enough samples to last for two years.” He vanished into a corridor.
Five minutes later—throat lozenges, cough syrup, nasal spray stuffed in Pellam’s jacket pockets—they walked into Keith’s office, a large sparse room, done in cheap paneling. Keith seemed like the sort who’d sink most of his money into the factory itself. Pellam shut the door and said softly, “I’d like to ask you a favor.”
“Meg said there was something on your mind.”
“I’d appreciate if you’d keep this off the record.”
“Surely.”
Pellam said, “It’s about my friend. The one who was killed.”
“That car accident.”
“I’m not sure it was an accident.”
“No?”
“I found the wreck and I noticed what looked like two bullet holes in the back. The sheriff said they were caused by the fire department but I checked out their equipment and I don’t think that’s it.”
“Bullet holes.” Keith was frowning.
Pellam shrugged. “I was wondering if there was any way somebody could look at a hole and see if it was definitely made by a bullet. Someone like you?”
Keith said, “Possibly. What do the holes look like?”
“The ones I saw were about a third of an inch, so that would mean they’re about thirty caliber.”
Keith said, “Deer round, so it might be copper jacketed.”
“Could be, sure.”
Keith was looking up at the ceiling. “Any chance you could find the bullets in the car?”
“Let’s assume they disappeared.”
“Got you.” He nodded knowingly. Then reflected. “The car burned, right?”
“Right.”
“If,” Keith began slowly, “they were just lead bullets, the odds are that any residue would have been burned away. Lead oxidizes at a very low temperature. Copper, though, that’s a different story. It has a real high vaporization point. And going through sheet steel in a car? Yeah, I’d guess enough would have come off in the holes to find traces.”
“Now, next question—”
“I’d be happy to.”
“I wasn’t going to ask you to go to the trouble. Isn’t there something you can show me to look for?”
“After about four years of inorganic chemistry, sure. But why don’t we just spend a half hour right now? I’ll take some samples and we can have it back here in the lab in no time. We’ll run it through the chromatograph and spectrometer. Where’s the car?”
“Out at a small junkyard on Route Nine.”
“R&W?”
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Keith frowned. “I thought it would’ve been impounded or something.”
“See why I’m a little curious about what’s going on?”
THE CAMPER, FOLLOWED
by Keith’s Cougar, pulled into the R&W parking lot, much of which was piled high with twisted copper piping. The pudgy man Pellam had spoken to yesterday—Bobby, he
recalled—stood looking at it like a proud father, his hands on his ample hips. He wore bib overalls and a seersucker hat, like a train engineer’s.
Pellam and Keith climbed out, walked up to him.
Keith said, “Hey.”
“Hey, Mr. Torrens. How you doing?”
“Not bad. How’s business?”
“Lookit this,” Bobby said proudly.
Keith nodded.
Pellam examined the tangle of pipe. “Not bad.”
“No shittin’.” He laughed at the obvious statement.
Three men, staring down at ten cubic yards of pipe. Nodding, impressed the way men always are at good finds.
Pellam glanced along the front of the fence toward the charred wreck. It was lit by bare incandescent bulbs in mechanic’s hand-held light baskets.
With an odd formality Bobby stuck out his hand. “How you doing, sir? You’re that movie guy, right?”
Pellam blinked. “That’s right. We’re here about what I was asking you before. The car?”
“Car?”
“I was talking to you about that wreck.” He nodded toward the remains.
The man frowned. “Don’t believe so. No.”
Pellam glanced at him. “We were talking about that car down there. The wreck.”
The man lifted his hat and greasy bangs dropped onto his forehead. “Don’t recall that.”
Oh, I get it.
Pellam sighed, reaching for his pocket. He found a bill and was starting to pull it out when the man said, “Bobby.”
“What?”
“You were talking to my brother. Bobby. I’m Billy.”
Oh. The W in R&W. Got it.
Keith laughed. “Billy and Bobby’re twins.”
Billy said, “But don’t let that stop you.” He accepted the twenty.
“You mind if we take a look at the wreck?”
“If you’re in the market for a car,” Billy said, shrugging, “I can do better’n that. But help yourself.” He turned back to his precious pipe.
They walked toward the burnt-out car.
Pellam whispered to Keith, “Twins?”
“You do horror films for your company, I’ll bet you could get ’em pretty cheap.”
They walked around the wreck. Pellam stopped suddenly.
“It’s gone.”
Keith blinked and leaned forward. Someone had used an acetylene torch to cut off the trunk and rear portions of the fenders.
Pellam called, “Excuse me. . . .”
Billy tore himself away from his pipe. “Yessir?”
He wandered slowly to the wreck.
Pellam said, “What happened to the metal here? The back portions?”
“Whatsat?” Billy called.
“Look here,” Keith said.
“Shit, it’s gone,” Billy said.
“I got the gist of that,” Pellam said.
“Shit.” The twin put his hands on his hips and looked around, like he was searching for a dropped quarter.
Keith said, “Bobby start to cut her up?”
“Naw, he’s not into like heavy work. Damn now. Who’d come by and steal half a burnt car?”
Keith and Pellam walked back to their vehicles. “I’m sorry. Wild-goose chase.”
Keith said, “It’s pretty funny, though. You go out to look at the car and find what looks like evidence. Next thing, you come back and that part’s gone.”
“Yeah, funny.”
BILLY STOOD IN
the shack, waving goodbye to Keith Torrens and the movie man. He picked up the phone and punched in a number. Bobby answered on the first ring. He must have known it was Billy because he just picked up the phone and said, “So what is it now?”
“Hey, guess who was just here.”
“Lessee, Elvis’s ghost, singing ‘Love Me Tender.’ ”
“Naw,” Billy said, “but wish it was. That’d be a fuck of a lot better for you and me.”
“
ARE YOU ALL RIGHT
?”
Wexell Ambler’s lover didn’t answer him.
After a moment, he gripped her buttocks tighter and dug his nails, which were long for a man’s, into her flesh. She whimpered. He remembered to relax his grip somewhat.
“Does it hurt?” he asked. “Does it—”
“Wex, oh—”
“—hurt?”
She whimpered again and pressed her forehead against his pulsing neck.
When they’d begun seeing each other it had been awkward.
Several problems.
First, neither had ever had an affair before and they didn’t know what you did and didn’t do. Surely affairs had special protocols—How do you make dates? Do you even call them “dates”? Do you shop at different grocery stores to avoid chance meetings when you’re with your spouse? Or is it better to see each other casually like that and avoid arousing suspicion?
Second, there was a funny type of jealousy at work.
He accepted that his lover was married but he was occasionally stung by the thought that she’d learned a certain technique—a touch or kiss—from her husband.
Third, neither of them was twenty-five any longer. Ambler had worked in the building trades when he was young and still hunted and fished—the history of physical effort had helped slow the inevitable effects of gravity and sedentary life. But there was no denying that muscle was giving way to fat, that erections that used to last an hour began to fade after fifteen minutes, and that he’d be no good for twenty-four hours after he came. His hair was thin (though in some slight compensation, not too gray) and he’d developed a jowl that he kept poking at as he’d pass the large oval mirror in his dining room until his wife had commented on it and he immediately stopped the habit.
Oddly, though, his lover, who was more than fifteen years younger than he was, had been even more self-conscious than Ambler. She always shut the lights out and drew the shades before she undressed.
But despite these worries, they had quickly fallen into a comfortable pattern and they soon found themselves making good, sweaty love.
Today, in the dark tangy-wood-scented bedroom, Ambler pinned her to the stark oak bed and pressed into her—hard, hard. Almost cruelly. He wasn’t sure why. He knew he had a reputation for being a cruel man in business and at other times, but he would never think of being cruel to anyone he loved. But as he felt himself coming closer to the moment, he wanted to hurt his mistress. He wanted
her to admit she was in pain but that she didn’t want him to stop.
“Does it hurt, love?”
“Yeah,” she whispered, her mouth saying the hot word against his skin, a centimeter from his ear.
She gasped twice, then whispered something he couldn’t hear, then she said, “Don’t stop. No, don’t stop. I like it.” The words were lyrical grunts. He smelled the aroma of her perfume and sweat.
“You like it . . .”
“Don’t stop.”
“. . . to hurt?”
“Oh, Wex. . . .”
Afterwards they lay together. Unlike when Ambler had made love with his wife, he and his lover often began to talk immediately, right after they had caught their breath.
Today, though, he kissed her forehead, whispered, “Darling,” and then they lay with their own thoughts for five minutes, half dozing.
“He’s still here, I heard,” Ambler said casually.
“Who?”
“That man from the movie company.”
“I heard.”
“What do you suppose he wants?”
“Taking time off after his accident, I suppose.”
Ambler asked, “They aren’t going to make the movie here, after all?”
“Why don’t you like him?”
Why do you say I don’t like him?
But Ambler didn’t say that. He said, “Look what happened. With the drugs and everything.”
“Wasn’t his fault.”