Rainy City (4 page)

“You must have a theory,” I said.

“I really don’t. I just believed she would be back. And now it’s been over a week. Mid they took Angel. I don’t know what’s happening. Angus said I was a Jew. Why would he say that?” His voice began to grow strangled.

“I’m Lutheran, just like he is.”

“Would she go to her folks’ house?”

“No!” said Burton emphatically. It was the largest bullet of emotion he had fired all morning. Then, in a more controlled tone, he added, “They don’t get along real well. They’ve had a few tiffs. She’s okay with her mom. But her dad and her…”

“Any other relatives? Or friends I might try?”

“We don’t have a whole lot of close friends. I’ve phoned everyone here in town.”

“Maybe somebody’s hiding her.”

“Melissa doesn’t know anyone that well.” “Where else might she go?”

“There’s an aunt, maybe. I understand Melissa stayed with her one summer during high school. They used to be close.”

Burton staggered into the other room and returned with a Christmas card and its torn envelope which he handed over timidly. The aunt’s name was Mary Dawn Crowell. The address was in Bellingham.

“She ever run away before, Burton?”

He hesitated, but not for long. I had the feeling he would tell me anything I wanted, if I asked—even how and where they had sex, as if the rest of us had more rights to his life than he did. “She’s been gone before. Never this long.”

“Where did she go?”

“I never found out.”

“Weren’t you mildly curious?”

“I figured if she wanted to tell me, she would. I guess she never wanted to.”

“When was the last time she took off?”

“About six months ago. But she only stayed overnight. I don’t know, maybe she doesn’t love me. I honestly want her to be happy. If she’d be happier somewhere else, I’ll even help her move. She knows that.” He was a real scrapper, like a worm on a sunbaked sidewalk.

When we left him, Burton was heading toward the kitchen to hack away at his poem. He had given me a photo-booth snapshot of his wife. I stuck it in my wallet. In spite of his passiveness, I liked him. He was goofy, but maybe that was what it took to be a poet. Maybe that was what it took to spill your guts across the page for the whole world to see, and maybe to laugh at.

Under a sky the color of a bad bruise, we stood together beside the truck, each wrapped in our own thoughts.

Kathy chewed on her lower lip, a habit I invariably found appealing, even in white face. Across the street from the Nadisky household stood another tumbledown bungalow, the only other rundown place on the tidy block. I’ll bet the neighbors loved it.

A woman leaned over a davenport and stared at me through the window, curlers in her hair, lines from a sleepless night tweezering her eyes, heavy breasts tugging at her bathrobe. Something told me she had more interest in Nadisky’s problems than just that of a snoopy neighbor. If I reached any dead ends I would double back and look her up. Sometimes the neighbors knew more than the husband. Lots of times the neighbors knew more than the husband.

Before I realized what was happening, Kathy began trembling. I reached out and held her in my arms. She was small and frail as she shivered in my grip. The woman across the way didn’t take her eyes off us for one moment. Perhaps she had never seen a man hug a clown before.

“Oh hell,” said Kathy. “This is the second time I’ve gotten the heebie-jeebies over this family.”

We climbed into the truck. She had shrugged off her shivering fit and was now staring at the top hat in her hand. From it she produced three colored juggling balls and began fiddling with them. I slid the seat all the way back from where she had adjusted it to drive Nadisky to the hospital. The woman across the street had vanished from the window. I could see a football game on their color television in the background.

“What about that man? That awful guy who was beating up Burton? Who was he?”

“He works for various detective agencies. He freelances when somebody offers him a wad of bills. He’s a nice guy. He was going to give your dentist a lot of work before I grabbed you.”

“He wouldn’t hit a woman?”

I fired up the truck and edged into the street. Kathy had buried the tires against the curb. They made a ripping noise. “Don’t bet on it. Holder’d whack himself in the head with a brick if the money was right.”

“What was he doing with the Crowells?”

“My guess is Angel’s grandfather brought him along as a sort of policeman, to make sure there were no hitches.”

Kathy tumbled the colored juggling balls into her top hat and spoke through gritted teeth. “Oh, that gripes me. That makes me so mad how they waltzed in and beat up Burton and took his daughter.”

“Burton doesn’t seem as angry as you do.”

“Don’t let him fool you. I’ve seen him mad before. He’s written some real angry poems. You should see them.”

“I read some of them.”

Kathy did a double take. “Thomas, you didn’t! These are my friends. How could you do such an embarrassing thing?”

“He had a poem right out on the kitchen table in plain sight.”

“Oh.”

“But I snooped through their place anyway.”

“Thomas!”

“You want me to find Melissa? Or would you rather I was polite?”

“Can’t you do both?” I shrugged. “I never have yet. I wouldn’t know how to start.” ?

BELLINGHAM IS A LONG HAUL WHEN YOUR THOUGHTS ARE dark and distant. Kathy’s premonitions were beginning to worry me. I’m not easily frightened, but she was seeing something in conjunction with this family that didn’t belong, something ugly, and I didn’t know if I wanted to find out what it was. Years ago, I had wanted to know everything. Needed to know. Now, I realized there were some things you were better off not discovering.

North and over eighty miles distant, Bellingham was a small city, not mentioned much in Seattle. The central feature of the burg was Western Washington State College. A long time ago I had seriously contemplated enrolling there.

I could have telephoned Mary Dawn Crowell, but you never find out as much on the phone. Besides, I had nothing else to do. The drive would give me a chance to think things through. My buggy was a six-cylinder and red-lined at seventy. I saw no reason to strain the old girl. I kept the needle a hair past the double nickels. It showered most of the way. It was pouring in Bellingham.

Mary Dawn Crowell lived near the heart of the city in a condominium that had clean lines and freshly planted, plastic-looking shrubbery in front. She wasn’t home. The manager, a congenial grandmother-type with gray hair and gray eyes and gray dentures, was more than helpful to the tall stranger who had motored all the way up from Seattle in the rain squalls.

She escorted me up carpeted steps to the third floor where we spoke to one of Mary Dawn Crowell’s neighbors, a hunched-over gentleman named Felton who must have immigrated from Latvia or some other obscure country. He wore a shabby suit, though it was readily apparent that he hadn’t gone out and wasn’t planning to. He lived in suits. He probably had two of them and rotated every Tuesday. He told me Crowell had taken a Sunday drive with some oldsters and would be home in the late afternoon.

I conned her phone number out of the manager and drove around looking for someplace to wait. It was just after one o’clock.

I grabbed a hamburger at a greasy spoon opposite a shopping mall. Strolling across the street to the mall, I window-shopped and watched the young girls in tight jeans. I watched the old girls in tight jeans, too, and the matrons in tight jeans, but mostly the young girls in tight jeans. Everyone was dressed the same. Same designer denims with the same decals on their butts, same baseball caps with the same logos on their brains, same reds and blues, same cuts and styles.

One man trundled past wearing my shoes. Another came past in my coat. In the parking lot outside, there were at least two trucks identical to mine. It made you wonder how many had your brain.

I bought a thick Sunday paper and found a movie theater playing Body Heat. I’d seen the flick, but I could easily tolerate it again. After the murder, I slipped out to the lobby and phoned Mary Dawn Crowell. No reply. That particular flick always made me thirsty. I floundered back to my seat with a tall cool Seven-Up and evaporated into the celluloid miracle.

It was half past five before a woman who might have been Crowell parked a shiny new road-gray Buick in back of the condominium and scurried through the pattering rain to the glass doors. I allowed her enough time to get inside and take care of business before I climbed out of the truck. I stalked through the wet and thumbed the buzzer next to 304.

“Yes?”

“I’m Thomas Black, a friend of your niece’s, Melissa Nadisky.”

“Who?”

“Melissa Crowell? Your niece. She married a fellow named Nadisky.”

“Yes, of course. Is Melissa with you?”

“Not today.”

“Come on up.” The door buzzed and I went in. The joint smelled of new carpets.

Mary Dawn was a spicy old gal, a spinster or widow by the looks of her clothing, which was thirty years out of date. The world was full of short little mannish women like her. She had a wide, squat body and a broad face that seemed to get broader toward the chin, as if the wide jaw belonged on someone else. Brown curls lay so snug that her scalp looked bald in patches. She sized me up while I introduced myself. She spoke in bursts the way a lot of people with pent-up energy do.

Though I was an exceptional liar, I decided the direct approach would be the most efficient.

“My name is Thomas Black. I’m a detective. Some friends of your niece asked me to find her.”

“I didn’t realize she needed finding,” said Mary Crowell, abruptly plunking into a wooden armchair smothered in cushions. The apartment was crowded with wooden furniture, all of it meticulously polished.

She motioned for me to sit opposite her on a cushioned love seat. “Would you happen to know where she might be?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Haven’t seen Melissa for a spell. Don’t get along with her father, Angus—he’s my older brother. What’s the matter with that husband of hers? Doesn’t he know where she is?”

I shook my head. “When was the last time you heard from her?”

“Last time I talked with Melissa was Tuesday.”

“What’d she say?”

“She telephoned and asked if she could stay with me for a few days. Said something was bothering her, something that had been bothering her for a long time. Something from her childhood. I told her of course she could stay. She’s been up before, don’t you know.”

“Has she? When was the last time?”

Mary Crowell mulled it over and her eyes grew distant. I shifted on the love seat. My trousers were wet all down the back from splashing through the rain in the parking lot.

“Maybe six months ago?’ I suggested.

“Yes, about six months ago. How did you figure that?”

“She turns up missing every once in a while. Generally, it’s just a day or two at a time. I gather she was up here each of those times.”

“I don’t know when she was missing, as you call it. She’s visited me a few times.”

“Have you heard from her since this week’s phone call?”

“No. Said she’d be up the next morning, which would have been Wednesday, but she never appeared. Greyhound, she said.”

“And she didn’t let on where she was phoning from?”

“Matter of fact, she did.”

“Seattle?”

“Tacoma. Said she was calling from someplace in Tacoma. Why she’d be clean down there, I have no notion. Course, what do I know? I’m just old aunty Mary. I don’t rate much more than a nickel card every other year when they can afford one.”

“She tell you why she wanted to stay with you?”

“Just that something from her childhood was bothering her.”

“Nothing else?”

“Melissa isn’t much of a conversationalist. I had the feeling somebody was waiting on her, the way she tried to rush-rush everything along. Said she’d bring Angel along. Asked would it be all right if they stayed a few days. I said it would. Even stocked some butter brickle ice cream for her. That was always her favorite when she was a little tyke. Used to come up and spend a week with me every summer. That was back when Harry was still alive…”

“Harry, your husband?”

“Nah. Although we were going to get married. He was Angus’s business partner, the brains of the company. Things were swell in those days. Me and Harry. And Melissa coming up every summer.” The old woman’s voice grew sorrowful and her mind seemed to retreat to another dimension.

“

till she got older,” she said, snapping out of it, completing a sentence I hadn’t heard the first half of. It’s still okay. You locate her, you tell her she can stay with her old aunty anytime she wants. Can bring her baby, too. I’m not anxious to have that piker husband of hers here, though.”

“They tell me he’s quite the poet.”

“You listen to that claptrap? Poetry won’t put that baby into shoes.”

“I understand Melissa spent most of a summer up here while she was in high school. If she was in the habit of spending -one week up here each season, why did she suddenly come up and stay most of the summer?”

“Who told you that?” she asked.

“Burton.”

“Did Burton tell you why she spent the summer up here, Mr. Black?”

“I was hoping you would.”

She glowered at me. She tapped the ends of her gnarled fingers together. It was apparent that I had wormed as much out of this old gal as she wanted me to worm.

I took a deep breath, rubbed a knuckle into my eye and said, “Angus Crowell is your older brother?” I was fishing.

She snapped up the bait. “Born ten years before I was. He left home for the Navy when I was nine.”

“And you don’t get along.” “Never have. Don’t make no bones about it. He’s not my kind of people. Neither is that wife of his,” she stated, bluntly.

“In what way?”

“In every way. He was a mean kid and he turned into a shrewd, crafty adult. I don’t like them kind. Used to torture little animals when we were children. Set fire to more than one cat in the neighborhood. Had a dog once almost walk away with his hand. Whatever Angus was up to, you can be sure that pooch had good cause.”