The Snowfly (51 page)

“You ever have to use that thing?” I asked her.

She looked at me quizzically. “Never even unholstered it. Why?”

“Just wondering.”

“Girlfriend cop as personal problem?”

“No, nothing like that.” I told her about my folks, my learning to shoot, Vietnam.

“A gun is just a tool, Bowie,” she said, sitting down beside me. “No more, no less. A cop's real weapon is talk, not lead.”

I wasn't reassured. “Would you use it?”

“You mean,
could
I use it. I don't honestly know, but I have to think I could, if it came down to that. If I couldn't, I should find another line of work. You can write about bad guys from a distance. I have to smell their sweat. Why are we talking about this?”

“Are you a good shot?”

“I'm not Annie Oakley,” she said with a forced smile. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

I wanted to tell her to take off her uniform and gun and get back into bed. I wanted to fold my arms around her and keep the world away from her. But I couldn't say what I felt.

“It was a great vacation,” I said.

She kissed me tenderly and whispered, “Worrywart.” Then she was up and all business. “See you tonight.”

“I have to go to New York,” I said. This was the first time I'd mentioned it.

She took it in stride. “When will you be back?”

“You mean,
will
I?”

She smiled. “You'll be back, big boy.”

“I don't quite know when. I'll call you.”

“This time I know you will,” she said.

I walked her out to her cop car and we kissed good-bye. I had never told a woman I loved her, but I was about to. Ingrid put her hand over my mouth and smiled. “Not now, not yet, not like this.” My mind reader.

20

Grady Yetter had once told me you could tell the world's current geopolitical losers by the language predominating in New York cabs. On my hop from La Guardia into Manhattan, my driver was South Vietnamese.

I had a reservation at the Visigoth, a small residential hotel on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village. I called Yetter from a pay phone.

“Jesus,” he said when he heard my voice. “You're alive?”

Did I detect less humor in his voice than usual? “No thanks to you.”

“Always the carping. It looked like a good setup.” He added, “If you're looking for work, it's still bleak here.”

Such directness was not like him. “Just dinner,” I said.

There was a pregnant hesitation in his voice. “You're here?”

“Hey, I'm your find, remember?”

He reluctantly agreed to meet me and I smelled trouble.

We met at one of his Irish watering holes on Second Avenue. We shook hands. He piled his overcoat in the corner of the booth. I already had a glass of Guinness on the table for him. He took a long pull that left froth on his upper lip.

“So,” I said. “You look good.”

Yetter stared at his beer. “What do you want, kid?” His eyes stayed down.

“I have to want something? Old pals can't have dinner, swap war stories?”

“I couldn't hire you back if I wanted to. I don't know what you did over there, kid, but you obviously broke some big ballskis.”

“You want the story?”

Finally, he looked up. “No, kid. I don't
ever
want to know. Our suits and lawyers have been visited by spooks. They didn't specifically order you kept off the payroll, but they said you should never leave the country again for UPI if we don't want the FCC and IRS and who the hell knows who else shoving their microscopes up our keisters. You pissed off the Russians and Washington, kid. That's quite an accomplishment. I've been in this business forty years. I think my reporters should make snakes rattle, but this . . .
this
went way beyond that. I don't know what you did, but son, you've sure got the federal snakes buzzing. Take my advice, get your ass back to middle America and stay put.”

“Or?”

“Just do it, Bowie.”

 

•••

 

I didn't follow Yetter's advice. Instead, I went to the New York City Public Library when it opened the next morning and asked to see the head research librarian.

His name was Robert Peterson and he wore a gold loop earring in his right ear. It caught the light when he moved his head. I told him I was a journalist looking for information on M. J. Key, published works and unpublished works, and that I had been led to believe the library could help.

He was gone for about an hour and sent a woman to tell me to come back later that afternoon.

“Nothing,” he said, when we met again.

“What about other institutions? You're connected to other places, right?”

“I've checked. There's nothing. There's no M. J. Key on our shelves. No M. J. Key in our catalogs. No record of any M. J. Key publications, published or not, in the index of the Library of Congress. Nothing in our sources on out-of-print works. You must have the name wrong. Or something.”

Or something, was right. Key was disappearing from library references and I had a hunch the government was behind it. Danny had found Key's works here before, and now references to them were gone. Was this widespread, and if so, why? I didn't know how many of Key's books had been in print, but there was no way they could all be collected physically. Not even Uncle Sam could do that. Not that they had to physically remove the books. All they had to do was remove card-catalog entries and cross-references. Not a small job, but doable if this was what they were up to. The old fellow at Michigan Tech had similarly come up empty. At the time I thought it was his incompetence; now I had to wonder. And somebody had removed Key's books' index cards from York Gentry's collection. Was all of this connected? I had no way of knowing unless I kept pushing ahead. The more barriers that got thrown in my way, the more determined I was to break them down or find a way around them.

The CIA had debriefed Valoretev and me in Sweden. And the government was threatening UPI if they employed me again. I thought about this and all I could come up with was M. J. Key. I had wanted to interview Brezhnev and this had cost a man his life. My dogged pursuit of the rubber-bullet story in England had cost Jen Chia Yi Yi her life as well. My refusal to back off had left blood on my hands, and it was clear now that the Key manuscript was anything but a simple fishing book. On the other hand, the Russians had let it go back to the West. Did they know what they had, or had it been bought for the Kremlin strictly as a collector's item, as Valoretev had said? What the hell was in the manuscript that was making my own government so determined to make all mention of it disappear?

I called Ingrid but got no answer. She was probably still on patrol. You could never find a cop when you needed one. And she was conscientious. She would never quit early.

Neither would I.

I went over to Grand Central Station that evening, stopped at a newsstand, and looked at a New York State atlas. The next morning I took the New York Central an hour and a half north.

The village of Rhinecliff was built on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River; it was spring, newly bloomed forsythia blazed yellow, and there were buds on the trees. The station was several hundred yards north of the village square and I enjoyed the walk in soft air. I noticed that all the houses had mailboxes. Not a good sign for what I sought.

The village square was triangular. There was a stone monument to the war dead in the center of a patch of old grass. The post office was between a hotel and a bar.

There weren't all that many brass boxes in the post office. Each had four knobs to rotate to a combination number. I found Box Forty-Five and peeked in. It was empty.

I went to the service counter and tapped the hand bell on the counter. A man in a green eyeshade appeared. I told him I was thinking about moving to the area. Did residents have a choice of boxes or delivery?

“Everything's delivered,” he said.

“Then why the boxes?”

“Seasonal people,” he said with disdain.

“Do you know Raina Chickerman or M. J. Key?”

“Sorry,” he said. “I'm not the answer man.”

“Is there a newspaper in town?”

“There's the weekly
Gazette
up in Rhinebeck.”

“How far is that?”

“Four, five miles.”

“Is there cab service?”

“From the train station,” he said.

“I was there and didn't see any.”

The man shrugged.

“How about a pay phone?”

“Outside the Sugar Cone.” Before I could ask what this was and where, he pointed. “The ice cream shop is back up the hill and to the right. You can't miss it.”

The telephone was inside. I got a directory from the girl working the ice cream counter and called the
Gazette.

The editor's name was VanDenBerg. I told him I was a reporter from Michigan and asked to use his morgue. When I got back to the train station there was a cab. The driver wore a baby blue porkpie hat.

“You from L.A.?” the cabbie asked.

“Michigan,” I told him.

“Tigers,” he said. “They're okay. I guess I can take ya. Friggin' creeps from L.A. can walk.” Another clan encountered.

Milt VanDenBerg (he told me he was named for Milton Eisenhower, not Milton Berle) gave me a cup of coffee and took me to his microfilm file.

“Looking for something in particular?” he asked.

“Two people. M. J. Key and Raina Chickerman.”

“Never heard of 'em. You try the City Directory?”

I drew a blank. “What's that?”

“Lists everybody. Got one in every town in America.”

“You've got one?”

“Yes, sir.”

I looked, but there was neither Chickerman nor Key. I did, however, find an R. Smith, which was the name Raina had used in Grand Marais. The address was Box 45, Rhinecliff. My heart raced.

I told VanDenBerg I had found a name, but only a box number.

“That would be a city person,” he said. “We get a lot of 'em. Probably comes up weekends and summers. City people got their own ways.” The values were obviously not shared.

“Do they use a box if they don't want their mail delivered?”

“Wouldn't surprise me any,” the editor said. “Could be they sublet a different place every summer. City people like to jump around. Real grasshoppers.”

“Is there a listing of sublets?”

“Only if a Realtor handled them, but we've got so much demand up here that people don't need to throw money away. It's cheaper to run an ad with me. I've got subscribers all over the place.”

“Are your subscriber lists public?”

“Nope, that is a matter of privacy. And you could be the agent of a competitor.”

“I'm not. Could you take a look for me?”

“Not sure I could do that.”

“I can pay.”

“That would be unethical.”

“For your time and effort, not the names. Call it professional courtesy.”

“I can do that.” He waited until I gave him a twenty and wrote the names for him.

When he came back, he was smiling. “No Raina Chickerman, no M. J. Key, no R. Smith.”

Which amounted to another wall, hit nose-first.

“Sold an ad to another Chickerman, though,” he added after a long pause.

“Who?”

“Time's money.”

“Gus Chickerman,” I said and I saw by Milt VanDenBerg's face that I had guessed it.

The editor gave me an address and I knew Raina wouldn't be there but I had to look. I took a cab to the house, had the driver wait, and walked the grounds. The place was small, more cottage than house, and it was empty. All the shades were up. A mildewed
for sale
sign was stuck in the front yard beside a hedge gone wild.

I wrote down the name of the realty company and paid a visit. Another twenty bucks got me the name of the person who wanted the house sold: Eubanks!

It remained a wall, but now I knew she had been here and that Raina's movements had not been the mystery her late parents had led me to believe. And Eubanks was involved.

I caught a cab back to Rhinecliff and took the train north to Albany. It was easier to get a flight from there than to go back into New York City.

On the flight from Albany to Detroit I sat beside a woman with pale blue hair who silently read a Bible, moving her lips and tracing each word with her forefinger. She stopped reading when we hit some air pockets. She closed her eyes tight and began to lose her color.

“It'll settle down,” I told her.

She did not look at me.

When the air grew smoother, she immediately went back to reading.

After a moment, she snapped the book shut with a pop and looked at me. “Are you a Believer, sir?”

When I didn't answer, she said, “Do you put your life in the hands of the Big Fisherman?”

“M. J. Key?”

She said, “Blasphemer.”

 

•••

 

I had always loved reading detective stories and I had known my share of cops and security types; stories found neat resolution, tightly engineered by their authors, but real investigators, cops or reporters, rarely found easy or quick answers. Less than two-thirds of murders in cities were ever solved. Reality was eternally messy.

I claimed my car in Detroit and pointed myself north. I could not wait to see Ingrid. By Alma it was snowing. By Mount Pleasant the snowstorm had intensified, making it impossible to see, but blind as I was to the outer world, I had a crystal-clear view of my inner world and it was a startling sight. I had missed Ingrid as I had never missed anyone in my life.

I also thought about something else. My old man had always said, “What goes around, comes around.” I had been butting up against M. J. Key since college and I had no doubt that this wouldn't be the last time. Raina Chickerman was the key to Key. I didn't know how or why, but I knew it was true.

It was nearly sunrise when I got to Dog River and headed west. I drove toward Ingrid's, but the snow had drifted high and a half mile away was as close as I could get. I walked the rest of the way leaning into a howling wind and when I climbed onto the drifted-over porch I pounded on the door.

“You're freeezing,” she said when she opened the door.

Snow was melting on my face. “I love you,” I said.

She looked at me for a long time.

I asked, “Now, like this?”

Ingrid held out her arms and smiled. “Exactly the way I imagined it.”