Suspects (24 page)

Their next job was to get as much help as they could talk the captain into providing them, find the dump for this sanitation district, and look for the plastic garbage bag into which Glotty had placed the rubbish left behind by Lloyd Howland. That there might be nothing therein that could be identified as Lloyd's, let alone anything incriminating, was likely. That among the thousands of similar bags in the dump the one with the Howland-Glotty association could not be recognized even when opened could even be called probable.

To reach Molly's cousin Joe's place you went through an alley in the middle of a string of shops that had seen better days, crossed a service road, and were suddenly in an almost rural setting of trees and weeds, amid which sat a one-story structure that had apparently formerly been a cottage but had undergone sufficient degeneration by now, with flaking paint and curled roof shingles, to be called a shack. The underpinnings of the screened-in porch had collapsed at the far front end, slanting its floor in two planes, and the screening was torn in every panel but the one above the crushed support.

Molly stopped her father's car behind a gleaming black pickup truck equipped with an immaculately white cap that covered its bed.

“Look at the difference between his machinery and his house,” said she. “That's Joe for you.” When they were out of the car, she told Lloyd that the porch had been fallen in for years. “We have to use the back.”

The garage at the end of the dirt driveway was also in better condition than the residence. Through its big open doorway could be seen the furnishings of a carpentry shop: floor-mounted power tools, walls hung with shelves or pegboarded hardware, wood in many forms—horizontally stacked lumber, barrels blooming with clustered dowels, giant plywood sheets on end—and unfinished pieces: a doorless cabinet, an inverted table with three legs in the air, the bottomless frame for a drawer.

As they approached the building a loud whine issued from deep within. Sporadically this became a groan or a scream or a howl, all noises made by the same lathe according to which tool was applied to the cylinder of wood revolving on its longitudinal axis or whichever section of the grain was under the blade. The tall skinny goggled man supplying human direction did not hear the arrival of Molly and Lloyd, nor did they exert any effort to gain his attention until he at last switched the machine off, killing the sound instantly. The last of the spray of sawdust ceased to descend a moment thereafter.

“Hey, Joey,” Molly shouted at high volume as though over a power tool that had not been silenced.

The man turned, pushing his goggles up. Seen at closer range, he was more sinewy than skinny. He had a long jaw shaded with a faint growth of whiskers, and black hair brushed straight back from a high pale forehead. He seemed to be in his late twenties. He squinted in their direction. He wore jeans and a sawdusted shop apron.

“Hey, Moll!”

“I told you about Lloyd,” Molly shouted. In a lower tone she informed the latter, “He can give you something to do and also a flop. I didn't spell it out earlier because I didn't want an argument. You got one now, we can call it off.”

“You're really something,” Lloyd observed. It would have been embarrassing for him to back out at this point, not to mention that he had no better offers.

Joe shook hands with a limp, diffident grasp. He addressed his remarks to his cousin. “I didn't reckonize you there for a minute. You're all dressed up.” A fact that did not seem to please him greatly.

“I'm back behind the wheel again tomorrow A.M.,” said Molly, as if in apology. “I got to be going now, to buy food for my dad and then get it all cooked. If I don't leave him enough to heat up, he'll feed himself, and you know what that will be—eggs fried in bacon grease.”

Without warning, Joe spoke to Lloyd. “She's a good cook, too.”

“I might take the hint and cook you guys something too if you ever clean up that kitchen.” She began to step backward. “I really have to get going. You need me for anything, Lloyd, you get Joey to call, huh? Not for the next couple days, though: then I'll be on the road.” She was heeling the threshold. “Thanks again, Joey, you're the greatest. Take care, you guys.” She was gone before Lloyd remembered he should have said something to acknowledge what she had done for him.

The two men stood there awhile, continuing to watch Molly's departure after it was over. They could not see her car owing to the presence of the van in between. Lloyd believed it was probably his place to say something, since he had been, in effect, imposed upon the other, but nothing whatever came to mind, and finally it was Joe who spoke.

“I guess you're her boyfriend?”

“No,” Lloyd hastened to say. “Just a friend.” They both continued to look out the doorway of the garage and not at each other. “She's been helping me with some problems.”

“That's old Moll,” Joe said. “That's her all right. She's got a good heart. You're the first
person
she ever brought over, though; the rest have been animals: dogs, cats, all hurt or sick, and the baby squirrel was an orphan. ‘Hey, Moll,' I used to say, ‘what am I, a vet?' But the idea was, see, I got this place where there's extra space, and then it bothers her I'm by myself. I had a dog once, but he got out to the main street and was hit by a car. I can't go through that again.” At last he turned to look toward if not precisely at Lloyd. “She brings birds that fly into the picture window over at her and Uncle Bob's place. They don't get killed usually, just knocked out. She brings ‘em over here.” He jerked his elbow. “Right now I got a sparrow she brought last week. It's on the front porch. It got well after a couple hours, but stayed around. All those holes in the screening? You'd think it would find one and fly away. I tried to catch it, to
take
it out, but if you know birds you know that didn't work. So there it stayed, and I give it bread crumbs to eat. Damn if I didn't go there yesterday and the bird flew and landed on my shoulder. How about that?”

“I've never done much carpentry,” Lloyd told him, “though I have sold small power tools when I worked at a hardware store. But I can haul things and clean up and so on. I don't mind work. I'm not a charity case.”

“All right,” said Joe. “That's fine with me. Let me think after I finish turning this table leg. You can go in meanwhile and see where you're gonna stay. It's the front bedroom. It's not much, but there it is. Your sack is already in there.” He elucidated. “Molly brought it this morning.”

Lloyd had forgotten leaving his backpack behind at the motel. In jail he had been provided with the necessary toilet articles except for a razor. On arrival he had been quickly, coarsely shaved, with an electric razor, by a prisoner-barber, the guard impatiently waiting in attendance.

“Okay,” he now told Joe. “Then I'll come back and make myself useful.”

Joe had pulled the safety goggles down over his eyes. “You might want to take a look at that bird I was talking about.”

Lloyd found the interior of the house, beginning with the kitchen, reasonably clean and in order, at least by his lights, whatever Molly's feeling. Perhaps the main reason for this was that the furnishings were almost as sparse as they had been in the one-room apartment he had lately vacated. A crudely made table, the top of which was but a sheet of unpainted plywood, sat in the center of a sizable kitchen and was accompanied by two folding chairs. Then up a bare hallway, past a room stacked with cardboard boxes, to the bedroom assigned to him, where nothing movable was to be found but an air mattress on the floor beneath the side window, and the blue cotton blanket heaped upon it. He opened the door to the closet and saw his backpack on its floor.

Another window looked onto the slanted front porch. He glanced out but could not see the sparrow. Either the bird was at the other end or had finally removed itself to the thickly foliaged grove of trees between Joe's hideaway and the busy commercial street that was only a hundred and fifty yards away but from which only muted sounds penetrated the greenery.

In his own company for the first time since leaving the cell, Lloyd was convinced he carried about his person the stench of the disinfectant of which the jail reeked, an odor so strong he wondered why Molly had failed to mention it. But then he considered the possibility that the smell might be the work of his imagination, which was perhaps rebelling against the constraints he had placed upon it since learning of the murders. He crossed the hall to the living room, another place barren of furniture. One wall was painted in pale blue, and newly so, with a drop cloth stretched along beneath it and cans of paint and turpentine nearby, alongside a tray filled with a cloudy liquid in which a roller was soaking. This was the source of the odor, which closer up was so different from that of disinfectant that he must have misidentified it for reasons other than a simple matter of smell.

He stepped out the door onto the porch. He still did not see the bird but immediately heard a faint whirr of wings and felt as if a fallen ball of cotton had lodged in the thick hair on his crown. When he gingerly reached up not to seize the creature but to verify its presence, the sparrow flew to the second-highest eminence on the porch, the tip of the handle of a push broom leaning against the flaked white paint of the siding. Its eyes were as bright as those of the squirrel in the park across from the jail, but, being smaller, seemed quicker and more sensitive. Aware that the slightest movement on his part, the crooking of a little finger, could send the bird elsewhere, he stood frozen and exchanged stares with it. Even so, in another moment the sparrow winged from the broom shaft to the collapsed end of the porch and landed on the angled floor, where it plodded about on large but frail-looking claws, beak down, poking between the desiccated boards.

Lloyd was accepted by being disregarded, if not trusted, by a creature so small it had reason to fear all who were larger. Next time he visited the porch he would bring along something the bird could eat: there was no other service he could provide it. For Joe, he could begin by painting the rest of the living room. He yearned to be useful, not simply to submerge himself in a task but to be able to look at an accomplishment when he was done and know it would endure for a while at least no matter what happened to him. He had never yet decided what to think about the dead, whether they could know of the subsequent histories of those they left stranded in life, but if it was possible for Donna to be aware of him, he would like finally to gain the respect she could not possibly have felt for him when alive.

Before the detectives could get far with a search for the garbage bag discarded by Denarius Glotty—LeBeau was still trying by phone to find a Sanitation Department official who could say for certain exactly which dump was used by the trucks that collected along the seven hundred block of Claussen—Larry Howland called Moody.

His voice was plaintive. “Can I get over to my house sometime today?”

“We're up to our necks—”

“Can I ask you something? Who bailed Lloyd out of jail, and where is he? He doesn't have any family but me, and I never knew he had any friends.”

Being a professional, Moody concealed his surprise and asked, “How'd you find out about it?”

“I went to see him,” said Larry. “Or tried to. I'm over here now, at a phone in the park across from the jail. Can't I find out where he is, at least?
They
won't tell me a thing.”

Moody thumbed through his notebook and found Larry's new address. “Got your phone in yet?” Larry gave him the number. “Does he know you moved?”

“I don't know how he could. I haven't told anybody but you.”

“And the hotel and phone company and the PO, I bet, and how about your place of business?”

“He's not going to hurt me,” Larry said. “I'm not worried. If
you
really are, then you would have notified me he was out, right?”

Ignoring the jibe, Moody said, “Sit tight. We'll get back to you.”

LeBeau had just hung up his own phone. He was glowering. “How about this? They haven't—”

“Lloyd's been bailed out.”

“By who?”

“Not Larry. That was him on the line. He doesn't know, either.”

“Does he want protection?”

“He didn't seem worried,” said Moody. “Lloyd probably doesn't know his new address. But we better find where the little bastard is. If he's in the wind again—!”

LeBeau called the jail. After a short conversation he lowered the phone and told Moody, “Martha Sparks, two-oh-six West Ether-edge, Clareville.” This was an incorporated village north of the city.

“She met the bail? Where's Lloyd?”

“Care of a Joseph Littlejohn.” LeBeau was reading from his note. The street was one neither detective had heard of, but the ZIP code indicated the middle of town.

Moody ran the names: neither Sparks nor Littlejohn had a sheet. Down in the car, he took the local street guide from the glove compartment. “Welling…
K-fifteen
… Welling, Welling…” LeBeau meanwhile had started the engine. Moody shook the folds from the map attached to the guide and was tracking a finger across it. “Here it is, Welling.… Looks like Lloyd suddenly picked up some friends someplace.”

“He's still a creep,” LeBeau said.

* * *

Marevitch's worst fears were not realized: the female psychologist was neither in her twenties nor was she especially pretty, at least according to his taste. He preferred fair hair, and furthermore Dr. Andrea Gilbertson looked undernourished to him, the kind who ran in the park in the early morning and ran the risk of being waylaid there and raped.

Dr. Gilbertson leaned across the desktop and shook Marevitch's hand in a firm but womanly grasp, not the macho kind, relieving him of another of his fears. She asked him to be seated. He was wearing civilian clothes, a brown serge suit and a shirt and tie chosen for him by his wife.