Rough Cut (15 page)

    Cindy waited for me in the shadows near the rear. Tonight she wore a gray tailored suit, with her shining blond hair swept up on the right side. With her glossy lipstick, and the cigarette burning in the ashtray, she seemed to belong in this bar haunted by the forties.

    After I'd sat down and ordered a martini, Cindy reached down and picked up the bag next to her. She was right-it did look like a doctor's bag.

    "So this is the famous bag," I said.

    She shrugged. "Disappointed?"

    I smiled. "Sort of. I guess I hoped to find a note inside."

    "A note?"

    "Yeah. One explaining who killed Denny Harris and Ron Gettig, and what Merle Wickes knows that he isn't telling me about this black bag."

    She laughed. "Gee, that would be a long note."

    "It could be much longer. It could go on to tell me what a private eye named Stokes knows about your husband, and why somebody planted a piece of rope in Tommy Byrnes's desk this afternoon, trying to make it look like Tommy had strangled Gettig."

    She glanced up as the waiter set our drinks down.

    When I looked back at her she was staring at her drink as if it were a crystal ball. I didn't need to ask whom she was thinking about.

    "They're going to arrest him," she said, obviously referring to her husband. Her voice had gotten raw suddenly, as if she'd just developed a sore throat.

    "Maybe they won't," I said.

    She stared glumly into her drink. "I feel guilty."

    "Why?"

    "Because the police seem to be focusing on him. And here I am enjoying myself with a man whom I like a great deal."

    I touched her hand. "We don't know for sure that he's the killer."

    "Maybe the real killer won't ever be found but the police will blame him anyway." She frowned. "Poor Clay." I leaned over and kissed her cheek.

    She turned and our lips touched.

    After we went back to our drinks, she said, "What kind of sweaters do you like?"

    "Crew necks, I guess, why?"

    "Would you mind if I knitted you one?"

    "That'd be great."

    "I'll start tomorrow."

    "Thank you."

    "No, thank you, Michael. I enjoy a sense of being needed."

    I stared at the bag sitting on the edge of the table. "Speaking of needed, I need to know how this bag fits into everything."

    I pulled it over, started inspecting it.

    Up close, the bag looked cheap, leatherette instead of leather. The name tag was one of those clear plastic window jobs encased in a leatherette oblong. Except the oblong had been torn in half. What remained of the tag were two lines of writing-or rather two half lines of writing.

    
07 107th St.

    
0307

    There is a 107th Street in the city, but there are 107th Streets in lots of cities. The big problem is the 0307-the tag was smudged enough that I couldn't tell if those were the last digits of a zip code or a phone number. If it was a phone number, it would take a long time to run down.

    "Any brainstorms?" she said.

    "This tag looks like a phone number."

    "How could we ever find out the first digits?"

    "There are four prefixes in the city's phone system."

    "Right."

    "What if I put them in front of the numbers we have and start dialing. Maybe we'll get lucky."

    "That sounds as if it will take a long time."

    "They've got two phones in the back. If you take one and I take one, we can cut the time in half."

    "When do we start?"

    "How about now?”

    

    

    By six o'clock the snow and the cold had filled the bar with people wanting to get warm and have some laughs and discover the secret of immortality.

    We were in our respective phone booths, the ten dollars in dimes we'd bought laid out before us. Thus far I'd had no luck. The formula had gotten me nothing but polite sorrys, impolite and irritated (lots of people seem to be either sleeping or having sex at this time of evening NOs, or courteous old people who want to help me find whoever it is I'm looking for but don't have a clue as to how I should go about it.

    I checked with Cindy. She was having no more luck.

    About the time a big guy who looked as if he'd recently forsaken his job as a lineman for the Packers and had taken up selling insurance started hovering around the phone booth-about that time something unexpected and wonderful happened.

    I added an eight to the formula, heard the female voice say "Beloit Motel." I described the bag. Tensely, the woman on the other end of the phone said, "Mister, maybe you'd better come right out here."

    

    

    The Beloit was the kind of motel you expected to find on the edges of an industrial park, a large plastic box that had once been white but that was now, and irrevocably, stained by the elements and the pollution that hung on the air like gauze.

    The snow made the place look better than it should have, the cracked windows warmer with light, the filthy sidewalk white.

    The office was located on the ground floor right of the building.

    As I opened the door, the acrid smell of a greasy, burning dinner lunged at us like a rabid dog. I could see Cindy's features crumble in displeasure. My stomach turned once.

    The cooking was being done on a tiny gas stove. I didn't want to know what she was actually cooking-the contrast between the relatively fresh cold air outside and the cloying smell in here was enough.

    She turned to us without smile or frown on her face, just a kind of idle stare, as if she were a robot that was voice-activated.

    "Are you Mrs. Kubek?" I asked, knowing she was.

    She wiped strong hands against her faded housedress.

    Nodded. "Yes," she said. "If you want to call me that. Husband's been dead now twenty years." She had a face and body and manner that hard work had beaten into weary submission years ago. Probably she was in her mid-forties. She could have passed for sixty, an unhealthy sixty.

    "I wonder if you'd show me Kenneth Martin's room."

    At the mention of the man's name something small but wonderful happened to Mrs. Kubek's face. A suggestion of happiness lit the eyes and turned the corners of the mouth into a smile. Momentarily, at any rate. Then the weariness came back, coupled now with a strong sense of disappointment, and she nodded her graying head toward the outdoors.

    "Police came three months ago," she said. "I called 'em after he didn't show up for a week. That wasn't like him at all. He's a man who likes three meals a day and a quart of beer in the evening and an hour or two of television before he goes to bed. He's not a drifter." She used the word as if it described the worst kind of degenerate imaginable. In her business, it probably did.

    While she spoke, more to herself, really, than to us, I glanced at Cindy.

    She looked alternately moved and put off by this woman. When I nudged her, and she angled her head toward me, I saw that there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes.

    Suddenly the cubicle-office got oppressive to me. I wanted to be outdoors again in the relatively fresh, cold air-away from the numbing sense of loss in the room and the stench of greasy food.

    "Could I see his room?" I asked.

    For the first time Mrs. Kubek seemed suspicious. "I still don't understand why you called. You're not with the police?"

    I shook my head.

    "And you ain't with that other fellow?"

    "What other fellow?"

    She made a face. "Guy with real thick glasses. Always wears a black topcoat."

    My good friend Stokes-the-creep. "When was he out here?" I asked. She smiled. "Oh, several times."

    The smile was odd, made me curious. I had to wait for her to explain.

    "First time he was out here," she said, "I kinda surprised him." Dramatically, she leaned behind the registration counter. In moments she produced an impressive-looking revolver. "With this."

    "He was breaking in?"

    She nodded. "Yeah. He'd helped himself to Kenneth's room. Let himself in. I happened to be taking something down the hall to one of the other rooms. I went back and got my gun here and surprised him. He was scared, let me tell you." The smile was back on her face. I realized then that there was at least the possibility that Mrs. Kubek was not quite right. What I'd put down to grief might well be insanity of some kind.

    "Could I see the room?" I said.

    "You never answered my question, mister."

    I shrugged. "Some terrible things have been happening to people I know lately."

    "Like what?"

    "Two of them have been murdered."

    If the subject of murder made much impression on Mrs. Kubek, she didn't show it.

    "So why do you want to see Kenneth's room?"

    "Because he might have known something about the killer."

    "Why would you think that?"

    I stared at her. "Believe it or not, we're trying to help you." She seemed to think this over, that we could be friends. "Wait outside."

    "What?"

    "Wait outside." I shrugged.

    When the door swung shut behind us, the hard cold night air began seeping into my bones. It felt great. I watched my breath plume against the night sky and listened to the rumble of semis in the distance and stared briefly at the brilliant stars.

    "Thinking about anything special?" Cindy asked, leaning into me, smelling wonderfully of perfume, liquor, and her own body warmth.

    I hugged her to me.

    "Just sometimes, looking up at the stars…"I didn't want to finish it.

    She snuggled up to me. "I know. It makes you think about God, doesn't it?"

    "That's the weird thing. I'm not religious in the formal church way. All the man-made wrangling gets me down." I stared up at the stars, recalling from my boyhood Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter novels and the fateful sense Burroughs gave the winking stars. In his way, Burroughs had been a very religious writer, and in a far more persuasive way than many church-approved ones. "But sometimes…" I laughed. "Maybe hanging around Lutherans is good for me."

    Cindy hugged me again. Invitingly. I wanted to be in bed with her, warm and floating on the cadences of her soft voice.

    Behind us, the door opened.

    Mrs. Kubek shuffled into the night beneath a worn gray topcoat. Men's buckle boots covered her legs halfway up to her knees. A faded scarf covered her head. A fistful of keys dangled from her fingers. She didn't say anything, she didn't even nod any acknowledgment. We followed her.

    

    

    Half an hour later I sank down on a mattress that was not much thicker than a slice of bread.

    Kenneth Martin's room had the feel of a man who spends his time existing rather than living. From the pinup-style calendar (the girls busty but clothed) to the plastic statue of Jesus on the dresser to the neat stack of
Readers Digests
next to the frayed armchair, here were the remnants of a man who had imposed a kind of civilization on an otherwise dreary life. His pride would be that he was clean, punctual, dependable. He would not worry about other people's opinions of him but rather his own opinion of himself. When I looked around the room, I saw what had probably attracted Mrs. Kubek to him. In her world of drifters, winos, and grinning traveling salesmen, there was a real working-class dignity to Martin.

    The trouble was, while his room suggested many things about his personality, it told me nothing about his possible involvement in the robbery of Mrs. Bradford Amis, and what he might know about the murders that followed.

    I opened the drawer in the nightstand next to the bed. Inside was a prayerbook, a pack of stale gum, and a western paperback. I thumbed through the book. A black-and-white photograph fell out. I judged the picture to be maybe fifteen years old. The two men in the photo wore the flowered shirts of the mid-sixties and their sideburns were long and wide. They stood in front of a tiny frame house on the side of which sat two rusting-out cars. There might have been a white-trash sense of the men and the place except for the scrupulous order and cleanliness of them, the house, and even the rusted cars. On the steps of the house, almost out of focus, sat a small boy and a woman.

    I held the photo up to Mrs. Kubek. "Are either of these men Kenneth Martin?"

    She took the photo. Examined it. "The one on the right. That's Kenneth."

    Tears were in her eyes.

    "You know who the other man is?"

    "His brother, Don."

    "You know how I could contact him?" She shook her head. "Can't."

    "Why not?"

    "Dead. Him and his wife. That's her in the back, the wife. Traffic accident. Sometimes when Kenneth drank…" She shook her head. "Well, sometimes he'd talk about the accident and he'd get real depressed. Then he wouldn't talk at all. A family like that-wiped out. It don't make no sense, does it?"

    I put the photo back into the book and the book back into the drawer. I was beginning to feel that I was violating a living, breathing entity by being here.

    I glanced over at Cindy. She was fingering a doily on the bureau, looking as blue as I was starting to feel.

    "What about Stokes, Mrs. Kubek?" I asked. "Did he say why he was here?"

    "Not really. Just said he was working on a case and he thought maybe Kenneth could help him clear it up."