Shackles (19 page)

“What else did he say? Please, Ms. Belford, try to remember.”

Another sigh. “He … let me think a moment …” She took ten moments. Then, “He said he was looking for a quiet, isolated mountain cabin because he … some sort of project he was working on and he didn’t want to be disturbed by anyone. He said he wanted to hole up for the winter … those were his exact words.”

“Did he want to see the cabin before renting it?”

“No. He asked me several questions … I showed him photographs, we always prepare multiple photos of our listings. When I told him the price he said it would do just fine.”

“How did he pay?”

“With a cashier’s check.”

“Went away and got it and came back?”

“Yes.”

“Which bank?”

Still another breathy sound. “The Bank of Alex Brown, a branch in downtown Sacramento. Now really, I … we’re closing on a property later this morning and I have to … I can’t take any more time to answer questions …”

“Just one more. What was the date?”

“Date?”

“That he came in. That he signed the rental agreement.”

“November second, last year. Now is that
all
?”

“Yes, ma’am. I appreciate your time—”

“Thank Mr. Lanier,” she said, and hung up on me.

I put the receiver down. November second. Almost five weeks before he’d abducted me—plenty of time to buy all the things he would need, make two or three or four trips to the cabin, install the ringbolt and the chain, complete the rest of his preparations. But how long before November second had he got his idea? How long had it been in the planning stages? Not sixteen years, not anywhere near that long, or he’d have acted on it years ago … unless he
couldn’t
act on it. Suppose he’d been in prison, or some sort of mental facility? That could be it. But then where had he gotten the money for the cabin rental, for all the provisions and the rest of the stuff he’d needed? Had it before he was put away? Borrowed it from friends or relatives? Stole it? Probably didn’t matter—but then again, could be it did.

One thing I knew for sure: Lawrence Jacobs wasn’t his name. He would not have wanted his real name on the rental agreement in case anything went haywire with his plan. That was one of the reasons he’d paid with a cashier’s check. The other was that handing over a large amount of cash might have made Susan Belford curious, if not actively suspicious.

James Lanier and I had little to say to each other. He showed me to the door, and we spent a few seconds wishing each other well before I went across to the car. When I drove away he was walking back to his garden, a slow-moving, solitary figure marking time, trying to find ways to fill up the rest of his days until—faith and hope being what they are—he could be with his Clara again.

K Street was one of Sacramento’s central thoroughfares, and 4719 was no more than a couple of miles from the capitol building and all the other not-so-hallowed halls of state government. Still, it was a marginal neighborhood of lower income apartment houses and small business establishments. The building I wanted was an old three-story apartment house, narrow and fronted by two of the city’s wealth of shade trees, wedged between another apartment house and a cut-rate liquor store. I parked down the block, went up into the vestibule. Six mailboxes, each with a name Dymo-labeled on the front. None of the names was Lawrence Jacobs; none of them was familiar. The one on the box marked with the numeral 1, O. Barnwell, had the letters “Mgr” after it.

I tried the entrance door. Locked. But through its leaded glass panels I could see someone in the dim hallway inside—a man up on an aluminum stepladder next to a flight of stairs, changing a light bulb in a ceiling fixture. I rapped on the door with my knuckles, and when he heard that and leaned down to look my way, I gestured for him to let me in. He didn’t do it. He must have been able to see me well enough through the glass to decide I was nobody he knew or particularly cared to deal with: He made a go-away gesture and leaned back up to the ceiling fixture.

I did some more knocking, this time with my fist. And I kept on doing it, harder and louder, until the racket finally brought him down off the ladder and over to the door. He took another, scowling look at me through the glass, yanked the door open, and said angrily, “Chrissake, what’s the fuggin idea?”

“You the manager? Mr. Barnwell?”

“Yeah. But we got no vacancies—”

“I’m not looking for an apartment. I’m looking for a man who calls himself Lawrence Jacobs.”

“Who?”

“Lawrence Jacobs. He lived here around the first of November last year.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Were you the manager back then?”

“I said I never heard of him.”

He started to push the door closed. I got a shoulder up against it and pushed harder than he did, hard enough to crowd him backward and let me slide in through the opening. The hallway was clean enough but it stank of disinfectant, old wood, somebody’s chicken and garlic recipe. It stank of Barnwell, too—sweat and beer and the too-sweet odor of cheap aftershave.

Behind him, down the hall past the ladder, a door to the ground-floor front apartment opened and a skinny blond woman poked her head out. But Barnwell was too busy glaring at me to notice. He was in his late forties, lard-bellied, balding, with a tattoo on one bare forearm—the name Maggie intertwined with blue-stemmed red roses. He had eaten something with ketchup on it in the past few days: There was a streak of dried tomato red across the front of his sleeveless sweatshirt.

“What the hell you think you’re doin, pal?”

“Looking for Lawrence Jacobs. I told you that.”

“And I already told you—”

“Sure you did. Now tell me the truth.”

“Listen—”

“I will, as soon as you start to talk.”

“I don’t have to fuggin talk to you.”

“Don’t you?” I said, soft.

We looked at each other for a time. His features softened first, like wax under a flame; then the anger in his eyes cooled; and then his gaze slid away and a tic began to jump on one puffy cheek. He said, “What are you, a cop?”

“Could be. And maybe I’m somebody you want to mess with even less than a cop. Capisce, mi amico?”

He didn’t like that; I had meant it to scare him and it did. Enough so that there would be no need for me to show him the .22. He backed up a step, and he must have seen the woman hanging out of the open doorway because her jerked his head toward her and snapped, “Goddamn it, Maggie, get your ass back inside!” She gave him the finger, but she didn’t argue or waste any time pulling her head in and slamming the door. So much for blue-stemmed red roses and the sentiment that went with them.

Barnwell put his eyes back on me, still didn’t like what he saw, and let his gaze slide off sideways again. He was nervous now; the tic on his cheek had worsened. He lifted a hand to poke at it, kept the hand there as if it and the arm were a protective shield between us.

He said, “Lawrence Jacobs, right?”

“That was the name he was using.”

“Okay. Okay. But I dunno his real name, I swear it.”

“How long was he here?”

“A week or so, that’s all.”

“Come on, Mr. Barnwell, you don’t rent out apartments for a week or so. We both know that.”

“He didn’t
live
here, he was just stayin here.”

“With one of the other tenants?”

“Frank Tucker. He was a pal of Tucker’s.”

“Tucker isn’t one of the names on the mailboxes.”

“He moved out back in December.”

“Did he? Where to?”

“Vacaville, I think. Yeah, Vacaville.”

“Where in Vacaville?”

“I dunno.” But then he paused, and something dark and bitter flickered in his expression. “My old lady might,” he said. “I can ask her, you want.”

“You do that. But not just yet. How well do you know this Frank Tucker?”

“I don’t know him. I don’t wanna know him.”

“Why not?”

“I got reasons.”

His old lady being one of them, I thought. Maggie of the blue-stemmed roses. But there was nothing for me in his domestic problems. I asked him, “Frank Tucker his real name?”

“Far as I know.”

“What does he look like?”

“Big bastard, must weigh two-fifty, two-sixty. Arms like fuggin cement posts. Black greasy hair, like Presley used to wear his. You know?”

I knew—and I didn’t know. The description meant nothing to me. “How old?”

“Forty, forty-five.”

“What does he do for a living?”

“Said he was a truck driver.”

“But you don’t think so?”

“None of my business what he does.”

“Talk to me, Mr. Barnwell. What do you think Tucker does for his money, if it isn’t driving a truck?”

“Strong-arm stuff, okay? That’s what I think.”

“What kind of strong-arm stuff?”

“Any kind. Strikebreakin, head-bustin, shit like that.”

“What about Lawrence Jacobs? That his line of work too?”

“Nah, not him. Too small, not mean enough.”

“What does
he
do for a living, then?”

“He never said and I never asked.”

“He just stayed here with Tucker for a week of so. Stayed in Tucker’s apartment the whole time?”

“Well, he went out most days.”

“With Tucker?”

“Nah, alone. Just crashin with Tucker. Or maybe …” Barnwell let the sentence trail away.

“Or maybe what?”

“I always thought there was somethin funny about him. Tucker, too, kind of. Queer, you know?”

“Meaning you think they had a homosexual relationship?”

“Could be. Tucker likes broads too”—the dark and bitter thing touched his face again—“but Jacobs, he looked pure fuggin fag to me.”

The gospel according to O. Barnwell, philosopher and sage. But how much truth was in it? I put it away for the time being—until, if, and when I could find somebody more reliable to bear witness.

I said, “Were Jacobs and Tucker old friends or new friends? How did it look to you?”

He thought about it. “Old friends, I guess. Yeah, they knew each other a while.”

“From where? Here in Sacramento, someplace else?”

“I dunno. They never said.”

“Is Tucker a Sacramento native?”

“He never said that neither.”

“How long had he been living here when Jacobs moved in?”

“Few months. He’s the kind moves around a lot.”

“He tell you beforehand Jacobs was moving in or did Jacobs just show up?”

“He told me. Said he had this buddy needed a place to crash for a week or two, till he found a place of his own. Didn’t ask if it was all right, just told me Jacobs was comin. But what the hell, why should I care? I don’t own the fuggin building.”

“You talk to Jacobs much while he was here?”

“Nah, I don’t like fags.”

“Then how come you lied for him?”

Barnwell hadn’t been looking at me much, had done most of his talking to the floor or to spots to my left and right. But now his gaze slithered back to my face, held there long enough for him to say, “Hah?” and then went roving again.

“You told a woman at a Carmichael real estate firm that Jacobs lived here, had an apartment in this building. You told her he’d been here for some time, paid his rent promptly, had a steady job.”

“Oh yeah, that. Sure. But it wasn’t no big deal. He give me twenty bucks, so why not?”

“He tell you what his reasons were?”

“So he could get a place he wanted up there. Carmichael. Said the real estate outfit wouldn’t rent it to him if they knew he didn’t have an address and was out of work.”

“If he was out of work, where did he get the money to rent a place?”

“He never said.”

“And you didn’t ask.”

“Why should I? It wasn’t none of my business.”

“How long after that did Jacobs move out?”

“Couple of days. He must of got the place he wanted in Carmichael, hah?”

Yeah, I thought, he got the place he wanted, but not in Carmichael. “You ever hear from him again?”

“Nossir, never.”

“Or from Tucker since he moved?”

“Not me.” His mouth turned down at the corners: anger, bitterness, self-pity. “Maybe my old lady heard. You want me to ask her now? Or you want to?”

“You do it, in private.” It was easier that way. He could get things out of her that she’d be reluctant to tell a stranger, even a stranger playing the kind of role I was. Besides, if he was alone when he told her about me, he’d build me up into something pretty nasty—use me as a club to punish her for her real or imagined dallying with Frank Tucker. O. Barnwell, loving husband. “I’ll wait here,” I said. “One thing, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t call anybody while you’re inside. And don’t call anybody after I leave.”

“I won’t. Who would I call?”

“Because if you do,” I said, “I’ll find out and I’ll come back. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

“Nossir,” he said to a point three feet on my left. “You don’t have to worry, I won’t want no trouble. I’m just a guy tryin to get along, that’s all.”

“Sure you are. Don’t be long, Mr. Barnwell.”

He went back past the ladder, moving sideways as if he were afraid to put his back to me, and disappeared inside the ground-floor apartment. A little time passed. I leaned against the wall next to the front door and smelled the building’s secretions and thought about Lawrence Jacobs and Frank Tucker. Names, just names. And meaningless descriptions that fit dozens of people whose paths had crossed mine at one time or another. Where did Jacobs fit into the short, unpleasant life of Jackie Timmons? And did Tucker fit into it at all?

Voices began to filter out through the wall from Apartment 1—loud voices that kept getting louder. Barnwell shouting, Maggie shouting back. Then there were other voices, something falling over, a yell of pain, a screech that evolved into the words “You stinking
animal
!” and finally, when the door down there opened and Barnwell reappeared, the steady sound of sobbing.

Barnwell looked pleased with himself as he approached me: The fat worm had turned, and in the process had discovered he still had some sting in his tail. He was a sweetheart, he was. People like him … what made them that way? But I knew the answer; the answer was simple. Life made them that way. The hard, bad, sad, grinding task of living the lives they had constructed for themselves.