S
he couldn’t imagine such a thing. “I’d
probably feel pretty rich if somebody wanted to walk in
here and give me a hundred dollars for all of it,”
she said. When I didn’t bite, she let it go. Just as
well, I thought: there was no use speculating, she’d
probably faint if I told her half of what I was thinking.
But she looked at me across the room and a sense of it
began filling up the space between us. The air seemed
brighter: the sun had a different aura as it beamed through
the window on the west side and lit up a million floating
particles of dust. Amy moved out to the middle of the room
and flipped up one of the flaps.
“Mamma never told me anything,” she said,
fingering the papers in the box. “Not once did she
ever say she thought this stuff might even be worth the
paper it’s printed on.”
Maybe she didn’t know, I thought. Maybe value to
her had nothing to do with money. Maybe she figured
she’d talk about it someday and just ran out of time.
You can’t plan a heart attack.
“I guess I should’ve figured there was
something to it,” Amy said. “The way she never
wanted me to let on it was here, not even to Archie or the
Rigbys. I think she was always afraid somebody would come
and take it away from her.”
“Yeah, but where’d it come from? How’d
she get it?”
“Just like she got everything else. Piece by
piece, starting way back when she first went to work at
Grayson’s. I think that’s when they started
talking about her doing his book someday. And he read some
of the things she’d published, and he liked what
she’d written, and he said okay, but it’s too
early. He hadn’t done enough yet. But he gave her
this stuff, sometimes just a few pages a day, to read and
think about. She’d bring ‘em home with
her—a few letters, some sketches he’d thrown
aside—just stuff, you know. I never paid any
attention when she told me about it.”
“And over the years it became this.”
Amy was reading. Whatever was on top was working its way
through her brain as she tried to understand its larger
significance. “This looks like a plain old letter.
He’s talking about fishing…what’s so
special about that?”
“It’s something other people will have to
decide.”
“And these other people will want this
stuff?”
“You can count on that. They’ll want this
stuff.”
“And you know who they are?”
“I do now.”
She picked up the pages and read it all—the
three-page letter that Grayson had written on January 4,
1954, I saw as I crossed the room and looked over her
shoulder. I moved on to the window and stood staring down
at the muddy yard, letting her read in peace. When I turned
again, her eyes were fixed on mine. She gave a little
smile, naive and worldly all at once. Do what you want, she
seemed to say: I won’t fuss, I’ll go along.
The only thing in my mind was that it all had to be
moved. It had been here twenty years and I couldn’t
leave it even one more night. “The real question is,
how does this help us find Ellie?” Amy said. I
didn’t know, it was too vast, like standing at the
edge of a forest on a hunt for one tree. But it had to be
moved and then maybe we could start asking questions like
that.
Now a funny thing happened—Amy lit into the work
with a kind of driving impatience, as if she could clear
the house all at once. She had put it off forever, but
moving that first box had a galvanizing effect. “You
go on,” she said, “I’ll keep working on
it.” We had filled up the car. It would take six
loads and a full backseat when we made our last run out of
here. It was three o’clock, her children had to be
picked up by seven, and I still had no idea where I’d
make the stash or how long it would take us to get it all
moved.
“Go,” she said, insistent now. “Go,
dammit, you’re wasting time.”
I drove through Snoqualmie and out along the road to
North Bend. Clouds moved in from the west and the air grew
ripe with the promise of rain. It came, hard and furious,
washing away the hope of the morning. I didn’t know
how I felt anymore, I wasn’t sure of anything. I had
made a colossal discovery, but I was no closer to Eleanor
than I’d been yesterday. Overriding everything was
the depressing thought that I could be saving one life and
losing another. Amy Harper wouldn’t ever be going
back to Belltown, but where was Eleanor?
I settled for the North Bend Motel, one of those older
places with the rooms laid out in a long single-story row.
I rented a room at the far end, where it might not be so
evident to the guy in the office that I was using it for a
storage locker. I paid two days in advance. The room was
small—piled four high around the table and bed, the
boxes would fill it up. I unloaded fast and started back.
The rain had come and gone, but the clouds hung low and you
could see there was more on the way. I turned into the
Harper place at quarter to four. Amy had moved a dozen
boxes and was still running hard. She was slightly giddy,
confirming what I’d thought earlier, that the act of
moving things had given her some badly needed emotional
release. Her shirt was dark with sweat, soaked across the
shoulders and under the arms, and her face was streaked
with dirt. “Don’t forget to check the
mail,” she called as I was going out with the second
load.
But again the mailbox was empty.
At the end of the fifth load I ran into trouble. I
stopped at the road and knew something was different.
The mailbox was open. I knew I had closed it.
I got out and crossed the road. The box was empty, but a
cigarette had been thrown down and was still smoking on top
of the damp grass. A beer bottle had been dropped in the
mud. Beside it was the print of a man’s shoe, an
impression that hadn’t yet begun to fill with
water.
I felt the fear. Night was coming fast, fingers of fog
wafted across the land, and Amy was alone in the house.
I splashed along the road with my lights off. I could
see a flickering light in the trees ahead. It took on bulk
and form and became a car, idling in the clearing.
I stopped and reached under the seat where my gun was. I
clipped it to the front of my belt near the buckle. I got
out of the car and walked up through the trees.
Headlights cut through the mist at the edge of the
porch. Two men sat there in the dark.
I started across the clearing. A voice came at me from
somewhere.
“Hey!…Where you going?”
I looked at them across the gap. “Going to see Ms.
Harper.”
“Ms. Harper’s dead.”
“Ms. Amy Harper wasn’t dead, when I left her
here half an hour ago.”
“That’s
Mrs
. Amy
Willis
to you, dum-dum. You can’t see her now. She’s
busy.”
“She’s having a re-yoon-yun with her old
man,” the other one said, and they both laughed.
I started toward the house. They got out of the car.
They were punks, I had seen their kind many times, I had
sweated them in precinct rooms when I was a young cop
working burglary. When they were fifty, they’d still
be seventeen.
The one riding shotgun had the James Dean look, dark,
wavy hair over a fuck-you pout. They thought they were
badasses and I was an old fart. That made two surprises
they had coming.
“This asshole don’t hear so good,” the
James Dean act said.
His partner said, “What’ll it be,
Gomer?…You wanna walk out of here or be carried out
strapped over the hood of this car.”
“I’ll take the hood, stupid, if you two
think you can put me there.”
I veered and came down on them fast. I caught little
Jimmy a wicked shot to the sternum that whipped him around
and juked him across the yard like Bojangles of Harlem,
sucking air till he dropped kicking in the mud. His partner
jumped back out of range. My coat was open and he’d
seen the gun, but he’d already seen enough of what
went with it. I stepped over Little Jimmy as the ex loomed
up on the porch.
“Who the hell’re you?” he growled.
“I’m Rush Limbaugh. Who the hell’re
you?”
“I don’t know you.”
“I’m taking a poll to see who’s
listening to the Asshole Radio Network. Maybe you’d
better get out of my way.”
“Maybe what I’ll do is come down there and
kick your ass.”
“Maybe what you’ll do is shit, if you eat
enough.”
He started to launch himself off the porch. He balked,
almost slipped, and stood tottering at the top.
Then he came, with too little too late. His pal yelled,
“Look out, Coleman, he’s got a gun!” and
he balked again, missed his step, and splashed face-first
in the mud.
I went around him in a wide circle. “So far you
boys are terrifying as hell,” I said. He struggled to
one knee. I asked if he could sing “April
Showers.” I hate to waste a line like that, but I
know he didn’t get it. I walked past him, close
enough for him to grab my leg, but he didn’t. I knew
he wouldn’t. By the time I got Amy to open the door,
they were gone.
Amy stood at the window and watched them go. It was the
last vestige of her childhood, the beginning of a long and
wonderful and fearsome journey.
“
C’est la vie
,” she said to the fading day.
I thought about the woman in Irwin Shaw’s great
story of the eighty-yard run. I told Amy to read it
sometime and take heart.
She had never heard of Shaw. I felt a twinge of sadness,
not only for the fleeting nature of fame but of life
itself. I told her what a powerhouse Shaw had been when he
was young, and how the critics had come to hate him and had
made him the most underrated writer of his day. She
didn’t understand why people would do that, so I
explained it to her. Shaw made a lot of money and they
never forgive you for that. She asked what the story was
about and I said, “It’s about you and the damn
fool you married, when you were too young to know
better.” I didn’t want to diminish it by
telling her any more than that.
We gathered ourselves for the trip to town. I’d be
leaving fourteen boxes under Selena Harper’s roof for
one more night.
“I don’t think we made much headway,”
Amy said.
“We didn’t find Eleanor. Maybe we found you,
though.”
She didn’t say anything. She gave me the key and I
locked the house. She sank back in the car and closed her
eyes, a picture of sudden weariness.
I told her what I had in mind as we drove.
“I’m going to call a man who knows all there is
to know about this stuff. If I’m right, he’ll
want to fly up from Los Angeles and look at it.”
“It’s in your hands. I trust your judgment
and I won’t go back on you, whatever you decide to
do.”
I pointed out the motel where I’d made the stash.
She gave it a polite look and we swung west with the night,
into the freeway, into the driving rain.
T
he night was full of surprises. The first came when I
called Leith Kenney from Amy’s room at the Hilton.
She sat behind me, discreetly nursing her child while I
punched in the call.
It rang three times in L.A. and a woman answered.
“Mr. Kenney, please.”
“I’m sorry, he’s not here.”
“Do you know when he’ll be back?”
“I really can’t say.” There was an
awkward pause. “He’s gone in to a meeting
tonight and it’ll probably run late. Then he’s
going out of town.”
I blinked at the phone but recovered quickly.
“I’m calling from Seattle.”
“That’s where he’s going. Is this Mr.
Pruitt?”
I felt my heart trip. I looked at Amy in the mirror, but
she was busy changing breasts and didn’t notice
anything.
“Yes,” I said, thinking on my feet.
“Yes, it is.”
“Has there been a change of plan? This is Mrs.
Kenney. Lee will be calling me when he gets there. I could
give him a message.”
“I don’t know…I might have to change
things.”
There was a brief silence. It would really help, I
thought, if I had the slightest idea what the hell I was
talking about.
“Well,” she said, “would you like to
leave a message with me?”
“I’ll catch him here. Is he staying at the
same hotel?”
“Yes, the Four Seasons. They should get in early
tomorrow morning.”
“Is Scofield coming with him?”
“I don’t think you could keep him away, Mr.
Pruitt.”
“I’ll see them then. Thanks.”
I hung up and stared at the floor. Pruitt stared back at
me.
Amy was looking at me in the glass.
“Something wrong?”
“No,” I said. “Everything’s
fine.”
She went across the room and put her children down. I
headed for the door and got the second surprise of the
night.
“I remembered something today,” she said.
“I thought of the man who came and looked in the
attic just after Mamma died. His name popped right into my
head. I knew I’d forget it again, so I wrote it
down.”
She fished in her jeans and came up with a paper.
“His name was Otto.”
Again I walked through that cluttered bookstore. I held
a bag of Ayn Rand and wondered why the man wasn’t
there. I looked up a dark stairwell leading
to…what?
“Otto Murdock.”
She looked at me hard. “How’d you know
that?”
I
headed north on the freeway and hoped I’d remember
where Murdock’s was. I found it after twenty minutes
of trial and error. I arrived on a wave of deja vu. It
looked exactly as I’d last seen it—the same dim
light shone from deep in the building, the same open sign
was propped in the window and tilted at the same slight
angle—even the rain was the same, as if the world had
turned back on its axis and erased the last seventy-two
hours. I pushed open the door and called his name. There
was no sound. If any customers had come in since last
Friday night, they had left no evidence of their presence.
They had come, looked, and left as we had, perhaps with a
slight sense of unease. Those who knew Murdock would figure
it as another bout with demon rum: the others would mind
their own business.
I crossed the store and looked in the back room.
Everything was the same…the dim light in the
corner…the rolltop desk with its piles of magazines
and papers…the canvas briefcase pushed off to one
side with my note still taped to the handle…the
rickety stacks of books and the thick carpet of dust,
undisturbed where we hadn’t walked and already
filming over where we had. I followed our three-day trail
across the room and into the stairwell. I looked up into
the black hole and called him, but I knew he wasn’t
going to be inviting me up. My voice felt heavy, like a man
shouting into a pillow.
I touched the bottom of the stair with my foot. I leaned
into it, took a deep breath, got a firm hold on my gun, and
started up. The light faded quickly: there was none at all
after the fifth step and I had to go by feel, knowing only
that the next step would be onward and upward. I had a
sense of movement coming from somewhere…
music!
. . . and now the feeling that it had all happened before
was as sharp as a scream. I planted each foot, letting my
fingers slip along the inner edge of the wooden banister
and guide me up.
Don’t screw up again
, I was thinking:
don’t make the same mistake twice
.
Now I could hear the melody, some classical piece on a
radio. I saw a thin line of light…the crack at the
bottom of a door. It dropped below eye level as I climbed
higher, and a kind of sour dampness lay over the top. And I
knew that smell, better than the people of Seattle knew the
rain. In my old world it came with the smell of Vicks, the
stuff homicide cops use to help them get through the bad
ones.
I was standing at the top with an old memory playing in
color and sound. My partner was a skinny guy named Willie
Mott, who was giving me the lowdown on Vicks VapoRub.
This one’s ripe…put a little glop of Vicks
up each nostril and you won’t notice it so much
.
I stood at the door of hell and nobody had brought the
Vicks.
I touched the wood with my knuckles. Found the knob.
Gripped it carefully by the edge, with the joints of my
fingers and thumb.
The latch clicked: the door creaked open and the warm
moist air sucked me in.
I retched.
I backtracked and stumbled and almost fell down the
stairs.
On the third try, I made it into the room. I cupped my
hand over my nose and got past the threshold to the edge of
a ratty old sofa.
A single lamp near the window was the only source of
light…a forty-watter, I figured by the dim interior.
Dark curtains covered the window. I couldn’t see the
body yet, but the room was full of flies. The music poured
out of an old radio. It wasn’t “Rigby,”
just something he’d been listening to when he finally
ran out of time. I moved toward it, still fighting my gut.
I hadn’t seen much of anything yet.
There was the one window.
A closed door across the room.
A pile of books on the table.
A typewriter…a pile of magazines…a roll of
clear sealing tape…and a bottle of lighter fluid.
I moved around the table, watching where I walked. A
wave of rotten air wafted up in a cloud of flies.
I tasted the bile. What I didn’t need now, after
compromising the first scene, was to throw up all over this
one.
The lighter fluid might help. I know it’s an evil
solvent; I’ve heard it can get in your blood through
the skin and raise hell with your liver. But it’s
stronger by far than Vicks, and even the smell of a
cancer-causing poison was like honeysuckle after what
I’d been smelling.
I put my handkerchief on the table, then turned the
plastic bottle on its side and pried open the squirt
nozzle. Liquid flowed into the rag. I touched only the
ribbed blue cap, so I wouldn’t mess up any prints on
the bottle itself.
I made the wet rag into a bandanna. Found a roll of cord
and cut off a piece, then tied it over my mouth and
nose.
I was breathing pure naphtha. It was cold and bracing
and it had an immediate calming effect on my stomach.
If it didn’t kill me, I could function like a cop
again.
I found him sprawled on the far side of the table. He
had been there most of a week from the looks of him. His
face was gone, but I could guess from the wispy white hair
that he had probably been Otto Murdock.
I didn’t know what had killed him: there
wasn’t enough left to decide. What there was was
hidden under a carpet of flies.
Let the coroner figure it. Whatever they pay him,
it’s not enough, but let him earn it…and in the
end tell supercop what I already knew.
Murdock hadn’t keeled over and died of old
age.
And Janeway hadn’t done it. This would break his
super heart, but when the reaper came cal-ling, Janeway was
still in Denver, doing what came naturally. Trying to fit
John Gardner into his proper shade of orange, with murder
the last thing on his mind.
I didn’t see any weapon. Nothing on the table
looked promising as a motive or a clue.
There were no ashes.
No sign of a struggle. Even the chair he had been
sitting in was upright, pushed back slightly as if
he’d been getting up to greet a visitor.
I went to the far door and opened it.
His bathroom. Nothing out of place there.
I was feeling lightheaded by then: the naphtha was doing
its dirty work. The skin under my eyes felt like blisters
on the rise.
I ripped off the rag and got out of there.
Downstairs, I looked through his rolltop.
Some of the notes in the pigeonholes were three years
old.
I looked through the drawers.
Bottle of cheap bourbon, with not much in the
bottom.
Letters…bills…
The sad debris of a life that didn’t matter much
to anybody, not even, finally, to the man who had lived
it.
Pushed off to one side was the canvas bag. Eleanor had
wanted to look inside, but I wouldn’t let her.
I opened it now and hit the jackpot.
A thick notebook, old and edgeworn…
I seemed to be holding Darryl Gray son’s original
subscriber list. With it was a manuscript, a dozen pages of
rough draft on yellow legal paper. I knew the handwriting,
I had seen it on other papers in Amy’s attic. The top
sheet was a title page, aping Vic-toriana.