Lullaby Town (1992) (10 page)

The waitress brought the meat loaf on a heavy white plate like the kind they used in cafeterias in the forties. The slice of meat loaf was wide and thick and weighed almost a pound. There was a large portion of creamed potatoes and about a million green peas, and a thick brown gravy had been ladled over the meat loaf and the potatoes. Nurture food. It smelled wonderful. She said, "Can I get you anything else?"

"Tabasco sauce and another Rolling Rock."

She brought the Rock and the Tabasco. I applied both liberally. Tabasco is great for clearing the sinus and putting the ruination of lives into perspective. So is the Rolling Rock. The meat loaf was excellent What's wrong with this picture? Peter Alan Nelsen was a celebrity, and the profits from his pictures were subject to stories in Newsweek and Time. Karen would read those stories and know that her ex-husband, the father of her child, was worth millions. Many people, perhaps most, would go after a piece of that, yet she hadn't Either for herself or for the boy. Interesting. Maybe Peter wasn't the boy's father. Maybe Peter had done such hateful things to Karen that this was her way of punishing him and he deserved it. Maybe Karen was a nut case.

At five minutes before seven a tall guy with a nose like a chayote squash came in and looked around. He was wearing a bright turquoise shirt with a squash-blossom string tie and black slacks and a black duster. The black slacks were a half inch too short and the pointy black shoes were cut a half inch too low, so you ended up seeing a lot of black socks with little red triangles. He looked at me and the guy with the Times and the couple in the back and then he left. Probably looking for the disco.

I worked on the meat loaf and the potatoes and the peas and a growing depression. There were questions, and the questions bothered me, but I hadn't been hired to answer questions or even to get Karen Shipley to admit that she was Karen Shipley. I had been hired to find her whereabouts and I had done that The rest was up to Peter Alan Nelsen. So what if Karen Shipley didn't like it, and so what if I didn't like it. They don't pay me to like it.

I ordered two more of the Rolling Rock to bring back to my room. A couple more Rock and I'd probably like it just fine.

Out in the parking lot the guy in the string tie met a white Thunderbird and said something to the driver. They talked for a minute, then the guy in the string tie got in on the passenger's side and the Thunderbird crept away around the side of the motel.

The waitress brought the beer in a little brown paper bag and the check and a single peppermint. I signed for the check and went out through the lobby. My room was on the ground floor, off the parking lot on the west side of the motel, halfway down a two-story row of rooms and just past a little alcove with an ice machine and a Pepsi machine and a stair leading up to the second floor. The Taurus was parked outside my room and a green Polara station wagon was parked closer up on the street side of the lot. A Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler took up most of the far end of the parking lot, looking like a supertanker in dry dock. No white Thunderbird.

When I got to the stairwell, the guy in the string tie and another guy stepped out. Guess they put the Thunderbird on the other side.

The guy with the string tie said, "Hey, Joey, you think this is the guy?"

Joey was shorter and wider than me with a round cannonball head and caviar zits and a thick fleshy body that made him look sort of like an overgrown Pillsbury dough boy. He was wearing a blue Navy pea coat open over two layers of flannel shirts. The shirttails hung out. He said, 'Yeah, this is him. Looks like a fuck from out of town who don't belong around here. Lake he needs a little help to find his way home." He was maybe twenty-six, but he looked younger. He also looked mean.

The guy with the string tie nodded and made a sort of snickering sound. The snickering sound was a nose whistle. "Fuckin' A, Let's get him on his way."

I said, "Are you guys for real, or is this going to be on America's Funniest Home Videos?" They sounded like Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall. Brooklyn or the Bronx or Queens, but I couldn't tell which. New Yorkers all sound alike.

The guy with the string tie took out a piece of pipe maybe ten inches long and Joey took a half-step forward. Joey said, "We got a message for you, Mickey Mouse. Pack your fuckin' mouse ears and go back to Disneyland."

I blinked at them. "Did Karen Lloyd put you guys on me?"

The string tie waved the pipe so I could see it better. "You don't ask questions, fuck face. You just do what we say." He was breathing hard and the nose whistle was loud. Even Joey looked.

I said, 'That's some nose whistle. Is it natural or did you have to stick something up in there?"

Joey said, "This fuck thinks we're kidding."

Johnny Style swung the pipe from somewhere out around the North Atlantic.

I stepped to the inside and hit him in the forehead with the two bottles of Rolling Rock. The broken glass cut through the bag and beer sprayed back along my arm and across the wall and the sidewalk. Johnny Style said, "Unh," and dropped the pipe and fell backward over a curb stone. Joey sort of waddled forward, throwing a lot of overhand rights and lefts without much in the way of control, trying to do it the way he'd done it in schoolyards and on playgrounds for most of his life.

I sideslipped and hit him twice in the face and once in the neck and drove a straight kick from the tae kwon do into his solar plexus. He stopped swinging and made a sort of coughing sound and stepped back. Surprised.

I said, "What's this got to do with Karen Lloyd?"

Joey made the coughing sound again, then something hard hit me behind my right ear and I went down. Third guy in the Thunderbird. I kicked up and punched, but I don't think I hit him. My eyes weren't working too well and it was hard to see through the starbursts. Joey leaned over and punched me some more in the ribs and again in the back of the head, saying, "You fuck! You fuck!" He was slow, and he was stupid, but he was strong. He lifted my head by the hair and sort of shook my head and said, "Get out of town and keep your mouth shut or we'll turn you into a fuckin' piece of hamburg. You got that? You got that, you fuck?" I tried a claw move at his eyes, but I missed. The guy with the string tie said, 'Jesus Christ, I gotta get to a hospital."

Joey kicked me again, then there were footsteps and, a long time later, an engine fired to life and faded away into the buzz of the highway.

I lay with my face pressed down into the parking lot, and no one came and no one saw. It was cold. Carsm oved past on the service road, but none pulled in. Out front there would be people coming and going for the bar, but not back here. After a while I pushed myself up and tested my balance and went to my room.

I took four aspirin and peeled off my clothes and looked at myself. You get kicked in the lower back and you worry about the kidneys, and you get kicked in the ribs and you worry they're broken. I leaned forward and back and from side to side and raised my arms over my head. The places where I was kicked throbbed with a sort of a dull ache and when I raised my arms the right side of my back below the shoulder blade hurt but not the way it would hurt if anything was broken. I urinated. There was no blood. Kidneys were okay, but I'd have to check again later in the night.

I closed the toilet lid and sat on the seat and felt myself living. I felt the blood move and the lungs work and the muscles pull against bone. I hurt, but it was better than being in the hospital, and it was better than being dead. I had been hurt bad before, and I knew what that felt like. This wasn't bad.

I took a very cold shower, and then I dressed and went out to the ice machine and brought back a tub of ice. I undressed again and took another four aspirin and put some of the ice in one of the snowy-white Howard Johnson towels. I stacked the pillows at the head of the bed and sat against the pillows with the ice on my head. An hour later I dressed and put on my jacket and walked back to the bar. It was nine-forty-five. The bartender was gone and the bar was closed and so was the restaurant. That's life in Chelam.

I went back to my room and put more ice in the towel and lay there for a very long time thinking about Karen Shipley.

ELEVEN.

The next morning my back felt stiff and hard, and the place behind my ear ached with a doughy, immediate presence. I took more of the aspirin, soaked in a hot bath to loosen the back, and then did yoga, starting with the simplest stretches and working my way through the spine rock and the cobra and the spine twist. The back hurt quite a bit at first but warmed and felt better as I worked.

By twenty minutes after nine I was back in Chelam. I drove down Main Street past the bank to the town square, turned one block south, then turned again and parked in front of a place that had at one time been a showroom for John Deere tractors. Now, it was empty.

The threat of snow had passed without incident, and the day was bright and clear except for a scattering of cottonball cumulus clouds that moved through the sky to the south. It was warmer. I walked back to the grocery store one block north and stood by the pay phone and looked at the bank. Karen Shipley's green LeBaron was in the lot. I could go into the bank and confront her, but chances were good that she would continue to deny that she was Karen Shipley. Chances were equally good that she would deny knowing the three leg-busters who had come to the Ho Jo. I could go in with the sheriff, but that would bring in the press and Peter Alan Nelsen. The press would like it, but Peter Alan Nelsen probably wouldn't. Also, I didn't like the way it felt for Karen Shipley. There was something acutely desperate and unprotected about Karen Shipley denying that she was Karen Shipley even as she stared at her photograph, and I didn't want the sheriff and the town and the press to know what it was before I knew what it was. Also, going to the sheriff seemed like a wimpy thing to do. There were alternatives. I could lie in wait for Karen Shipley and, when she stepped out of the bank, pistol-whip her into admitting her true identity. If that didn't work, I could shadow her every move until, in an unguarded moment, she revealed her true self. Or maybe I could just ask around. Hmm. Asking around seemed easiest and a lot less trouble. After all, Karen Shipley had lived here for eight years. The people here knew her and knew of her, and if I talked to them, I might learn what they knew and see what they saw. If I knew enough and saw enough, maybe I'd know what in hell was going on and what to do about it. Elvis Cole, detective in search of intelligence.

Rittenhauser's Diner was down the block, two doors past the barbershop. I went in and sat at the counter. A pinch-faced short-order cook in a blue apron was standing with his arms crossed near the cash register. He was watching a tiny Magnavox color TV that was sitting on a gallon can of pork and beans next to the register. Oprah Winfrey. Something about fat men being better lovers. He picked a clean coffee mug from a wire rack and filled it and put the mug in front of me without my having to ask. He said, "What'll it be?"

Three eggs, scrambled. Rye toast. Maybe put some mushrooms and some cheese in the eggs."

"Sharp cheddar?"

"How about Swiss?"

"You got it."

He made the eggs and a little patty of hash browns and two large pieces of rye toast. When it was done, he put it all onto a heavy white plate, then he put the plate in front of me. I said, "Nice looking plate of eggs."

He said, "Unh," and went back to the Oprah.

I ate some of the eggs. "Just moved out from California. Transfer. Met Karen Lloyd at the bank yesterday."

"Unh."

"Nice looking lady."

He said it again.

"You know if she's married or seeing someone?"

"Nope." An obese man in his sixties told Oprah that he could ejaculate twenty-six times a day. He attributed it to his bulk. The cook looked interested.

"Nope, you don't know, or nope, she's not seeing someone?"

"Ain't none of my business." The obese man said that when he was thin, he was sexually dysfunctional.

"She been working at the bank long?"

The cook leaned closer to the television. Something about high-fat content leading to increased fluids production.

I said, "Great day for a nuclear holocaust, huh?"

The cook nodded and cut himself a piece of cherry pie, still staring at the Oprah.

Maybe looking for intelligence in Chelam was going to be harder than I thought. I decided to shadow her every move.

Being a stranger in a small town is sort of like being a Martian in Mayberry. You tend to stand out. Aunt Bea sees you hanging around a parking lot, pretty soon Barney Fife is looking at your driver's license. Opie rides by on his bike, pretty soon you got Andy in your shorts. Everybody in town knows you're there, and then you get your thugs in string ties asking why you're still around. You see how this works?

I drove back to the Howard Johnson's, changed rooms, then drove down to the Hertz office hi upper Westchester and traded the blue Taurus for a white one. I couldn't do much about Aunt Bea and Opie, but I could make it tougher for Joey and his pal with the tie.

By nine-fifty I was back in Chelam. By nine-fifty-two the new white Taurus was parked in a little alley outside the John Deere showroom and I had picked the lock on a side door and let myself inside. From the showroom I could see the bank and the grocery store and a fair part of Main Street. Aunt Bea and Opie might wonder about the Taurus, but it was better than having them wonder about me.