Sugartown (22 page)

The room had two doors. One would belong to a closet. Clothes are kept in closets. Trouble was, the one that looked most likely was clear across the room. I took some deep breaths and squared my shoulders and started pulling myself along the wall the long way.

It wasn’t much of a hike. Guys with one leg and cancer eating their insides make lots longer ones for the research foundations. I leaned against the wall until my breath stopped whistling and my heart got through whacking my breastbone, and then I tried the knob. Of course it was locked. I worked my way around the rest of the distance, which brought me back to the bed, and went through Paul’s pockets. Of course they were empty. I leaned against the wall and felt my brow wrinkle. Then I grinned. I reversed directions and went back past the closet door, moving a little faster now. About crawling speed. I bumped the wall from time to time for reassurance. I grasped the knob on the other door and pulled. It came open. A ring of keys wobbled from the key in the lock.

The fourth key opened the closet, where my clothes hung among a dozen suits in muted colors with tailor’s labels sewn inside the jackets. My wallet was in my inside breast pocket where I’d left it, contents intact. The packet of hundred-dollar bills was not. I found my wristwatch in another pocket. The battery was working. The hands read 7:10. The calendar said it was Sunday. I’d entered Rynearson’s house on Friday.

My shirt was on the hanger — it was a wooden one, I hoped I’d remember to thank Rynearson for that — and I took off the hospital gown and got dressed. I found my shoes on the closet floor with my socks rolled up inside and put them on. Just for the hell of it I went through all the pockets in the tailored suits. I found two silk handkerchiefs and a book of matches. I wondered what a man with a jade lighter would want with matches. I put everything back and walked around the bed to where I’d started. I was doing fine now. I felt like a one-legged milking stool. Paul snored.

The drawer in the nightstand was empty. I left it open and looked at the two needles left on the tray. Selecting one, I filled it from the brown bottle and held up the point and squirted a short thin stream, testing it. I was ready to talk to someone.

O
UTSIDE THE ROOM
was a short hallway paneled in yellow, with a door standing open to an unoccupied half-bathroom across the way and at the far end a square of strong sunlight. I locked the door to the room with Paul in it, dropped the ring of keys into my pocket, and crept toward the light, holding the needle underhand with the point forward like a knife. The hall opened into a room I knew. It was the one in which Rynearson kept his personal collection of eastern art and antiques. The light slanted in through an unshaded window in the east wall and lay solidly on the fragile canvases and paper-thin stuff of the ornate rug, probably for the first time since they had taken up residence. I didn’t like that. The pieces of the Ming vase I had shattered on Paul’s head had been swept up, but I found them still lying in a wicker wastebasket in the kneehole of a fey teak desk with an onyx pen set on top, and I didn’t like that either. A man who wears a smoking jacket should be more careful about his things.

The desk drawers were locked. I selected a likely looking key from the ring and it worked. All the drawers were empty except the top one on the left side, which contained my Smith & Wesson in its holster. I unleathered it, swung out the cylinder, said hello to the brass cartridges, snapped it back in place, strapped the holster to my belt, dropped the needle into the drawer and locked it. When in doubt go with the weapon you know. With it in hand I went through an open door into the next room.

It was an office, with only a dark tapestry that Christ might have seen hung on one wall to speak of Rynearson’s weakness. A glass cabinet held more needles and two small brown bottles like the one in the bedroom. The place looked untidy for a man of his habits. Three empty file drawers were stacked crookedly, one atop another, on the big modern desk. Two of the desk drawers hung open with nothing inside. I slid out the others, and also those still in place in two tall file cabinets in the corner. The same. The air had a charred smell. There was a fireplace in the corner near the window, with a heap of ashes in the grate. I touched them with a poker and they broke apart. It was a funny time of year to build a fire.

I tried the handle of a gray steel safe set in the floor behind the desk. Whoever closed it last had either forgotten or hadn’t bothered to spin the dial. The door hinged open and I reached down inside and lifted out a familiar-looking packet.

I counted the bills; they were all there. The safe was empty otherwise. I stood there with my lips pursed, riffling the bills. Then I put them away inside my jacket and got back to work.

At the end of the hall opposite the living room was a dressing room in a five-foot space between walls, containing an upright hickory bench like a church pew, its curved seat polished by contact with many rumps. A wardrobe too cheesy for show held a couple of camel’s-hair overcoats and a white lab coat and some empty hangers. Rynearson’s burgundy-colored lounging outfit was draped over the bench, the slippers with dragons on the toes kicked underneath. The trousers had no pockets. In the pockets of the smoking jacket I found the ebony cigarette holder and the jade lighter. I flicked open the lighter’s lid and spun the wheel. An invisible seam popped open in the side and a thin steel rod two inches long licked out. There was a hollow in the end of the rod. I placed my thumb against it and pushed. The rod telescoped back into the lighter with some resistance and the complaint of a tiny but feisty spring concealed inside. I kept pushing until something clicked and then closed the little doors in the side.

The lighter had no flint and there was no reservoir inside for fluid. Yet the last time I’d seen it he’d had it in his hand to light a fresh cigarette in his holder. Not long afterwards my system had started shutting down. I remembered the stinging sensation in my left arm, that I’d blamed on a pulled muscle. I thought about the hollow in the end of the spring-loaded rod.

I pocketed the lighter and went back toward the main room, stopping along the way to unlock the bedroom door and look in on Paul. He still lay on his face on the bed, his snores shaking the frame. I locked up again and took the spiral staircase to the ground floor. I holstered the Smith. I was pretty sure now I wouldn’t need it soon. The rail stayed put this time, it was just cold brass after all, but my ankles wobbled and I leaned on it plenty. I was sweating again by the time I reached bottom. I rested against the banister for a moment before continuing.

There was nothing for me there. The shop didn’t look any different. All the windows were shaded. I punched
NO SALE
on the cash register on a glass counter with moderately expensive carved jewelry on black felt inside and looked in the cash drawer. It was as clean and empty as a TV minister’s head. There was a kitchen with a breakfast nook, a full bathroom, a storeroom containing packing crates and a cot with rumpled bedding on it and artistic odds and ends on shelves and in boxes that there was no room for out front. No basement. No Eric Rynearson. My hat decorated a peg near the shop door as if I’d hung it there. That was a nice touch.

I climbed the stairs again, stopping to rest twice on my way up. Paul’s snoring was inspired. I stood between the bed and the nightstand looking down at him for a moment, and then I grabbed a fistful of the thick matted hair on the back of his head and lifted his face and dashed the contents of the blue plastic pitcher into it. He gasped and spluttered and went on snoring.

This would take a while. Well, it was Sunday and I was too late for church anyway.

I let go of him and carried the pitcher across the hall into the half-bathroom and filled it from the tap and went back and did it again. This time he stopped snoring long enough to spit curses. I made two more trips. Puddles collected on the sheet and the mattress squished when I let his face fall. After the fourth dousing he said something indecipherable, but which was not a curse. I held on to him and slapped his face — loud, stinging smacks that burned my palm. He gurgled and lunged. But there was nothing behind the lunge and I pulled my head back and his fingers skidded off my throat and his momentum almost carried him off the bed, depositing him over the edge. He started making familiar deep sumping noises. I stepped back just in time. I walked away from the racking and splattering and wrenched up the window to let in sweet air.

When it was over and Paul lay moaning with his head hanging off the mattress and his chin dripping, I reached across the bed from the other side and got another fistful of hair and yanked him over onto his back. He was conscious enough to yell. But his pupils had shrunken to pinpoints, and if the same stuff Rynearson had fed me was pumping through his veins he was in a carnival or a rowboat or some other childhood memory of a time of peace. Assuming he had a childhood. As ugly as he was now he must have been a fascinating little gargoyle when he was small.

“Where’s Rynearson?” I asked.

“Rynearson?” His tone was shallow, not at all the deep volcanic rumbling that normally originated in the hollow of his enormous chest.

“Right. Where is he?”

“Rynearson?”

This wasn’t working. If it was the same stuff, scopolamine or Sodium Pentothol or some bastard hybrid of the two, Rynearson had probably combined it with some kind of hypnotism in my case. I was too old to learn the trick. But whatever lights of knowledge were glimmering in the little ape’s shrunken brain wouldn’t shine out through a broken head. There was too much Paul even in that stupid shell to give up an inch that way.

I played nurse. I fluffed his pillow, I used the white cloth the needles had rested on to wipe his face and mop up the worst of the mess on the bed, I sat on the dry side and patted a knobby hand that had hair like barbed wire on the back and called him by name and asked him about Rynearson. He spoke in broken sentences with long pauses between, and sometimes snoring, and when I woke him gently he’d forgotten what we were talking about and we had to go back to the beginning. After an hour I had my sticky hands on just two pieces of information: 1. When Paul had been getting set to retire to his room above the garage the night before, Rynearson had told him to come in first thing in the morning and set out the needles and serum, which Paul called “the junk.” 2. Rynearson had said he’d sleep on the cot in the storeroom downstairs just as he had the night before and meet Paul in the bedroom in the morning.

Paul had risen at 6:30 as always and gone to the cabinet in the office and gotten the stuff as directed, assuming his employer was still sleeping or else getting ready in the dressing room down the hall. What Paul made of the mess in the office could only be guessed at. Maybe he’d thought Rynearson was reorganizing his files. In any case the assistant had come in expecting another day of dope and questions for the P.I. in residence. When I tried to get him to go back further he started jabbering about beaches. I figured they were his carnivals. Questions about the cross skidded off the sloping bone of his forehead.

“So where’d Rynearson go,” I asked rhetorically, “and why’d he burn his files?”

“To avoid dragging in the kind of associate nobody wants to have mad at him.”

I looked at Paul. It didn’t sound like something he’d say. It wasn’t even his voice, doped up or otherwise. He lay with his mouth scooping a round black hole in his beard, snoring fit to bubble the paper on the ceiling. I looked at the hallway door, through which two men in dark tailored suits were coming with automatic pistols in their fists.

I placed the man who had answered my question right off. He was the older of the pair, with steel-gray hair cut very short and the kind of flat tired eyes I would know if I saw them floating all by themselves in a jar, in a face running to fat and freckles, millions of freckles. He had a handsome leather folder open in the hand that was not holding his Army Colt.

“FBI, friend,” he said in that same conversational tone. “You look like a man who knows the position. Show me.”

“H
E RABBITED
. His car’s still in the garage so he hooked a cab. My thought would be around midnight, when the shift was getting ready to change outside. That’s when these kids start looking for the relief instead of what Uncle pays them to look for. Like smoke coming out of a chimney on a warm night in May.”

On
kids
, the gray-haired agent glanced at his companion, a reedy youth showing a lot of Adam’s apple above his Arrow collar. This one looked a little like Kirk Douglas’ son in
The Streets of San Francisco
, with graphite-rimmed aviator’s glasses and crisp black hair combed straight back and cut off square at the nape of his neck. His face didn’t flicker.

The older man’s name was Gervais. He called his partner Tommy, but I’d seen his ID too and none of his names was Thomas. Officially he was Special Agent Mulholland. We were sitting in Eric Rynearson’s museum of a living room, Gervais in a cruel-looking clawfooted chair with my gun and the contents of my pockets spread out on the table holding up the skull ashtray at his elbow, including my credentials, Rynearson’s jade lighter, the ring of keys I’d taken out of the bedroom door, and the five thousand dollars. After Gervais had pulled my fangs I’d told him what I was doing there and for whom and as much as I knew of what had gone on since Friday. I left out the cross. I wasn’t sure why, and I was beginning to wonder if Rynearson had mentioned it at all or if I’d been hallucinating. None of it made sense anyway.

I said, “You’ve been watching the place?”

Gervais nodded. His face had a kind, mildly amused look that didn’t fool me for a minute. “You were seen going in but not coming out. We ran your license plate and I’ve been dying ever since to know what a private star would want with Rynearson. City cops towed your heap away, incidentally. Yesterday morning.”

I made a face and lit a cigarette from the crushed and wilted pack in my shirt pocket. I had to hold the match in both hands to keep from shaking out the flame. It was an effort just to remain sitting up. I envied Paul out cold in the bedroom. “He really is a Russian agent, huh? I thought that was smoke.”