Mr. X (33 page)

The cab deposited me in front of a building like a cardboard box mounted with a peaked hat. Its original pale brown had faded to the sandy yellow of old chinos. Two courses of the cement-block foundation, interrupted by basement windows, protruded above the ground, and a pitted walk led to the unceremonious front door. I went up the steps and read the names beside a vertical row of buzzers.
JANETTE
,
TITE
,
CARPENTER & BURGESS
,
FELDMAN
, a blank I supposed was for my room,
BREMEN
,
REDMAN & CHALLIS
, and
ROWLES & MCKENNA
. I pushed the button beside
JANETTE,
and a metallic buzz came through the window to my left. An interior door opened; footsteps rapped
toward me. An economical white-haired woman in a short-sleeved safari shirt-jacket bored gimlet eyes into me from a face that made Lieutenant Rowley’s seem like a powder puff.

“I suppose you’re the one from Toby Kraft.”

“That’s me,” I said.

Helen Janette backed up and watched me come in. Whatever she saw did not improve her frame of mind. “This is the deal. I’m giving you a nice, comfortable room on the second floor. You and Mr. Bremen are supposed to have exclusive access to the bathroom at your end of the hall, but the girls at the back go in there, too.”

A door behind me clicked open. I glanced over my shoulder. A gaunt old man with a Neanderthal jaw, a mesh T-shirt, and a brown fedora was leaning against the opening to a darkened room. His shades had been pulled down, and a cartoon jittered across the television screen in the murk behind him.

“This is Mr. Tite,” she said.

I turned around and held out my hand. He ignored it.

“The room is thirty dollars per night, a hundred eighty by the week. You get basic cable if you bring your own TV. For an extra ten dollars a week, clean linen every other day and vacuuming on Thursdays. No cooking in the rooms, no meals supplied, and no loud noises. If you can’t behave yourself, out you go, I don’t need the aggravation.”

I said I’d be happy to pay for a week in advance, plus cleaning, if she took plastic. Helen Janette thrust out a hand and waggled her fingers. I dug out my Visa card, placed it on her palm, and followed her into her apartment. Mr. Tite lounged against the doorframe and eyed me from beneath the brim of his hat. After I signed the slip, she said, “I’ll show the gentleman to his room now, Mr. Tite.”

Tite straightened up, gave me a hard look, and backed out.

“There are two more rooms at the other end of the house,” she said. “Miss Carpenter and Miss Burgess share the big one, and Mrs. Feldman has the other. Miss Carpenter and Miss Burgess have been with me fifteen years. I’ve never had a speck of trouble with Mrs. Feldman.”

We began going up the stairs. “Your room is at the front, above Mr. Tite.” She turned halfway around and lowered her voice. “Mr. Bremen is across from you. He’s a crossing guard,
and you know what
they’re
like.” She put her finger to her lips, then pointed upward with the same finger. “Drunkards.”

At the top of the stairs, she marched to a white door on the far side of the corridor. An elderly guy with a ponderous belly and a flaring white mustache who was seated in front of his TV looked through his doorway and raised a hand the size of a stop sign. A broad yellow banner hung across the back of his room. “Hi there,” he called. “This our new inmate?”

“I’m busy, Mr. Bremen.” She slammed the key into the lock.

I followed Helen Janette inside. “Bed. Closet. Desk. Dresser. Your sink. I change the towels and washcloth every other day. If you want to move the phone to the table, there’s a jack behind it. You pay all your utilities. I don’t want to see any hot plates in here, but coffeemakers are okay. Mrs. Frahm left behind her radio–alarm clock, so that comes free of charge.”

I looked at the digital numerals displayed on the black box next to the telephone. It was 8:31.

“At the back on this side are Miss Redman and Miss Challis. They’re cute little things, but if you’re a gentleman, you’ll keep your distance. Mr. Rowles and Mr. McKenna are in the room across from them. Mr. Rowles and Mr. McKenna are pianists, and they’re out of town most of the time. Do you expect to be here longer than a week?”

I put to rest the concern that I might form an unholy alliance with Miss Redman and Miss Challis.

She slid the key on top of the dresser. “Try to keep reasonable hours. Comings and goings after midnight wake me up.”

I hung up my clothes, shoved things into the dresser drawers, and called Suki Teeter. After three rings, an answering machine picked up, and Suki’s voice informed me that if I were to leave my name and telephone number she would probably call me back, unless I were looking for money. Suki was still in bed. I called Merchants Hotel and asked for Mrs. Ashton.

“My God, are you all right?” Ashleigh said.

“Thanks to you.”

“I couldn’t
believe
those guys. Especially that creepy Lieutenant Rowley. I hardly believe you, either. Why didn’t you tell them you were here?” She giggled. “Lieutenant Rowley has a filthy mind. I said we gabbed away like old buddies until you sobered up enough to go back to your aunt’s, but I could tell he knew exactly what we were doing. You know what? You were
like the way you were in Chicago, sort of dangerous. Not drunk dangerous, that would have been awful, unpredictable dangerous.”

My insides folded into origami. “Sometimes I surprise myself.”

“They let you go, anyhow.”

“About six-thirty this morning.” I told her that I had moved out of my aunt’s house and gave her my new telephone number.

“Am I going to see you today?”

“I don’t know. Someone is going to help me track down some information. I’ll call you if I can.”

“This is exactly what I deserve,” Ashleigh said. “I know, all right, it’s okay.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Would your research assistant be Laurie Hatch?”

“She knows a guy at City Hall who can do me a lot of good,” I said. “It’s a long story, but I’m trying to find my father, and she volunteered to help.”

“No kidding.” She hesitated. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I want to see you again, though. All right?”

When we were done, I dialed Police Headquarters and asked a desk sergeant to give Captain Mullan my new address and telephone number.

I went into the hallway. Mr. Bremen caught my eye and beamed so widely that his handsome mustache nearly touched his ears. He jabbed a thick forefinger at his chest. In one of those spread-out Western voices evocative of endless plains and starlit camp-fires, he said, “Otto Bremen.”

My life appeared to be turning into a movie in which I had to invent my lines as I went along. I pointed at myself and said, “Ned Dunstan.”

“Drop in any time, Ned,” he told me. “Door’s always open.”

Two blocks west of Merchants Hotel, I turned into Grace Street and walked south toward the library. A congress of sparrows huddled on the sidewalk ascended in a flutter of wingbeats and sculpted an uptilted curve in the clean morning air. Shop windows bounced back slanting sunlight. I was present and not present, still in a movie. A boy with gilded eyes and sleek, shoulder-length hair stared down from the second-story window of a hairdressing salon. Directly across Grenville Street from the library was the foursquare brick structure of the Illinois State Provident.

A bank officer who looked about eighteen years old checked that I, along with Star Dunstan, was one of the box holders, led me downstairs, and asked me to sign a book and record the time. He let me into a chamber lined with numbered panels and indicated the panel that matched my key. I opened the panel, pulled out a wide steel container, placed it on the polished table, and worked the catch. A package wrapped in butcher paper had been wedged inside the box. From its weight and dimensions, I thought it was a photo album, and I would have opened it on the spot if I hadn’t been about to meet Laurie Hatch. I signed a form and carried the package upstairs and out through the front door.

Laurie was standing in front of the colonnade on the other side of Grenville Street. She was wearing a dark green silk blouse and fawn trousers, and her perfection transformed the sunlit street and the curving row of pillars into a backdrop. For a fraction of a second, the scene before me seemed as frozen in time as an advertisement in a magazine. Laurie broke into an incandescent smile, and I was no longer in a movie.

44

“I’m glad you’re early,” she said. “Stewart did his usual number and screwed up my plans. He has to bring Cobbie back around three o’clock. What’s in that package? Did you rob the bank?”

I told her about the key in the envelope and the safety-deposit box.

“It’s like a Russian doll. Inside the box is an envelope. Inside the envelope is a key that opens a box with another box inside it, and inside that box there’s a package wrapped in brown paper. Maybe it’s stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.” She took it from me and weighed it in her hands. “However, it feels more like a photo album.”

“If it turns out to be a fortune in hundred-dollar bills, I’ll split it with you.”

“I’d settle for a good lunch. Let’s put your fortune in my car. I’m parked right across the street.”

She slid the package under the Mountaineer’s backseat. “Nice car,” I said. “You ought to be ferrying lion hunters across the veldt.”

“My
father
did things like that, but I don’t. Stewart thought this was the proper vehicle for a suburban mother, so this is what I have.” Laurie linked her arm through mine. “Let’s see Hugh. He’ll be thrilled.”

“So who is this Hugh Coventry character?”

“Well, hmmm. Let me give you his short-form bio.” She cocked her head. “Hugh Coventry broke from his ancestral New England after getting his history degree from Yale by entering graduate school at Northwestern. When he discovered that a lot of history Ph.D.s were driving cabs, he transferred into library science.”

She waited for the straight line. “Weird move,” I said.

“You think?” We glided on ahead. “Hugh is in love with libraries. His M.A. thesis came out of a summer spent rollicking amongst the parish records of his family’s church in Marblehead, Massachusetts. He’s a computer genius, he likes to work nights and weekends, and he never gets mad at anyone. Ever since he took over, the Edgerton library ticks like a Swiss clock. Hugh Coventry is practically a saint!”

One day, Coventry had wandered out of the library, down Grove Street to City Hall, and into the Records Office to inquire about volunteering. The Records Office spread wide its official arms and said, Come right in, Mr. Coventry. Within a year, the managers of every department in the building were seeking Hugh Coventry’s assistance. In his second year as a volunteer, consultations with the mayor’s staff had resulted in instant access on the part of His Honor to block-by-block voting records, numbers of arrests and convictions on specific charges, welfare statistics, and other matters essential to governance. Thereafter, Coventry had been given the run of the building.

Two years before, when Edgerton’s upcoming 150th birthday had presented itself as an occasion for celebration, the new co-chairmen of the Sesquicentennial Committee, Stewart Hatch and Grenville Milton, asked for Coventry’s aid in assembling a visual record of the city’s past. The job spoke to his interest in local history, it called upon his organizational talents, it gave
him yet another means of embedding himself within his adopted city. Laurie had met him when Rachel Milton had installed her on the committee, to which Rachel gave three afternoons a week. The arrangement had endured until Laurie’s defection from her marriage.