Loren D. Estleman - Amos Walker 18 - Nicotine Kiss (15 page)

No major expressways have carved up the Huron shoreline yet, dropping trails of Taco Bells, Wal-Marts, and Uncle Ed’s Oil Shops. Of course the fast-food chains are represented—they travel on the wind like parachute seeds—but in singles only, not acres of plastic and steel and overflowing trash cans. The local steak-and-egg cafes operate inside the survival margin. The state highway is one long Main Street running past Woolworth’s, small
navigable hardware stores, and the one-screen movie theater. The parks have cannons, the VFWs hold bingo tournaments. When you slow down, the pedestrians either wave at you or put their hands in their pockets and glower; strangers are a big deal. The dogs are all named Duke.

I ate several bowls of chili in several Sugar Bowl Diners and bought a roll of Turns in each of a half-dozen pump-and-pantries, just to cover the bases. All the conversations I overheard had to do with some variation of Lyle Mundy and his fortunate fate. The counter help and regulars shook their heads when I showed them Jeff Starzek’s picture. I didn’t really think they’d tell me they bought merchandise from a smuggler, but their faces were easier to read than the urban kind. The trick was not to expect a break, but not to miss it when it broke. Complacency had gotten me shot once.

Just to be thorough I tried a bed-and-breakfast, in an old brick farmhouse; the barn, a massive relic from the golden age of European immigration, was an antiques mall in warm weather. It was one of those places with big poofy beds and two rooms to a bath, with plenty of oak and flocked paper in the foyer and a guestbook on a stand. A funeral director could have moved in without redecorating. A sweet-faced old lady doused in lavender told me she rented to couples only, lifted the glasses on the chain around her neck to stare at Jeff’s picture, and apologized for not being able to place him. She offered me ribbon candy from an oval dish.

Wherever you go, there is someone willing to take your money and give you a roof for the night. I drove past three or four likely places because I was tired of talking to strangers and absolving them of their ignorance.

In Port Sanilac, just below the nail of the Thumb, a squall blanked out the windshield, lifted the Cutlass off its wheels, and set it down on a Y branching off to the left. At least it felt that way.
Probably it was nothing less prosaic than the gust blowing me off course when I couldn’t distinguish between road and country. Anyway when the white dust settled and the wipers gouged out eyeholes in the mask I found myself on a snowmobile track with nothing but DeKalb signs on either side, and up ahead, like a lighthouse beacon, a rectangular sign on aluminum poles sunk deep in snow, illuminated by sickly yellow beams from a row of cup lights on top:

THE SPORTSMEN’S REST
Rooms by day or week
Your journey ends in 1500 feet

I shifted into first to beat the drifts and powered on. I had no illusions. Fate whispers in your ear. It hardly ever screams in your face.

T
he road—some kind of access that had had its day as a major artery before the state bulldozers came through—bent to the right around an old-growth oak hoary with vines and sprung birds’ nests to parallel the newer blacktop and the lake. I passed a deserted glazed-brick filling station sprayed all over with graffiti, the boarded-up remains of a frontier false-front souvenir shop, ropy also with garlands of black and green acetate, and a half-collapsed sign in a snowfield advertising a roadside zoo. It was all reminiscent of an extinct civilization that hadn’t progressed far beyond cliff-dwelling.

I saw a leaping fish, then descended a gentle grade and saw the angler on the other end of the line, dwarfed by perspective in water almost up to his vulcanized waist, gripping his bent rod with both hands; an
Outdoor Life
cover blown up to Cinemascope. A timber framework supported the sign on the curved slope of the roof belonging to a railroad caboose, painted schoolhouse red and parked on a forty-foot section of track. It was as if car and rails had been lifted in one piece from the Oregon Short Line and deposited in the middle of four scraped acres. Around it, broadcast as if by the same great hand, were six smaller structures, four of which had
been trucked in and plopped down on concrete blocks, the other two assembled on-site from boxes of giant Lincoln Logs. White aluminum sided the modular units and someone had painted the log cabins the muted orange of Campbell’s tomato soup.

Behind this prefab fairyland, trucks and passenger cars hummed along the charcoal line of the state highway, and fishermen’s shanties dotted the white apron of the lake like houses on Baltic Avenue. It was as surreal as the Thumb area gets, and just the kind of place for the traveler who likes to avoid the main track and blend in at the same time. I had no hope of tracing Jeff Starzek to it. It was too on the nose.

It was a weekday, and I shared the freshly cleared parking area with a snowmobile chained to a railroad tie and an old station wagon with woodgrain sides and a bumper sticker on the rear hatch reading
FISHERMEN DO IT WITH A LURE
. A gargantuan CXT pickup, nine feet tall, eight feet wide, twenty feet long, squatted on tractor tires next to the farthest bungalow with a snowplow blade mounted in front.

I walked around a parked snowmobile, climbed gridded metal steps to the caboose’s door, and opened it to the smell of old wood and generations of cigarettes. Someone had varnished the walls to slow down dry rot, sparing only a knotty-pine partition in back, which presumably sealed off the office from a living area. It looked yellow against the dark shellac of the walls, but did nothing to lift the gloom. Even the four-paned window looking out on the white-on-white landscape looked like a decoration intended to brighten the interior. There was an Indian rug woven by the Taiwan tribe on the floor, some overstuffed chairs no one ever sat in, a display of antique fishing lures locked behind dusty glass, and a yellow-oak sauropod of a teacher’s desk, complete with a crank pencil sharpener mounted on one corner, holding up a small wooden file box, a perpetual calendar and message pad set in
matching pebbled brass, and a lethal projectile of a ceramic ashtray the size of a platter, heaped high with squashed butts, some of which continued to smolder sullenly. A side-by-side shotgun with curled brass hammers hung on pegs on a wall behind the desk.

“Welcome to the Rest! You here for Tip-up Town?”

The woman seated under the shotgun, with a hand-rolled cigarette gushing smoke in one hand and a wedge of lime bobbing in a bottle of Corona in the other, was the roundest thing I’d seen on feet. Her face, nearly as red as Oral Canon’s, was a mass of bunched globes anchored by a tiny nose that curled like an endive at the tip. Bosom and belly heaved at the buttons of her XXXL flannel shirt. Her hair was an improbable shade of yellow, brighter than the pine partition, flipping up at the sides and mashed flat to her head. Hat hair; I blamed the ear-flapped woolen cap hanging on an antler next to the wall telephone.

All that bulk, and all those cigarettes, should have given her the voice of a factory whistle, but it was as small and bright as a bird’s. Her eyes stuck out like blue marbles.

“What’s Tip-up Town?” I asked.

The eyes started out another sixteenth of an inch. I nearly lunged to catch them.

“Mister, don’t
tell
me you haven’t heard about the ice-fishing festival. It’s the biggest thing to happen here since the French landed.”

“The knob came off my radio. I didn’t even know the French landed.”

“Don’t be fresh. Come Saturday you won’t be able to steer a bike between the shanties. They pretend they’re fishing, but what they’re really doing is drinking beer and peppermint Schnapps. Their little spring-loaded rods do all the work.”

“Oh, tip-ups. I tried it once. I’m still thawing out.”

“Drying out, you mean. If those boys put as much antifreeze in
their radiators as they put in themselves, I wouldn’t spend half the weekend giving them jumps to start them back home.” She took a puff and chased the smoke with two ounces from the bottle.

“You charge for that?”

“It’s a service of the establishment. I make enough off them in three days to shut down the rest of the winter.”

“I believe you. That truck outside retails at ninety thousand.”

“Oh, that. I’m keeping it for a friend. His ex-wife’s on the warpath.” She paled to a brick shade. “I sure hope you’re not her lawyer.”

“I’ve got an ex-wife of my own. Your sign says you’re extended stay.”

“I’ve been meaning to take that down. I don’t get much business by the week now that divorce is so easy. Hiding out from the wife used to be a bigger deal. I’m Miss Maebelle.” She thought for a second, then decided to park the cigarette in a notch among the old butts and stuck out a hand.

I shifted the cane to my left and took it. It was like shaking hands with pizza dough. “A woman who does as well as you must be able to afford a husband.”

“I buried two. Well, one, if you want to be technical; they never did find Jim after he took his Subaru out on the ice five years ago April. I was Miss Maebelle when I taught school. I never did get used to Mrs.”

“You gave up teaching for innkeeping?”

The globes rearranged themselves into a scowl. “The school seems to be getting along fine without me. They just don’t have an art or a music program. Don’t let anyone ever tell you the arts have any importance in our society. They’re the first thing the boards find they can do without when money gets tight.”

“Which one did you teach, art or music?”

“Art, and the timing was a dirty shame. We were just getting
into the expanding world of computer graphics. Another semester or two and I might have turned out the first Picasso to compose all his work on a keyboard. Don’t forget, all the great twentieth-century artists came out of rural America.”

“I think Picasso was Spanish.”

“I should have said Pollock. Not the point.” She put the cigarette back between her lips. “At least I had the Rest to fall back on, thanks to Jim. Poor old Arthur Weeks gave thirty years to the district. Thirty nails in his coffin when it came to finding someone who’d employ a sixty-two-year-old academic with an MA in Renaissance music. He moved in with his daughter and son-in-law and just faded off at the end like an old song. All because someone in Lansing couldn’t balance his own checkbook, let alone the budget.” She squirted out bitter gray jets as she spoke, the cigarette bobbing on her lower lip.

“I’m not here to fish,” I said. “Not with a pole.”

She stiffened. The globes that made up her face jiggled for a few seconds after she went motionless. Maybe she thought I represented CXT truck’s ex-wife after all.

I showed her my license and the deputy’s badge I got in a box of Cocoa Puffs. “I’m working an inheritance job.” I traded the folder for the picture of Jeff Starzek and Rose Canon.

She put down her beer bottle to take it. “I don’t get many couples.”

“The woman’s the client. It’s her brother I’m looking for. The family can’t settle the estate without him present.”

“How big is the estate?”

“It isn’t the Illitches, but there’s a consideration in it for anyone who shortens the search.”

“How much?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

“Horse trader. Is he a fisherman?”

“He’s in sales, spends most of his time on the road. This is part of his territory. He likes the quiet, out-of-the-way places.”

“It won’t be so quiet come the weekend. Those anglers can drink, and then there’s the snowmobiles, waking people up at all hours and scaring away the fish.”

“I see you’ve got one of those, too. Unless it belongs to CXT Truck.”

“A woman in my condition needs a little help getting around the cabins. I never take it out on the ice. One of these years someone’s going to say something at the Air Horn and it’ll be bloody as all get out. I haven’t seen him, mister.” She gave me back the picture.

“What’s the Air Horn?”

“Truck stop up the highway, only you won’t find room to park a Peterbilt between the pickups and snowbuggies this weekend. I don’t mean to say the place is a bucket of blood. Fifty-one weeks out of the year you can take your kids there, buy ‘em a Coke and a bag of chips while you drink suds with your friends. Mix the snowmobilers with the fishermen and anything goes.”

“Would it be okay if I talked to your staff?”

“You already are. You might have noticed this isn’t the Trump Tower.”

I wrapped a five-dollar bill around a card and slid them under the edge of the mammoth ashtray. “This will cover long distance if you see him. There’ll be more if you do. You can get a new sign painted. The one you have could use touching up.”

“I painted it myself. I was a magazine illustrator before I got the call to teach. No work there now. You have to be half my age and know how to use a camera.”

“Norman Rockwell’s spinning in his grave.”

She brightened. She looked exactly like a cartoon sun.

“I met him once, showed him my portfolio. I wanted to study with him.”

“What’d he say?”

“He told me to paint signs.”

“What’d he know?”

“Those who can’t, teach,” she said. “Only those who can can’t teach. Try telling that to the governor.”

I zipped up my coat. “Okay if I walk around outside and smoke? My doctor says I have to exercise my leg. I fell on some ice.”

“Don’t sue me if you fall on mine. I can give you a key if you want to check out one of the cabins. All but Twelve. Furnace broke down and I had to drain the pipes and turn off the water to keep ‘em from freezing. All the repairmen are busy till next week. Biggest weekend of the year and I’m taking a beating because I can’t sell out the shebang.”

“I counted only six cabins.”

“I started at seven. Makes it sound like a bigger place.”

“Thanks. I’ll just walk around.”

“Too bad. You look as if you could use a little peace and quiet.”

“Except for the snowmobiles.”

The globes parted in a sweet smile with the cigarette growing out of it. “Jim always said you have to take a little snake with your Eden.”