Fire Lake (18 page)

"You haven't seen him this week, have you?"
I said.

Silverstein shook his head. "I haven't seen
Lonnie or Karen in almost nineteen years."

He reached into his jacket and pulled a cigarette out
of a gold case. I hadn't noticed in the office, but the man was
wearing a good deal of gold jewelry--rings, a Rolex. He'd obviously
made some money and liked to show it off. Maybe that was what his
wife held against him.

Silverstein lit his cigarette with a gold lighter.
Inhaling deeply, he blew a huge cloud of smoke out of his mouth.
"What kind of trouble is Lonnie in?"

"Drugs," I said.

He nodded. "It figures. And I guess you told
Leanne about it?"

"Yeah."

"That explains it. Lonnie's always been a god to
her. A fucking god." He dropped the cigarette onto the carpet
and crushed it angrily with his shoe. Bending down, he plucked the
butt off the floor and stuck it in his jacket pocket, then toed at
the carpeting until the ash mark had been rubbed away. The office
door opened and Karen and Leanne stepped out.

"I'll be in touch if I hear anything,"
Leanne said to her.

Karen said, "Fine." She turned to Jon. "The
last time I saw you, you were delivering mail on Calhoun Street and
hawking concert tickets on the side."

Jon Silverstein ducked his head. "That was ages
ago."

Karen smiled and touched Jon gently on the arm. "It's
good to see you."

Silverstein looked up at her and smiled back. "It's
really good to see you again too." A bit of enthusiasm returned
to his face. "Maybe we could all go to lunch. I've got the four
fifty outside. We'll hop in and drive over to the Maisonette. Talk
over old times. I'll treat. Or we could go out to the farm. Have
Grandma make us some grub."

Leanne Silverstein turned abruptly on her heel and
walked back into her office.

Silverstein's face fell again. "Maybe not,"
he said with a long sigh. "Good luck to you, Karen. I hope you
find Lonnie."

He followed his wife into the office and closed the
door behind him.
 

25

It began to snow again as we walked up Fourth Street.
At first there were just a few flakes, then it started coming down
like a hard rain. For several minutes the snow fell so thickly that
it was impossible to see. I pulled Karen into an alcove in front of a
shop window, and we stood there for a while, watching the snow sweep
in wind-driven sheets up the deserted street.

"Did Leanne tell you anything else?" I
asked.

Karen shook her head. "She just wanted a moment
to collect herself and to cry on my shoulder a little about Jon."

"Not a happy marriage," I said.

"No," Karen said sadly. "It's weird,
but I kind of feel for her. Even though I don't like her, I feel
sorry for her." She laughed mordantly. "Christ, she's
wearing pearls and I'm feeling bad! I don't know why it is that
Leanne can always manage to make me feel guilty."

I laughed. "I felt sorry for him."

"Don't," Karen said. "In spite of the
way it looked in there, Jon's nobody's victim. He could always take
care of himself. Even when he worked as a postman, he had a knack for
turning a dollar. And it looks like he's still doing a pretty good
job of it. But Leanne . . . it seems like she's been hanging by the
same thread since the day I met her. It's no surprise that it's
finally wearing through." Karen sighed. "Oh, for God's
sake, what do I care? So she's rich and unhappy. So what? She's got
her life. And I've got mine. Jon was right--none of it worked out the
way anyone planned. The important thing is to keep moving forward,
like the Marine Corps manual says."

I smiled at her. "How do you know about the
Marine Corps manual?"

"My brother, Tom, was a Marine," she said
with a touch of pride. "Tough Tom. Tough guy."

Karen stared out at the snow. There was snow all over
her jacket, in her hair, on her face. I brushed some of it off with
my hand.

"Give me a kiss, huh?" she said, turning
toward me. "I could use one."

I kissed her.

When the storm let up for a moment, we walked quickly
up to the parking lot where we'd left the Pinto. Once we got inside
the car, I took the bottles of muscle relaxant and painkiller
out of my pocket and swallowed a couple of pills--dry.

"You hurt?" Karen said, eyeing me with
concern.

"I'm all right," I told her.

She started up the car and pulled out of the lot onto
Fourth. "Do we have a plan?" she said.
I
shrugged. "Go see Norvelle, I guess."

"He isn't likely to tell us anything we want to
know, is he?" Karen said. "I mean, if he's dealing drugs
..."

"I'll persuade him," I said dryly. "The
important thing is to find Lonnie and to find out what happened to
the crack."

I didn't say it to Karen, but it was also important
to find out who Norvelle's connection was, assuming that Thomas was
the one who put Lonnie in touch with the man. I was hoping that
Leanne Silverstein could help us with that. If I got a name from her,
I might be able to do a little business of my own with Lonnie's
supplier. Once I got Bo and his friends off my back, I could deal
with Jordan. And I planned to deal with him, in my own time.

Because of the blizzard, it took us almost thirty
minutes to drive up Gilbert to McMillan. By the time we turned onto
the little East Walnut Hills side street called Cross Lane, the
streets and sidewalks were covered with several inches of snow.

The house that Leanne Silverstein had directed us to
was a ramshackle two-story frame Victorian, with a screened-in front
porch and a turret window on the second story. It sat at the end of
the block, on the verge of an empty lot. The porch screen was full of
holes and several of the upper-story windows had been pasted over
with cardboard. There was a single lamp on in the turret window,
glowing a warm yellow in the blowing snow.

Karen parked in front of the house. Before she could
get out of the car, I said, "Maybe you better stay here."

She turned on the seat and gave me a questioning
look. "But you don't know him."

"He's a tall black junkie," I said. "I'll
find him."

"I mean, you won't know him to talk to,"
Karen said.

"I don't think old times are going to get us
anywhere with Norvelle. You said it yourself, Karen. He isn't going
to want to talk about a drug deal, especially one that's gone as bad
as this one has."

She looked down at the steering wheel. "You're
not going to hurt him, are you, Harry?"

"I'm not planning to."

"Remember that he's a junkie. All he cares about
is getting well and getting off. The most important person in his
life is his connection, and he won't give the man's name up easily."

"What do you suggest?"

"That I come in there with you."

I shook my head.

"I can talk to him, Harry. I know where he's at.
I've been there myself."

I stared at her for a second and sighed. "All
right, Karen.

But for chrissake, if anything goes wrong in that
house, just come back to the car and drive away."

"Without you?"

"Without me," I said.

"You're scaring me," she said with a shaken
look.

I said, "Good. Because this is likely to be a
scary place."

We got out of the car and walked through the blowing
snow to the porch. As we stepped up to the front door, I caught the
sound of heavy metal coming through the iced-over front window--Kiss,
I thought. Inside that front room a girl laughed shrilly and shouted
something obscene at someone else. I patted my coat pocket--the one
with the pistol in it-and knocked on the paneled wooden door.

When no one answered, I pounded on the door with my
fist. Someone turned the volume down on the stereo, and a few seconds
later a short towheaded girl, with a pale freckled face and greasy
pigtails, opened the door a crack and peeked out. She was wearing a
blue gingham dress with a man's red cardigan sweater draped over her
shoulders. An unlit cigarette drooped from her mouth. The girl eyed
me hostilely and shivered against the cold. She would have been
pretty if she hadn't looked so strung out. Her arms were like sticks,
and her face was careworn and darkly ringed around the eyes. She
couldn't have been more than fifteen; but in most of the ways that
counted, she'd never get any older than she already was.

"What do you want?" she said belligerently.
Her voice had an Appalachian twang to it.

"I want to talk to Norvelle Thomas."

"Are you his social worker?" she said.

It looked like that might be good enough to get us
through

the door. I said, "Yes."

Karen glanced at me, then smiled at the girl. "We're
friends of Norvelle's."

The girl stepped back from the door and pulled the
sweater tightly around her chest. "Well, come in, then,"
she said. "I ain't gonna stand here catching pneumonia."

We walked into a tiny hall. The girl slammed the door
behind us. I could see a living room through an archway to the left
and an uncarpeted staircase to the right that led up to the
second-story turret. Another short hall ran past the staircase toward
a kitchen. An old blacklight poster for Jr. Walker and the All Stars
had been taped to the wall by the front door. The concert was at the
Black Dome. July 22, 1968. I smiled when I saw the poster. I'd been
to the concert.

"You like Jr. Walker?" I said to the girl.

"Fuck no," she said.

Karen laughed.

Upstairs a phone began to ring. It rang twice, then
someone picked it up.

I glanced up the staircase. "Is Norvelle up
there?"

The girl shook her head, no. "Cal," she
said.

"Where is Norvelle?" I asked.

"I don't know," she said sullenly. "You
better talk to Cal." She nodded toward the living room. "Y'all
wait in there till I come back." She started up the stairs, then
looked back over her shoulder. "And don't touch nothing."

Karen and I walked into the living room.

Another teenage girl was sitting on the floor inside,
leaning against a cushion covered with a paisley throw. The three
pieces of furniture in the room--two chairs and a sofa--had also been
covered with paisley throws. There were brick-and-board bookshelves
along each wall, filled with science fiction paperbacks and record
albums. Drug paraphernalia was scattered on top of the shelves-pipes,
roach clips, glass hookahs. A forty-watt light bulb with a paper
globe around it hung from the ceiling; a threadbare oriental covered
the floor. Piles of dirty clothes sat in two of the corners. The room
smelled like dirty clothes. It also smelled faintly of marijuana and
sex.

"Who are you?" the girl on the floor said.

She pulled herself upright and stared at us
curiously. She was about the same age as her friend, but she still
had her baby fat. She was wearing jeans and a torn T-shirt. The
T-shirt was draped at an angle across her chest, leaving one of her
shoulders bare except for the strap of a black leotard that she was
wearing as an undershirt. She'd cut her hair in a kind of spiky
Mohawk and sprayed one side of it with blue glitter. She'd also made
up her eyes with mascara and rouged her cheeks like a clown's. But in
spite of the punk look, she was still obviously a little girl,
dressing up like the big kids.

"We're looking for Norvelle," I said to the
kid.

"What do you want with that nasty old nigger?"
she said with a sneer.

"He lives here, doesn't he?" I said.

She gave me a bored look. "So? It's Gal's house.
Cal's the man." She got a dreamy look in her eyes and let her
head loll back against the cushion. "Cal's so cool."

"Are you his girlfriend?" I asked.

She nodded. "Me and Renee. He says we do him
better than anyone."

"I'll bet," I said. "You live here
too?"

"Renee does," she said a little sullenly.
"But I'm going to move in soon. Living at home is a drag."

"Is Norvelle here now?" Karen asked the
girl.

The girl shook her head. "I don't know. I ain't
seen him."

I didn't feel much like sitting down on any of the
furniture. There was something so visibly corrupt about the place
that it affected me physically, as if I were staring at an accident.

I glanced at a huge beaten-tin ashtray, sitting on
the floor by the couch. There were no butts in it just torn-off
cigarette filters and a couple of balls of cotton. Karen noticed it,
too, and nodded, as if it meant something to her.

We stood there for a while, waiting for Cal. The girl
turned up the stereo and went back to Kiss. I thought about going
upstairs and searching the second floor. Then Renee came into the
room. The cigarette was still hanging in her mouth, unlit.