The Big Kiss-Off of 1944: A Jack LeVine Mystery (10 page)

“Backs to us, please, facing the vehicle, and hands in the air.”

Rubine came over and stood next to me, slowly raising his hands in the air. His eyes had switched off and his face was drawn and rigid, with a left eyelid that wouldn’t stop twitching. Except for the twitch, he would have looked fine on a taxidermist’s wall.

“Search them,” said the tall trooper. I felt hands going through my pockets, lightly and professionally. The hands found my gun and Rubine’s empty Colt and removed them.

“Both you gentlemen please take one step away from the vehicle, arms still raised.”

I don’t scare easy, but I was very scared now. Rubine whimpered again and I heard a suppressed grunt and the sound of a twisting foot behind me and turned my head. Turned it much too late. I felt a sharp sting behind my left ear and the world turned bright red and blue. Lightning went through my head and I felt strangely legless, as if only the top half of my body were falling. I was talking to the door of the car and felt something fall beside me, as I sank beneath layer upon layer of lukewarm water. My brain was talking to itself and I tried hard to listen in, but it got very far away and my head hurt so badly. The rocks were pearly and my lips pressed against the Buick’s hubcaps.

I was out.

T
HE BACK OF MY NECK
was on fire and a midget roller derby was being held in my stomach. Orange-green flashbulbs kept exploding outside my closed lids. When I got my eyes open, a flood of sunlight blew my head apart and triggered an immediate swell of nausea. I breathed heavily to fight off the inevitable, inhaling soil and pollen, turning my head with effort, glistening with cold sweat. A mighty sneeze sent an ant flying from my nostril, like a kid chuting out of the Coney Island funhouse. The sneeze hurt all over and I breathed deeply once again, holding on just barely, tottering near the edge and finally calling it quits. I wrenched my head to the side and threw up. LeVine starts his weekend.

I felt terribly weak, but the roller derby was winding down and the ache wasn’t so bad. I got to my knees, tore up some weeds and wiped my mouth, and remembered where I was: in some high grass a hundred feet from the highway, hidden from the sight of motorists. My car sat placidly on the road shoulder. A bread truck rattled past, raising dust that went up and up and seemed to settle in the clouds. A bright, scrubbed morning. Everything was peaceful, everything was simple—until I remembered why I was here, and who I had come with. Maybe they had put him in the back seat of the car. Sure. Maybe they had bought him dinner and given him a gold watch.

So I was a detective again, rising from the earth and stalking toward the car with the easy grace of Frankenstein’s monster carrying a piano upstairs. I tripped in some tangled weeds, caressed my shin on a stone and squealed in pain, limping the last thirty feet. My shirt was soaked through and I sat down heavily in the front seat of my patient Buick. I was panting.

Rubine, of course, wasn’t in the car. Chances were he was eyeball to eyeball with a lake trout, like his Uncle Irv. I leaned stiffly against the open door and noticed some drag marks in the dirt, made by a pair of limp heels. They ran along the side of the road for about fifty feet, so I followed the trail until it came to an abrupt end at a point on the concrete road where some freshly burnt rubber lay scattered about. Somebody had been in a hurry. I didn’t think it was Rubine.

Not with those bloodstains.

I hadn’t noticed any blood on the dusty stretch running parallel to the road, but this drying pool on the road made it pretty clear that my brief friendship with Rubine had come to an end. I wasn’t particularly happy about it. Or unhappy. It made me nervous. I did my little sleuthing bit and found some stiff, flaky drops of dried blood along the path of the heel marks. Figuring some mug had carried Rubine with his hands hooked under the deceased’s arms, it seemed certain he was going to have to change his shirt.

A small pick-up truck wheezed along the road and came to a stop beside me. I stuck my hand in my pocket and ducked as a wiry, nut-brown fanner leaned out the window and nodded in the direction of the Buick.

“Trouble?” His voice was husky and pleasant.

“The car’s in better shape than I am.”

“Uh, huh,” he said neutrally, looking me over. “Thought you might need a push. Happens to the best.”

“No, I’m just fine.” I stuffed my hands into my back pockets and tried to be just folks. “You know how far I might be from New Kingston?”

“New Kingston.” He thought about it. “New Kingston. ’Bout fifteen miles. What you do, stay on 28 and take her into Margaretville, go down Main Street and take your right by the drugstore. That’s New Kingston Road they call it. Follow that three-four miles and you’re in business.”

“Fifteen miles altogether.”

“Fifteen to Margaretville, then five. Say twenty.” He kept looking at me, so I wiped my hand across my brow and came up with some dried blood.

“You’re okay?”

“I’m dandy. And thanks for the help.”

“Sure,” he said, grinding the gears into first and starting back west on 28. “That’s by the drugstore,” he called out. I waved, he took a corner and disappeared from view and it was quiet again. It was half past eight and already very warm. I brushed myself off, wiped away the crumbs of blood with a hanky, slipped into the Buick and started on down the road. I had made another mistake.

Margaretville was a movie house, a hardware store, a grocery, a clothing-and-notions emporium with aisles you had to walk down sideways, a firehouse, a gas station—and the drugstore. Farther down Main Street, a flag hung still against a windless blue sky and that was the post office. Farmers and farmers’ wives were doing some early Saturday morning shopping, the old-timers sat on a bench in front of the hardware, mutts chased each other around. It was neat, bright, and orderly and my reasons for being there suddenly seemed outlandish. Stag films hidden up here? Fenton would have suffocated in the fresh air. This wasn’t his world: he was more comfortable in hotels where guys peed down the dumbwaiters and dried their socks over hot plates. Margaretville was stepping out of a Lionel train into Anytown.

I parked on Main and walked to the drugstore, Christian’s Drugstore to be exact. It was one of those places with orange Rexall bordering on the glass and displays of nickel toys. There was a nice poster in the window of a soldier and his girl drinking an ice cream soda together, two straws, while a white-haired guy in an apron watched approvingly, his arms folded across the fountain. “WHAT A HOMECOMING,” it said.

Inside Christian’s, the homecoming hadn’t begun yet. A forbidding-looking lady in her thirties stood behind a black marble-top counter while two old men in short-sleeve sport shirts talked of war.

“Japs could take the Russkies any day of the week,” said a stringy man with an Adam’s apple the size of a baseball.

“Course they could,” said his pal, a chunky hayseed with eyeglasses as thick as milk bottles. “That’s why we’re doin’ all the work. Jesus, I remember ’04 like it was yesterday. Russkies never knew what hit ’em!”

“Old Teddy had to bail ’em out.”

“That’s right! Wasn’t for Teddy, Japs would’ve finished ’em right off.”

The lady stared at me as I surveyed the walls, looking for a phone book.

“You need help, mister, say so.” Her voice was thin and taut: unwatered, unhugged. The old-timers put on the mutes and buried their noses in their coffee cups.

“I was looking for a phone book.”

“Could’ve said so.” She dipped her knees and pulled a thin booklet out from under the counter, a directory for Fleischmanns—Pine Hill—Margaretville.

“It’s a New Kingston number.”

“It’ll be there, New Kingston’s in there,” the chunky man said.

There was one Fenton in the book—Mrs. Raymond Fen-ton, Thompson Hollow Road.

“Thompson Hollow Road,” I said. “Where it is?”

“Who you looking for?” the lady said.

“Fenton.”

“The Fenton place?” asked the Adam’s apple. He looked at his friend and they both looked at Miss Christian behind the counter.

“You’ll be the first visitor in a long while, mister,” she said evenly. “Long, long while.”

“She still live there?”

“Oh, she lives there all right. You want her, you’ll find her.” The lady poured herself a glass of water, keeping her eyes on me.

“She’s just a strange kind of woman,” the stout man said, trying to put me at my ease. He caught himself and got nervous. “You’re not a relative, are you?”

“I represent people in her family. A small legal problem has to be cleared up.”

“I see,” said the Adam’s apple. I don’t think he believed a word of it.

“She live there alone?” I asked.

“Just her and a caretaker,” the apple said. “He’s the one you got to watch out for.”

The lady behind the counter shot him a stern, reprimanding look.

“Man’s got a right to know,” he insisted. “Man’s got a right to be warned.”

I patted him on the shoulder. “I appreciate it, buddy.”

The woman softened. “All right,” she said, as if conceding a point. “Watch yourself. I think her boy’s a convict. That’s the word.”

“She live up here long?”

She shook her head. “Five years.”

“Moved into Pete Devereaux’s house,” said the chunky man. “Used to be a real showcase.”

“Lord, yes,” the Adam’s apple nodded in assent. “It was the pride of the hollow.” He sipped some coffee and it went down the wrong pipe. He launched into a small-scale coughing fit.

“Jesus Christ,” he croaked, as the woman shoved her glass of water across the counter. Then she walked to the window.

“You really want to go there, you take this right turn right outside the store. Follow New Kingston Road all the way, bearing right as you go through New Kingston. Then it’s the third left after the town.”

“Thanks a lot,” I said, pushing open the screen door and looking at a Santa Claus Coca-Cola thermometer. Seventy-five degrees.

“Mister?” said the chunky man.

I turned toward him.

“Come back after you’re finished. I swear you’re the first man ever asked directions to that place.”

I
UNDERSTOOD WHY.
The Fenton place was Halloween City, a huge, peeling-paint wooden mansion turned hovel with a spa-sized porch, turrets, parapets, broken weather vanes, and the high reek of decay. The dull gray exterior was practically skeletal: coat upon coat of paint had weathered away. The grounds were littered with rusted shapes that had once been farm implements. Weeds ran berserk, grass gave over to dandelion patches of a particularly drab and urinous yellow, shot up a foot high, and sped thick and untamed to the side of a stagnant brook. Swarms of mosquitoes tested my neck for tenderness. There was a lot of acreage, none of it used, cared for, or seemingly even recognized by its owner.

She had better things to do.

I was stooping to examine the rusted hulk of an anvil when I noticed a spidery little woman with brownish mottled skin staring at me through a screen door. I stood up and she turned away, then pushed open the door and walked across the porch. She was holding a rifle. It was for deer hunting. I was the deer.

“Git ’em up!” she screeched, her voice a fingernail drawn against a blackboard. “Berl!” she yelled back into the house. “BERL!!” she yelled more shatteringly. My hair stood up on my arms.