Hard Rain (36 page)

“And what about the BMW?”

“Good question: we can't hang that one on Mr. Mickey yet. Maybe never.”

“What are you saying? Surely the same person—”

Zyzmchuk shook his head. “Four people have died. Blue Rodney and Disco and possibly—probably—your friend were all killed by Mr. Mickey and Andy Rooney. But what about Jerry Brenner?”

“I don't know.”

“Me either. That's why we've got to take one car at a time.” Zyzmchuk stared into his drink. “I liked those cars down there, in a neat little pile and all. Of course, one was on the bottom a few days before the other.” He rose and went to the pay phone in the hall.

But the operator had no listing for Big-Top Motors, not in Bennington, or anywhere else in Vermont.

“Maybe Buddy Boucher knows,” Jessie said.

Zyzmchuk smiled. “Now you're cutting coal,” he said.

Jessie called Buddy Boucher at home.

“Hi there,” he said. “Nothing to report. I'll let you know as soon as anything happens. Trust me.”

“It's not that, Mr. Boucher. I thought you might be able to help me locate another car dealer who used to be in Bennington.”

“Looking to buy a car?”

“No. Just find the dealer.”

“Because I'll beat any price in the tristate area.”

“I'm sure you will, but I'm just looking for the dealer.”

“What's his name?”

“I don't know. The dealership was called Big-Top Motors.”

There was a pause. Then Buddy Boucher said, “Why are you looking for this dealer?”

“It's very complicated, Mr. Boucher. But I think he sold my ex-husband a car in nineteen sixty-nine, and he might be some help in finding him now.”

“Are you talking about your ex-husband Mr. Rodney?”

“That's the only ex-husband I have.”

“Then the answer's no. Big-Top Motors never sold him a car.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I never forget a customer, Mrs. Rodney. That's one of the golden rules in this business.”

“I don't understand.”

“I was Big-Top Motors, Mrs. Rodney, until nineteen seventy-two. That's when I sold up and went over to Dodge. Big-Top went belly-up two years later.”

“But I've just seen a Corvette with your chrome plate on it, registered to Pat.”

“What year Corvette?”

“Nineteen sixty-nine.”

“What color?”

“Blue. The same blue as the BMW.”

“Azure blue,” Buddy Boucher said. “A convertible?”

“Yes.”

“I think I remember a car like that, Mrs. Rodney. I've got a good memory for cars. That one probably went for about five-one or five-two. A lot of money in those days. But it wasn't bought by anyone named Rodney.”

“Who bought it, then?”

“I don't recall offhand, but if it's important I can find out. I've got all the Big-Top files in the basement.”

“It's important.”

Buddy Boucher went away. Jessie hung on. In Buddy Boucher's house, a child yelled, “I'm the Terminator.”

A second child yelled in a higher voice, “No, I am. I'm the Terminator.”

Flesh smacked flesh. Yelling turned to crying. “Stop it,” a woman said. She'd taken over the yelling. “You can both be the Terminator.”

The crying stopped. “That's stupid, Mom.”

Buddy Boucher returned. “You still there?”

“Yes.”

“I've got the file. Azure blue Corvette Stingray, white walls, 327 V-8, radio, leather seats, serial number 43567978?”

“That sounds like it. I don't know the number.” She felt a tap on her shoulder. Zyzmchuk was there, holding up a piece of paper with a number written on it: 43567978. “Yes,” Jessie said. “That's the one.”

“I sold that car on the twenty-ninth of August nineteen sixty-nine, for five thousand one hundred and twenty-five dollars. Cash deal. I've got a photocopy of the check right here.”

“Who wrote it?”

“Like I told you, not Mr. Rodney. The signature here says ‘Hartley Frame.'”

“Hartley Frame?”

“Right.”

“Just a minute.” Jessie covered the mouthpiece and said, “He's got a photocopy of the check.”

“Get it.”

“Mr. Boucher? Could you send me that photocopy? It might be a big help.”

“I like to have complete records, Mrs. Rodney, in case the IRS ever comes calling.”

“How about a photocopy of the photocopy?”

“I guess that will be all right.”

As she gave him the address of the 1826 House, Jessie felt another tap, gentle, unrushed. She looked again at Zyzmchuk. He mouthed the word “bank.”

“What bank was the check drawn on, Mr. Boucher?”

“Morgantown National. In Massachusetts.”

“Thanks,” Jessie said. “Goodbye.”

Buddy Boucher was saying, “But I don't see how it matters if it wasn't your—” when she clicked the receiver into the cradle.

Jessie looked at Zyzmchuk, saw he'd heard Buddy Boucher's remark. “I'm not sure I do either,” she said.

“Po-iti po-dyengi,” Zyzmchuk replied.

“What does that mean?”

“‘Follow the money'—Trotsky, or one of that crowd,” replied Zyzmchuk. “All ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

“Little Pond?” Erica McTaggart said. “I haven't been there in ages.”

Erica McTaggart was sitting on the worn velvet couch in her tiny living room, wrapped in a blanket. It was a draughty house, and there was no fire in the grate, only a mound of ashes.

Jessie, leaning against one end of the couch, said, “Did Pat ever go there?”

Erica's eyes darted to her, to the easel, now empty of men doing what they had to do, of any canvas at all, to Zyzmchuk standing with his back to the fireplace. “I think so,” Erica said. “A group of us used to go there for picnics sometimes. In the spring. 'Sixty-eight or -nine. He would have been part of it.”

“Who else?” Zyzmchuk said.

“Who else?”

“Would have been there.”

“Different people. Sergeant Pepper.”

“Sergeant Pepper?”

“The name of the band,” Jessie explained.

“Right,” said Erica. “And maybe a few girls from Bennington.”

“Hartley Frame?”

“Of course. It was his band.”

Zyzmchuk and Erica looked at each other for a moment. She turned away, hugging herself.

“How about a fire?” Zyzmchuk said.

“There's wood outside, but I think it's wet.”

Zyzmchuk went out the back door.

Jessie said, “Who was in the band, besides Hartley and Pat?”

“It kept changing. I sang sometimes. There was a piano player for a while, but he flunked out. Different drummers. Hartley's roommate was one of them.” Erica glanced toward the back door. Her voice grew confidential. “Is that your boyfriend?”

“No.”

Erica nodded. “He's a little old for you anyway.”

The back door opened. Zyzmchuk came in with an armful of logs.

“What was the name of Hartley's roommate?” Jessie asked.

“Dennis Keith,” Erica said immediately.

“You've got a good memory,” Jessie said.

“Not really,” Erica answered. “He was a local boy.”

“Like Pat?”

“Not at all. Not at all. Dennis was one of the few who makes it to the college. His mother used to clean for me.”

Zyzmchuk knelt and started sweeping out the grate. “Is she still around?” he asked.

“No. She died a few years ago.”

“What about his father?”

“Didn't have one. He died in Korea, I believe.”

Zyzmchuk snapped a piece of kindling in two. “Have you got any pictures of him?”

“The father?”

“The son.”

“No. I had pictures. I had a whole sixties' album filled with shots from those days—Hart, the band, the big demonstration at the police station, the strike, everything—but it wound up at Ross's after the divorce, and he threw it out before I even realized I didn't have it. Can you imagine anything so petty? I was going to use it in a collage.”

Zyzmchuk arranged the kindling in a little platform, rolled a sheet of newsprint under it and piled one split log on top. He struck a match. The paper caught fire, then the kindling. The log smoked. He blew on it. A tiny flame flickered on the edge of its bark and slowly spread.

“I've got a picture of her, though,” Erica said. “Of Mrs. Keith.”

Erica led Jessie and Zyzmchuk into her bedroom. A big charcoal drawing of two lovers hung over the unmade bed. It looked like a product of drawing class, not as well-executed as some Jessie had seen but a lot more graphic than most. Erica's signature was prominent in the lower right-hand corner.

The photograph was one of many taped to Erica's dressing table mirror. It couldn't really be called a picture of Mrs. Keith. Erica stood in the foreground, a younger Erica in a very small bikini. She was laughing into the camera; her body hadn't been so wiry then. Jessie had some idea of why she'd offered to show them the photograph. She wondered whether she'd have made the same offer in Zyzmchuk's absence.

An old woman stood deep in the background, wearing a shapeless polka dot dress. Her gray hair was tied in a bun; deep shadows surrounded her eyes.

“That's Mrs. Keith,” Erica said.

“She cleaned for you?” Zyzmchuk said.

“Me and others. They were poor.”

“But her son went to Morgan.”

“On full scholarship. He was a hard worker. Much more like the students now. And he knew how to get ahead. Hartley didn't even know that the concept of getting ahead existed. Maybe that's where his charm came from.”

“Are you implying that Keith used Hartley to get his job with the senator?” Zyzmchuk asked.

Erica turned to him. Jessie saw her profile in the mirror, eyes narrowed, neck slightly bent, a prefiguring of old age. “You seem to know something about him.”

“Not much,” Zyzmchuk said. “What's the answer?”

“Are you a policeman?”

“No. Just a friend of Jessie's. Helping find her daughter.”

The image in the mirror relaxed a little. “I wouldn't say Dennis used Hartley, exactly. It was just normal clubmanship, really, the way men go about those things. The job didn't work out anyway.”

“It didn't?” Zyzmchuk said. “I thought Keith interned every summer in the senator's office.”

Erica shook her head. “Just one summer, and only part of that. It didn't work out.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know. I don't think Hart ever told me. It wasn't a big deal.”

The three of them stood before the dressing table mirror in Erica's bedroom. They looked in silence at the laughing, near-naked woman and the little old one behind her.

“Does the phrase ‘I kill, therefore I am' mean anything to you, Mrs. McTaggart?” Zyzmchuk asked.

“Sure.” She looked at Jessie. “It's from that song I played you—‘Descartes Kills.'”

“What does it mean?”

“Mean? What it says. You want a gloss on it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it's satire, I suppose. My ex-husband is a big fan of Descartes. The last man who knew everything and all that crap. He was also a big fan of the war in Viet Nam. That's what inspired it.”

“You wrote the song, then?” Jessie said.

“Just the words. Hart wrote the music. Do you want to hear it again?”

Jessie looked at Zyzmchuk. “No thanks,” he said. “But I'd like to know why it's written on the wall in the tunnels.”

“What were you doing down there?”

A tone entered Zyzmchuk's voice that Jessie hadn't heard before, cold and hard. “I told you. We're looking for Jessie's daughter.”

Erica's face changed. It grew more confident in a way. And the expression in her eyes said Zyzmchuk wasn't her type after all.

“We wrote it on the wall. That's how it got there. I can't explain why. It's like trying to explain humor. You get it or you don't.” She looked at her watch. That didn't require an explanation.

They walked out of the bedroom, through the living room to the front door. The fire had gone out.

“I told you the wood was too wet,” Erica said.

Jessie and Zyzmchuk went outside. The door closed. A lock clicked. A bolt slid. Another lock clicked. And another bolt.

There was a silence. Then Zyzmchuk said, “She forgot to turn the key.”

Jessie stared at him for a moment before she realized he was joking. There was a new expression on his face: all at once it was easy to picture him as a mischievous little boy. Jessie started to laugh. She laughed and laughed. She hadn't laughed like that since the night she'd sat with Barbara in the kitchen. This time it didn't end in tears.

A curtain twitched in the window of Erica McTaggart's drab little house. Zyzmchuk glanced at it, then said, “How does Spanish brandy sound?”

“Perfect.”

“But first to work.”

Two young men in lumber jackets and chinos were coming down the steps of the Morgan library. “I've got an exam at nine tomorrow,” one said. “What's Kierkegaard all about?”

“You're fucked,” the other replied.

“That's how I read him, too,” Zyzmchuk told Jessie as they entered the building.

The study halls and carrels were crowded, but except for one young woman leafing through
Money
magazine, Jessie and Zyzmchuk had the periodical room to themselves. Zyzmchuk threaded a reel of microfilm from a box labeled “NYT May–Aug. 1969” onto a viewer, wound it quickly through to August, then slowed down.

“There it is,” he said, stopping at Friday, August 15: the first day of the Woodstock festival.

The
Times
had devoted a story a day to the festival. Jessie and Zyzmchuk read them all. The editors had taken several approaches, treating it first as an amusing human interest story, like the hula hoop craze or Amazonian mud rituals; then as a natural disaster, (but only two people had died, not nearly enough for even a local fire, except in Manhattan, to make the paper, to say nothing of the front page); finally as a financial disaster (but a disaster that didn't appear to bother the promoters—that was the only clue that something new had happened).