Troubled Waters (30 page)

Which made me remember, really remember, Kenny Gebhardt. A kid. A kid with a lot of years ahead of him. Sure, I'd been upset by his death when it happened. But now that almost thirty years had passed, thirty years during which I'd lived and loved, I felt the real tragedy of Kenny's passing.

What kind of man would he have been? What would he have done with his astonishing intelligence? Would he have fathered children, made love to a wife?

Someone had deliberately stolen all those years from him. And it looked as if the same someone had tried to steal the rest of Jan's life from her.

“Let's go on a comic book hunt,” Ted said, rising from his chair.

“It's after ten,” I pointed out. “Are the stores going to be open?”

“We can start with drugstores. They stay open late.” Ted made for the door. I followed, keeping up with difficulty.

The first two drugstores we hit were a bust. I started waxing nostalgic, picking up an
Archie
and saying, “Gee, I didn't know they were still publishing these. I always liked Veronica. Betty was such a goody two-shoes.”

Ted had a
Spider-Man
in his hand. “This guy was my hero,” he said. “I liked the way he climbed up buildings with his suction-cup hands.”

But no
Metal Men
.

At the third store, we found out why. “Those are out-of-print,” the man behind the counter said. “You'll have to go to a specialty store. There's a guy down on Tenth Street, near the library, sells old comics. Maybe he'll have what you're looking for.”

A place on Tenth Street near the library. I wasn't the Toledoan; I waited for Ted to find the place, driving slowly up and down the dilapidated street with its bail-bondsmen and pawnshops. Nothing was open. “Maybe we should come back tomorrow,” I said.

Ted just kept driving. Finally we came to a lit storefront with a huge Green Lantern poster in the window. It was next to a plastic model of the starship
Enterprise
.

“This must be the place,” Ted said. He maneuvered his car into the nearest parking space.

The guy behind the desk reminded me of Zack. A Zack who'd never worked out, who weighed about ninety pounds less. But he had the leather and he had the tattoos. And he had the attitude.

“You look like Trekkies,” the guy said. “Baby-boomers usually want
Star Trek
stuff.”

Next to the door stood a huge standup of Worf, the Klingon, holding a phaser in his hand. Pasted to his shoulder was a hand-lettered sign that read, “Shoplifters will be nuked back to the Stone Age.”

“Under ordinary circumstances,” Ted replied, a smile in his voice, “we'd be happy to buy a life-size cutout of Jean-Luc Picard, but right now we're looking for a
Metal Men
comic book.”

“I thought you'd prefer the Counselor,” I murmured. The
zaftig
Betazoid stood in front of me, wearing her lavender jumpsuit and radiating sexuality even though she was made of cardboard. “I didn't know your taste ran to bald guys.”

“
Metal Men
?” Our host wrinkled his nose. “That's a toy comic,” he said. “Strictly for kids.” Then he brightened. “That's it, right? You two want it for your kid?”

Ted leaned toward the guy and said in a low voice, as if we were surrounded by listening ears, “We think someone used the Metal Men as a kind of code. We need a copy of the comic so we can translate the symbolism.”

“Wow,” the leather dude said, giving a long whistle. “That's heavy stuff. Like a Captain Midnight decoder ring, or something.”

Like this kid was old enough to remember Captain Midnight. Another Gen-X nostalgia-tripper. It would have been a nice shot in return for his baby-boomer crack, but I didn't say it. The poor guy couldn't help it that he was born twenty years too late.

We had easily risen to the top of his pyramid of customers, almost up there with people who knew obscure Japanese comic artists.

“So do you have a
Metal Men
, or what?” My patience was gone; I went into New York City mode.

It didn't faze the shopkeeper. “Yeah, back here,” he said, waving at a long table with cardboard boxes filled with comic books laid out on top. Each box was labeled in black marker. We found the one marked “Metal Men” and picked one out.

“Does it matter what year?” the guy asked.

“No,” Ted replied. “I guess any one will do. We just want to compare the symbols with this notebook.” To my surprise, he pulled Kenny's steno pad out of his windbreaker pouch pocket.

I wasn't sure why we were involving this flake in our business, but I followed Ted and Mr. Leather to the front counter. Ted opened the comic book and the notebook and set them next to one another.

“Here's a page identifying each of the Metal Men,” he said, pointing to the brightly colored illustrations.

Ted had been right. Each of the Metal Men—and one Metal Woman—bore a symbol on his forehead.

He looked carefully at each metal head, then at Kenny's notebook. Suddenly he broke into a delighted laugh.

“What?” I was looking just as closely, but—

“Look at Mercury.”

The character of Mercury was red; he had sharp features. The symbol on his forehead was the one usually associated with the female: a circle with a cross underneath. And little horns on top of the circle. The one we'd called the she-devil.

“That Mercury's a sarcastic dude,” the owner cut in. He was apparently more familiar with this “toy comic” than he'd wanted us to know.

It was his remark more than the picture itself that tipped me off. “You think Mercury is Rap?”

Ted nodded. “Yeah. And it fits. Mercury is quicksilver. It's changeable, it's hard to put your finger on.”

“That's Rap all right,” I agreed. “I always thought he was like a chameleon, except that instead of changing his color, he changes your color to his.”

My pulse quickened. We were actually getting somewhere. Ted had his own spiral notebook open; he made the mercury symbol and wrote “Mercury = RAP” on the blank page.

I looked more closely at the Gold Metal Man. His symbol was a circle with a dot inside. “Wes,” I said firmly. “He was the golden boy. I think he's Gold.”

Ted nodded. “I like it.” He wrote “Gold = WES” in the notebook and made the symbol mark next to it.

“There are only six Metal Men,” I pointed out. “But there were, what, nine of us?”

“And there's only one woman,” Ted agreed. He glanced at Kenny's book. “But he's got those P
₁
, P
₂
, P
₃
—I think
P
with the dot in the middle stands for Platinum. Since we had more than one woman in our group, he called each female Platinum, but designated them as One, Two, and Three.”

“Oh, great,” I said. “Now all we have to do is figure out which of us is which.”

“My guess is that Jan's P
₁
. She was his cousin, so she'd be the First Female in his mind.”

“Makes sense. Although I guess I always thought of Dana as the strongest woman in the group.”

“We can figure it out more clearly when we translate the code. Kenny made notes on what people said or did on specific dates. All we have to do is figure out who was actually where and then we'll know which person he's referring to.”

“I'll pretend I understood that,” I replied. “Now who's Lead?”

The symbol for Lead was the letter
L
. Which helped a lot, since we'd earlier thought the letter
L
was an initial.

“Lead's heavy,” Ted said in a musing tone.

“Tark.”

Ted nodded. “Yeah, I'll buy Tarky as Lead.” He made a note in his steno book. “Although I think the Lead character is a little slow, which certainly isn't Tark the Shark.”

“Tarky could be Iron,” I pointed out.

“We've got Tarky, Ron, and, I suppose, me,” Ted said, “to figure out. There's a skinny little guy called Tin. Seems to be like a mascot. That could be Kenny himself.”

“I wonder why he didn't differentiate between the women.” The question answered itself as soon as it left my lips. “Because he didn't see us as important enough to have separate identities. We were ‘the chicks.' He was sure none of us was a threat.”

“He was a kid,” Ted reminded me. “He was sixteen.”

I shook my head. “Thanks for trying to soften the blow, but he was just acting out what all you guys thought. Dana's right. We rolled the joints and brewed the herbal tea, but we weren't players. Not really.”

Ted wrote the name “RON” in his notebook and then laughed again. I was getting attached to that laugh; it was the delighted cry of a kid making a discovery. Before Ron's name he wrote the letter
I
.

“I get it. ‘I RON' equals Iron.” Then it was my turn to laugh.

“Which makes
you
Tin,” I finished. “Think about it. Why would he need a symbol for himself? There's only one Metal Man left, and it looks like you're him.”

“Tin's kind of a wimp,” the leather dude contributed.

The crestfallen look on Ted's face prompted me to say, “Maybe Kenny meant you in your Clark Kent mode. Mild-mannered reporter.”

“Thanks,” Ted replied with a wry smile. But he wrote it in his notebook. “Tin = TED.” He made the symbol and closed the comic book.

“How much?” he asked the proprietor.

“Six bucks.”

“Six bucks for a lousy comic book?” But he took out his wallet and handed over the cash.

As we walked toward the door, the dude asked, “You sure you guys don't want a ‘My Other Car Is a Federation Starship' bumper sticker?”

I shook my head, but then halfway to the door, I turned around and bought it for Ron's van.

It was late, but there was no way either of us was going to be able to sleep. We needed a place to sit in peace and cull through the notebook, decoding Kenny's observations. I suggested my motel room, not without a slight quiver of curiosity as to whether we might do more than read comic books.

An hour later, we'd learned some interesting things about our friends. We'd learned that Dana and Rap had a knockdown fight the night before the county fair. We found out that Kenny knew all about Ted and me making out under the weeping beech. We read Kenny's account of following the FBI man into the art museum and confirmed what he'd told us: that he never saw the person the FBI man met in the Swiss room.

There was a full account of the parathion switch. After he and Jan were finished, they'd driven back to his house, where he'd left the canister in his dad's garage. Unlocked.

But no smoking gun. We followed Kenny's story to the end, but there was nothing we didn't already know.

I flipped through the blank pages, stopping myself when I realized they weren't all blank. In the middle of Kenny's steno book there was one page with a note dated the morning of his death.

“Give me the translation sheet,” I said. “There's one more entry we haven't done.”

Ted handed me his code-breaker.

“It says here,” I said slowly, “that Iron was in contact with the FBI.”

“Wait a minute.” Ted leapt up from his chair and hovered over my shoulder. “I thought Iron was Ron.”

“So did I. But there is no way on God's earth,” I said, hitting the little table with my fist, “that I'm going to believe my brother was the one who sold us out.”

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-S
IX

The next morning, I met Harve Sobel in the rear booth at Posner's Deli. The place smelled almost like Junior's back in Brooklyn. I considered getting a bagel with lox and cream cheese, then decided that was asking too much of Toledo. I picked up coffee and a bialy and slid into a straight chair across from the old warhorse.

“So are we going to do anything today, or is this just a meaningless appearance?” I took a sip of weak coffee. “I mean, what can you do if your defendant is in intensive care?”

“Well, for one thing,” Harve said, “I can tell you what my daughter finally decided to tell me.”

That remark did more to open my eyes than the coffee. “But I talked to Dana.”

“She didn't tell you everything.” Harve's voice was heavy with phlegm. He hawked and spat into a cloth handkerchief.

I waited with barely concealed impatience. “She did say something about Rap being involved in something dangerous.”

Harve shook his head. Long strands of gray, stiff hair were stretched over his balding scalp. It curled slightly at the ends, which were yellowed like the pages of an old book. “This wasn't about Rap. This was about her and Walt Koeppler.”

I choked on my coffee. “Luke Stoddard said something about Dana making a deal with Walt, but I thought he was putting me on. Don't tell me she really—”

“No,” he said, holding up a meaty hand. “This was actually pretty clever, although I wish she'd told me about it at the time.”

“Harve, please put me out of my misery and tell me what you're talking about.”

“She pretended to sell out. She told Koeppler when and where they were going to move this Joaquín Baltasar. And then they pulled a switch. This Joaquín shaved off his world-famous mustache and put on Rap's T-shirt and baseball cap, and Rap got a stage mustache and a cigar and pretended to be Joaquín. So Walt Koeppler followed the wrong couple. He stopped Dana and Rap just this side of the Michigan border, while Jan and the real Joaquín went in the opposite direction.”

“Only to be stopped by the DEA,” I said slowly. I was thinking aloud. I was also wondering why Ron hadn't told me about the switch.

“That's why the whole thing was dropped at the time,” Harve said. “The feds screwed up big-time. They were looking to nab this Joaquín fella and he gets away. The DEA agent thinks he's busting Rap on drugs and instead…” Harve trailed off and raised his hands in a you-know-what-happened-next gesture.