Fire Lake (27 page)

I turned left on Taft and left again on Highland. The
sun was very bright on the snow-banked sidewalks and on the
salt-whitened street. I had to flip down the visor to cut the glare.

We turned east on McMillan, with Jordan still behind
us. When we got within a block of Cross Lane, Jordan dropped back,
pulling over in front of a bar--his engine still idling.

"He stopped following us!" Karen said
excitedly, as if that were a triumph.

"He knows where we're going," I told her.
"Norvelle is his snitch."

Her face fell. "Oh," she said with
disappointment.

Cross Lane hadn't been salted by the city trucks.
There had been so little traffic on the street that the snow looked
as if it had just fallen, plumped up like meringue from one curb to
the other. I inched down to Cal's house--the car grinding and sliding
through the drifts.

"It's going to be hell getting out of here
again," I said to Karen. "That's probably why Jordan stayed
out on McMillan."

She pointed to a dark spot on the right, where a car
had been parked overnight. "Pull in there."

I parked in the spot, with my rear wheels on what
little pavement was showing through the ice. We both got out into the
brilliant sun and, hands over our eyes, stared across the street at
Cal's turreted frame house. Two pairs of bootprints led away from the
porch, down the walk to the street. They circled a spot where a car
had been parked. Apparently, Cal and his friend didn't have much
patience with the snow, because the area behind the car was deeply
scarred with tread marks and gravel thrown up by spinning tires.

"Looks like someone was in a hurry to leave,"
I said to Karen.

"Maybe there's no one left at home," she
said hopefully. "We'll check anyway."

We crossed the street and walked up the sidewalk,
past the bootprints in the snow. The prints hadn't frozen yet, which
meant they were damn fresh-within the hour.

We stepped up on the porch, stomping our feet on the
slats to shake the patchy snow off our pants legs. Karen glanced
through the muslin drapes in the front window and said, "Looks
empty."

I knocked on the door. When nobody answered, I took a
credit card out of my wallet and slipped it between the door lock and
the jamb.

Karen laughed nervously. "I thought only junkies
knew how to do that."

"We detectives have our secrets." I fiddled
with the lock until the door sprung open. "
Voila
!"

I waved my hand through the doorway, and Karen walked
into the hall. I followed her in, closing the door behind me. A loud
plucking noise, like the sound of water dripping was coming from the
living room. We both glanced through the archway.

Someone had left a record spinning on the turntable,
and the needle was sticking in the last groove and being amplified
through the speakers.

"Jesus," Karen said, "they did leave
in a hurry."

I walked into the living room and lifted the tone arm
off the record. There was something different about the room, but it
took me a moment to realize what it was. The clothes that had been
piled in the corners were gone. Just a couple of pairs of girl's
underpants and a man's T-shirt remained on the floor, along with the
lingering smell of dirt and sweat.
 

"Maybe they went off to do the laundry?"
Karen said from the archway.

"Maybe," I said dubiously as I walked back
into the hall.

"Let's look upstairs."

Karen stared up the stairwell with foreboding. "Oh,
Harry," she said faintly. "What if they come back?"

"I don't think they are coining back, Karen,"
I said, starting up the stairs. She fell in behind me.

The stairwell made one turn to the left, before
ending in a short hall with three rooms running off it. There was a
door at the head of the stairs on the left, one at the end of the
hall, and one halfway down the hall to the right, which must have led
to the turreted room. As I neared the top step I began to smell
something--a charred chemical smell that I couldn't place.

"Someone's been cooking up," Karen said
immediately. I glanced back at her. "Smack?" She nodded. "I
ought to know."

I glanced at the door at the top of the stairs. The
smell seemed to be coming from inside that room.
I
pulled the pistol from my pocket and unlocked it with my thumb.

"Harry," Karen whispered, "be
careful."

I walked up to the door at the top of the landing,
put my hand on the knob, and turned it. As the door opened the
chemical smell became much stronger, mixed with another powerful
smell-one that I had no trouble identifying. I turned immediately
back to Karen, who was standing at the head of the stairs. "Go
down to the hall," I said, giving her a grim look.

"What?" She stared at me with confusion.

I nodded toward the door. "Someone's dead in
there." She threw her hand to her mouth, and her face went
white.

"Oh, mv God . . . Lonnie!"

Before I knew it, she'd pushed past me, running up to
the door and throwing it wide open. She let out a shriek, then
covered her face with both hands and began to cry, leaning heavily
against the doorjamb and rocking back and forth as she wept.

I went inside the room.

It was a bathroom. A skinny, naked black man was
lying on the tile floor--his head propped against the pedestal of the
toilet, his arms akimbo, his knees bent, as if he'd tried to get up
and failed. His brown skin had turned a violent purple. His face was
bloated-looking--his cheeks puffed out, as if he'd taken a breath and
died before he could exhale. There was urine and feces on the floor,
where he evacuated as he'd died. There was also a good deal of drug
paraphernalia scattered on the floor. A fit. A glassine bag half
filled with brown powder. A Bunsen burner. A charred ice-cream scoop
that he'd cooked up in. The rubber hose he'd used to tie off with was
still draped loosely around his left arm. I could see tracks all over
him-on every bend and joint of his arms and legs, as if he'd been
pieced together by a sewing machine. There were even needle marks on
the carotid arteries of his neck.

It looked as if someone had made a halfhearted
attempt to revive him. The bathtub was filled with water. And a
couple of trays of ice cubes, melted now, were lying by his body,
along with several damp, rolled-up towels.

I turned to Karen, who was still sobbing. "That's
Norvelle Thomas, isn't it?"

She nodded heavily, without looking back into the
room.

I glanced again at his body. "The poor son of a
bitch."

"Take me out of here, Harry," Karen said
suddenly, in a shrill voice. "Please, take me out of here. I
can't stand it. I can't stand it!"

I pulled her to me, guiding her away from the
bathroom and down the stairs. I took her into the living room and sat
her down on the dusty couch. I seated myself beside her, holding her
close until her sobbing began to die down.

"I never thought I'd see that again," she
said, dropping her hands from her face. She shook her head violently,
as if she were trying to shake the sight of Norvelle out of her
memory.

I took a handkerchief out of my pocket and wiped off
her face--gently, as if she were my child. Karen bit down hard on her
lower lip, her eyes still brimming with tears.

"That used to happen in shooting galleries,"
she said, trying to control her voice. "I saw it happen twice.
The other junkies . . . they didn't care. They were bummed out
because it spoiled their high. Maybe somebody would call the life
squad. Maybe not. I was always afraid that Lonnie or I would end up
that way. It was my worst fear."

"It's pretty scary," I said.

"You don't think ..." She glanced at the
stairwell.

"He's dead, Karen," I said.

"Dead," she repeated.

Someone jiggled the front doorknob. Both Karen and I
umped. Thelma, the teenage girl with the punk hairdo--the one who
thought Cal was so cool--came stomping into the hall, shaking the
snow off her high-heeled go-go boots. She was wearing a cloth coat
with a fur ruff, buttoned at the neck. Under the coat, she was
dressed like she'd been the day before--in a torn T-shirt, and a
leotard, and a short leather skirt.

"Hey!" she said, staring at us through the
archway. "I remember you." Her baby's face fell
momentarily, as if she did remember us. "Cal said you were
narcs."

"We aren't narcs," I said. "We're
friends of Lonnie Jackowski's."

"Norvelle's old pal?" Thelma said, coming
up to the archway and leaning against it. "The cute old guy
that used to have the band, right?"

Karen straightened up on the sofa. "Do you know
where he is?" she asked Thelma.

Thelma shook her head. "I just met him a couple
of times. He came over here on Wednesday. I wanted to talk to him,
but Cal took him upstairs. He and Norvelle and Cal spent most of the
afternoon up there, talking business." She made a face, as if
she didn't like it when Cal "talked business."

"How about the second time?" I said to
Thelma.

"Huh?" She made a questioning face.

"That you saw Lonnie," I said, prompting
her with a smile, although she didn't seem to need much prompting.
She was much more of a kid than the other one, Renee.

"That was on Friday night," Thelma said.
She gave Karen a quick, nervous look. "He didn't look so hot.
Somebody'd beat him up and he was acting kind of . . . you know,
crazy."

Karen put her hand on my knee and squeezed hard. "Do
you know where he went after that?"

"Norvelle and Cal drove him out to meet
somebody."

"Who?" Karen said breathlessly.

Thelma shook her head. "I don't know. It was out
in the country, I think. That's where he said he wanted to go,
anyway. Cal said they'd be gone for a while." The little girl
glanced behind her, at the stairs. "What's that smell?"

Neither one of us knew how to answer her.

She could see by the looks on our faces that
something was wrong. She stepped back toward the hall. "Where's
Cal and Renee? Where's Norvelle?"

I got up from the couch. "They're gone, Thelma.
Everybody's gone."

She stared at me disbelievingly. "Bull!"

Before I could stop her she'd run up the stairs.
"Harry!" Karen cried out. "Don't let her see him!"

I bounded across the room after her. As I got to the
hall landing, I heard Thelma shriek.

I ran up the stairs to the john door. She was
kneeling against the doorjamb, holding her stomach.

She'd thrown up on the bathroom tile, her little
girl's face was sick with terror.

"Don't kill me!" she screamed when I walked
over to her. She scrambled away from me, backward on her hands.
"Don't kill me too!"

"Honey," I said gently, "I didn't kill
Norvelle. He overdosed. We found him that way."

She stopped scrambling down the hall and settled back
against the wall. Her eyes began to glaze over--she was going into
shock.

"We were all going to get well," she said
staring dully at the floor. "Everybody was going to get well."

I picked her up from the floor and carried her down
the stairs.

When we got to the living room, I put her back on her
feet. Karen took her over to the couch, cooing at her sweetly and
holding her in her arms. "It's all right," she said. "All
right."

I left her consoling Thelma and went upstairs again
to check out the other rooms.
 

38 

The smell from the john was horrendous. When I got
back upstairs, I closed the bathroom door, pulling it tightly shut.
Then I walked down to the room at the end of the hall. The door was
open and sunlight was pouring in through greasy, unblinded windows.

It wasn't much of a bedroom. Except for a peach crate
with a lamp on it, and an unmade-up mattress beside the crate, there
was no furniture. There were no decorations on the peeling walls
either, no rug on the rough pine floor. A few clothes had been stored
in the crate--a pair of jeans and some rumpled shirts. I checked the
jeans and found a wallet in the back pocket. The only thing in the
wallet was an identification card--the kind that comes with any
wallet when you first buy the damn thing. It had Norvelle Thomas
written on it. No address. No phone number. He didn't even have a
social security card, much less a driver's license. And no
photographs or mementos at all. By comparison, the stuff that I'd
found in Lonnie's clothes seemed like a treasure trove.

The bedroom was so grim and empty that I didn't feel
like searching it any further. It was clear that Norvelle's whole
life--everything that mattered to him--had been arrayed at his feet,
on that bathroom floor. Outside of smack, he just didn't exist.

But I went through the bed and bedclothes anyway.
And, to my surprise, found seven hundred dollars rolled up in a wad
and hidden inside the zippered pillow on the mattress. There were
also several dozen glassine envelopes full of brown powder inside the
pillow. About three thousand dollars' worth of drugs and money, all
told.