The Bum's Rush (13 page)

He reminisced for a minute and then continued.
"Anyway, about in ... seventy-three, somewhere in there, they'd been
married a year or so when she had a baby boy over at the hospital in
South Bend. It's a matter of public record. Christened him Lukkas
Dunlap, Lukkas with two fc's, which was how Bobby's daddy spelled it. A
real piece of work, that one."

He slipped into his thoughts again and then snapped
back. "Well, life goes on, you know. They settle in and start raising
their own generation of barefoot children. There was a lot of work in
the woods in those days. Not like today. Those two kids were doing
pretty darn good. Cops had to come out once in a while to tell them to
turn the Lynyrd Skynyrd down on a Friday night, and there was some talk
that they were selling a little weed to their friends, but other than
that, they were pretty much living the redneck version of the American
dream."

I waited for him to regroup.

"That went on for about five years. Maybe a little
longer. Wouldn't you know it? Talk about bad luck. The kid survived
five years of setting choker, the most dangerous job in the civilized
world, and a week after he gets promoted to faller, a freak wind blows
one back at him. Poor kid was cold and stiff before they cut him out
and got him to the hospital in South Bend. I guess, from what they
tell me, the girl just came apart. The family had written her off for
moving outside the valley, so there was no help there."

"So she's about twenty-one and alone," I said. "And
the boy's five or six. Is that right?" "Yeah," he said. "But don't get
me wrong. The girl was a long way from destitute. I mean she damn well
should have been able to make it. She had Weyerhaeuser benefits, state
benefits, the whole thing. Heck, she was probably making more money
than half the folks in town." He stopped.

"But?"

"But she just couldn't stay away from the sauce,"
he said sadly. "She already had bad habits, and it was like losing
Bobby Dunlap just set some animal loose inside her. I'd see her coming
out of the liquor store at eleven in the morning, juiced to the ears,
always holding that little boy by the hand. It was a damn shame," he
said. He was nearing the end of his tale now, the lines coming more
quickly. "She lost it all. The house. Sold the furniture. Everything.
Drank it all up. Put it up her nose. I don't know. There's a lot of
stories; I can't say for sure. Either way, she and the boy end up
living at the old Raymond Hotel, which, believe you me, has never been
any place to be raising a kid." He hesitated. "There was some talk
about things she was doing to raise extra drinking money, but I don't
want to go into that." Silence. The rest of it came out in a rush.
"Well, one Saturday afternoon, the boy falls down the stairs at the
hotel. Breaks his arm so bad they've got to screw it back together with
a steel plate. Ambulance comes, carts him off. Nobody can find the
mother. Cops go through the hotel, find her shacked up and shitfaced
with some Chinaman on the fourth floor." I heard him breathe. "Well,
that's when the state stepped in and took the boy from her. Said she
was an unfit mother. Which I suppose she was."

"And?"

"Well, the boy went to a couple of foster families
here in the county. That's a paper trail that's easy enough to follow.
But then, about six months later he gets adopted, and the story ends."

"Sealed records?"

"Even more sealed than usual. No sooner would the
county find the boy a foster home than Selena would find out about it
and start showing up, making herself obnoxious to the families. Showing
up drunk, demanding the boy back, threatening folks. That sort of
thing. Ended up having a couple of restraining orders against her
before she was through. Spent more than a few nights in the can over
it, too. So, when the adoption came around, they made damned sure
nobody was going to follow that trail."

"And Selena?"

"Left town," he said. "I can speak to that one
personally. Saw her go with my own eyes. Blind drunk. Everything she
owned wrapped in a bedroll on the back of a Harley-Davidson. Sittin' up
there, if you can believe it, behind some yahoo with mom tattooed
across his forehead."

"I believe it. And that's the last you heard of her?"

"Until that state investigator showed up saying they were thinking about declaring her dead."

"He say why?"

"Said it was confidential."

Thin ticks of plastic static could be heard above the silence of the line.

"Thanks," I said.

"Wish it was a happier tale," he said.

"Me, too."

"Excuse the old newspaperman in me, son, but I've got to know. Is there a story for me in here somewhere?"

"Could be," I said. I didn't make him ask. "If there is, I'll do the best I can to see to it that you get it first."

He made sure I had his home number, reminded me to fix my phone message, and said goodbye.

I shivered as I rose. I was stiff and sore from
sitting in one place too long. In a spasm of optimism, I'd left the
shades up and all the windows open when I'd left this afternoon. The
apartment smelled cleaner than it had in months. The same dust seemed
better, now that it had migrated to different places. The sheaf of
papers I'd collected at the library and at Karen Mendolson's apartment
had blown all over the floor, lending a festive air to the place. I
stepped over them as I went around closing the windows and turning on
the heat. As I passed the desk, I punched the button on the surge
protector. I waited as the computer eeped to life, then set the modem
about dialing my Internet carrier. Busy, as usual. I left it on
perpetual redial and left the room.

I pulled a Beck's from the refrigerator and, using
my free hand, scooped all the papers into a messy pile. I spent the
next ten minutes at the kitchen table sipping beer and separating the
research I'd done on Lukkas Terry from the stuff I'd taken from the
girl's apartment.

I was still rearranging the material when I heard
the unmistakable sound of a couple of modems swapping electronic spit.
By the time I got to the desk, I was already on-line. I checked my
E-mail. Doo tee dee doo. You have mail! One message:

Date: Sat 17 Feb 1996 00:00:18-0500 To: [email protected]

Sender: [email protected]. Subject: Mendolson Job

Leo, old buddy, nice to hear from you. Can always
use a little work. Will drive up to the peninsula this weekend. Will
have something for you by Mon. pm. Two days @ 250 per. + expen. Ok?
Flash me back if anything about this is no good. Over and out.

Ron Miller [email protected]

I quit the mail program and was about to shut down
altogether when I noticed the little pile of disks I'd liberated from
Karen Mendolson's apartment. Plain black, double sided, double-density
disks with no labels. I picked up the top disk and slipped it into the
machine. Because she had a Mac at work, I figured she probably had one
at home too. Not many people mess around with both. Sure enough, after
a quick check for viruses, the little icon appeared on the screen:
"Digest" was all it said. I double-clicked it open. It read:

Date: Thu, 14 Dec 1995 00:00:1-0500

Reply-To: Mystery Literature E-conference

Sender: Mystery Literature E-conference

From: Automatic digest processor

Subject: DOROTHYL Digest-12 Dec 1995 to 15

Feb 1995

118

To: Recipients of DOROTHYL digests

There are 25 messages totaling 1003 lines in this issue.

Topics of the day: ]

1. Sayers' anti-semitism 2. J. A. Jance 1 3.
comment on Valentines mysterys 4. Cleveland Pi's 5. Hindsight and DLS
6. A REAL Cyber-Mystery 7. Maclean's Wisdom 8. Help needed re Ellis
Peters 9. Sayers attitudes

10. Edgars 11. Hardboiled vrs cozy debate 12.
Richard Barre's new book 13. Twelve Monkeys 14. Dropshot 15. D. L
Sayers 16. Think of England. 17. Quaker Mysteries 18. Lie Back and
Think of England 19. WONDER BREAD 20. That Phrase Again 21. Howlers in
Favorite Mysteries 22. Harlan Coben 23. Dotty Lantisemitism 24.
Edgars/12 Monkies/Howlers 25. (2)

I scrolled down to the first message:

DATE: Tues, 12 Dec 1995 18:29:42-0500 FROM: [email protected] SUBJECT: Sayers' anti-semitism

Flame me if you must, but I completely fail to see
how one can be excused anti-semitic views merely because they were
prevalent at the time. Some things do not change, and an abiding regard
for the universal value of one's fellow human beings is most certainly
one.

Lilly Rowan (Archie Goodwin's friend) aka Barbara Reynolds http://www.apox.com [email protected]

Hmm. I kept on. A review of a new mystery book by
Seattle writer J. A. Jance. A request for anybody who knew of mysteries
centering around Valentine's Day. Somebody inquiring about fictional
PI's from Cleveland. It went on and on. And on and on.

Four cups of coffee and four hours later, I'd waded
through all six disks. One through five had all been the same. A
chronological record of some sort of compiled digest dedicated to
discussing mystery fiction. The digest appeared to be called Dorothy L,
apparently named after a famed writer named Dorothy L. Sayers, whose
somewhat antiquated attitudes regarding Jews were, at least in the
period between December 1995 and March 1995, engendering quite a heated
debate as to whether current late-century standards should be
grandmothered backward in time to include prewar dowagers. I was staying out of it.

I learned that Victorian mothers used to advise
their soon-to-be-married daughters to "Lie back and think of England,"
that the movie 12 Monkeys had confused a hell of a lot of people, that
somewhere out there there were probably mysteries that featured Chilean
CPAs, that Dorothy L represented the cozy end of the cozy versus hard
boiled debate, that the digest apparently originated at Kent State
University, that an inordinate number of the subscribers were located
either at universities or at libraries, that most of the participants
seemed to be quite well educated and fairly articulate, and that many
subscribers adopted what they called noms, using the name of one of
their favorite fictional characters instead of their own. Finally, I
learned that if someone got off the subject of mysteries or got too
nasty with other subscribers, somebody using the nom Danger Mouse would
step in and gently but firmly threaten to jettison the miscreant into
blackest cyberspace.

The sixth disk was different. They were all
messages to Dorothy L like the others, but these were all from the same
person and all on the subject of Sayers's anti-Semitism. The first one
read:

DATE: Tue, 19 Dec 1995 18:21: 42-0600

FROM: J. P. [email protected] SUBJECT: anti-semitism

Pleeeese. Spare me! How can you possibly think to
transpose a modern set of values on a time fifty years distant? It's
absurd. Ms. Sayers professes a set of values which were totally
appropriate for a woman of her station in that time period. How dare
you dismiss her work with a wave of your politically correct hand.
Sorry if I sound a little strident, but this particular thread seems to bring out the worst in me.

J. P. Beaumont (J. A. Jance's Seattle Detective.) Karen Mendolson:) J. P. [email protected] [email protected] com

Bingo. I'd seen these same messages as I'd worked
my way through the journals. I scrolled my way to the end. All from
either the library address or the America Online address that I now
presumed to be Karen's apartment. All part of the great Sayers debate.
The more of them I read, the more I liked Karen Mendolson. Any enemy of
PC is a friend of mine. I returned the slide to the top, ejected the
disk, and reinserted one of the others.

It took me two tries, but I found it. The E-mail
address of this person called Danger Mouse. Seemed as good a place as
any to start. I copied the address from the message, clicked open a new
message of my own, and pasted in the address.

Date: Sat, 17 Feb 96 09:12:13 EST From: [email protected] Subject: This Digest To: [email protected]

Hello. I came across Dorothy L while surfing the web. Could you tell me more about it please.

Thanks,

Leo Waterman

Send. I stood and stretched. My shin throbbed. I
could still feel the touch of those stairs I'd rolled down the other
night. As I reached for the mouse to shut down the computer, someone
began banging on my apartment door. Had to be Hector. Nobody else could
get in. Hector Guiterrez was the superintendent of my apartment
building, a banished Cuban whose negative attitude toward Castro's
regime had earned him seven years in prison, fourteen days in a leaking
boat, and another two years behind barbed wire in south Florida. Even
after all these years in the land of the free and the home of the
brave, Hector still harbored a deep, abiding distrust of authority
figures. Hector was an ardent subscriber to the conspiratorial view of
history. Everything was a plot. A new postman was a potential CIA
agent. If he lost a sock in the dryer, he figured it was being
microanalyzed in some underground laboratory.

Years ago, for reasons I'd never fully understood,
Hector had unilaterally adopted me as a coconspirator. I'd never been
totally clear as to whom we were conspiring against or to what ends,
but it seemed to make Hector happy, which was good enough for me. Off
the pig. Subvert the dominant paradigm. It was us against the world.

Sure enough. There he was, his boiled-egg head
gleaming, his thick mustache, just beginning to show traces of gray,
twitching furiously. He blustered past me into the room, waving a
Federal Express envelope, taking laps around the coffee table, cutting
the air with the envelope.

"Leo, jew chit. I got better tings to do dan chase abler you."