The Changing (The Biergarten Series) (12 page)

The woman hesitated, opened the door slightly, stuck her face into the opening. "Yes, you can leave your card. Are you a salesman?"

"No."

"Then what are you?"

"I'm an investigator." Creosote cut loose; the woman gave him a look that was half confusion, half disgust.

"What's wrong with
him
?" she asked.

"Nothing," Ryerson answered. "He always does that."

"Oh." Her face vanished from the opening briefly. Ryerson read a momentary anxiety; her face reappeared. "Greta's not up. It's Saturday; I guess it's her day off."

"You're her—" Ryerson hesitated expectantly.

"I'm her landlady, Linda
Bowerman
. And her friend." That last, Ryerson knew, was a veiled warning;
I'm her protector, too
, it said. "What is it you're investigating?"

"I'm investigating the murders at The Park."

Linda
Bowerman
nodded her acceptance of that. "And how do you think Greta's connected with them?"

"I'm not saying I do. She does work at The Park, however, so there are some—"

"And so do ten thousand other people, Mr.—”

“
Biergarten
."

"Uh-huh." Again her face disappeared from the opening. Again Ryerson read anxiety from her. Her face reappeared. She suggested tentatively, "I guess she had a hard night, Mr.
Biergarten
."

And then he read something else, something from within the house, from above, from Greta's apartment. Something like fear. Or paralysis. Something that wanted to scream but couldn't, as if the vocal cords were numb, useless.

He said urgently, "Please, I think I should come in. Let me come in," and he took a step closer to the door.

Linda
Bowerman
closed the door until half an inch or less separated it from the frame and hissed, "Go away, this is private property!"

"You don't understand," Ryerson pleaded, "and I don't have time to explain, but I know that something's wrong in there. Something's wrong in your house."

"There's nothing wrong in my house. Nothing at all. Now go away, just go away!"

And Ryerson told himself,
If she meant it, she'd close the door
. "I'm coming in," he announced, "please step aside," and he straight-armed the door. Linda
Bowerman
backed out of the way, started for her living room, said, over her shoulder, "I'm calling the police." Ryerson said, "Good," because it was, he knew, the very best thing she could do at that moment.

~ * ~

"Motrin," the resident on call in the Emergency Ward at Strong Memorial Hospital explained to Ryerson. Ryerson had been waiting a good two hours for a report. "She took maybe thirty of them. Thirty of the big ones—six hundred milligrams each. We nearly lost her." The resident was a black woman not quite thirty with long straight hair and a distinctly businesslike air about her.

Ryerson breathed a little sigh of relief.

"You're her husband?" the resident asked.

"No, just a friend." He glanced in the direction of the Emergency Ward down a long narrow hallway to his right. "Can I talk to her?"

The resident answered, "In a day or two, yes." She paused, nodded at Creosote, who was snorting and belching, though more quietly than usual. "And without the dog, please."

"Of course," Ryerson answered, embarrassed. "Without the dog."

~ * ~

George Dixon glanced quickly around his office—though there was no one else in it—and opened the bottom right-hand drawer of his desk all the way.

"
Goddamnit
!" he whispered. "
Goddamnit
all the fucking hell!" What in God's name was his damned lunch pail doing here? He'd thrown the damned thing into the Genesee River. He studied the pail for a full minute. Then, tremblingly, he reached into the drawer, grabbed the handle, and lifted the pail out. His brow furrowed; this wasn't his lunch pail. His had had a long scratch down the front. This pail was brand new; Jesus, it still had a price tag on it.

He opened the pail quickly. It was empty except for a note written on a piece of yellow, lined paper.

The note said simply, "Who are you trying to kid, George? The world? Or
yourself
?"

And he thought desperately,
What the hell does someone know about me that I don't?!

HAPPY ACRES GOLF CLUB: SUNDAY , MAY 4

"Lost it in the sun,
damnit
!" Jack Youngman whispered.

"Good drive, anyway, Jack," Doug Miller said and teed up for his own shot. "I saw where it landed." They were at the ninth hole, a 413-yard, par-five dogleg to the left that Doug Miller always
parred
, but which Jack Youngman had
parred
only once.

Youngman growled back, "Just because I let you play through with me once or twice doesn't mean you can call me anything but 'Mr. Youngman,' you got that?"

Doug Miller grinned, shrugged, and took his shot. The solid
thwack
of the club head against the ball told him almost at once that it was going to be a long, straight drive, longer, perhaps, than Youngman's, who usually drove well but ended up taking two or three extra shots on the green.

Youngman watched the ball arch high, but not too high, then hit the fairway a good 260 yards straight ahead. He grimaced. "Where are those other assholes, anyway?" he said. "I'll be damned if I have to walk another nine holes with just you for company, Miller." He didn't add that the reason he'd let Miller golf with him these last six weeks or so was that Miller was just about the best partner a guy could ask for. He was a good golfer, for one—almost as good, Youngman thought, as
he
was—and number two, he was just asshole enough that he got the members of the other team mad and flustered enough that they screwed up a lot.

"They said they'd meet us here, right?" Miller asked. "At the ninth hole?"

"That's what they said," Youngman answered, a noticeable strain in his voice because he hated to wait for anyone. He glanced at his watch. It said 12:15. "We'll give 'em another ten minutes." He looked suspiciously at the wooden driver that Miller had just used. "What is that, Miller? Is that new?" He thought it was possible that the reason Miller's drives were so good was that he was using an illegal club, one with a head that was heavier than normal.

Miller handed him the club. "Nice, huh? English; custom made. You
wanta
try it? Go ahead."

Youngman shook his head as he studied the club. "I don't need no special club—"

Miller guffawed. "It isn't
special
, Jack." Youngman gave him a quick, critical glance. "It's a standard club."

"Uh-huh," Youngman said, unconvinced. "And what's this?" He pointed at three letters cut into the top of the club head: "DAM."

"My initials," Miller answered. "Douglas A. Miller."

"Uh-huh. What's the 'A' for—'Asshole'?" He grinned, pleased with his joke.

"No." Miller grinned too, as if sharing the joke. " 'Ashland.'”

"Who the hell gave you a name like that?" He handed the club back, but Miller said nothing; the answer to the question was obvious, and the other players had appeared.

~ * ~

MONDAY, MAY 5: 1:00 P.M.

The man from Quality Control said to the man from Research as they both stood looking up at the
Ansel
Adams mural–transparency—"Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico"—near the Ridge Road exit at Kodak Park, "Wasn't that supposed to have come down last month, Earl?"

Earl nodded. "They were going to put something by Linda McCartney up there, I think, but it got spoiled in processing, so they've got to redo it. I guess it'll be another couple of weeks, anyway."

"Too bad," said the man from Quality Control. "I mean, this is nice and everything, it's really nice, but you get sick of
any
thing after a while, no matter how good it is."

"Even sex," Earl said.

"I wouldn't go that far," said the man from Quality Control, and, both of them chuckling manfully, they turned and left The Park by the Ridge Road exit—the same exit that Greta Lynch and George Dixon and Doug Miller (when he was tagging after Greta) and a thousand other people used—to have a liquid lunch at Jack Ryan's Grill, just five minutes away on foot.

TUESDAY, MAY 6: 4:20 P.M.

Okay
, twenty-three-year-old Bud
Wygant
told himself,
so this was where Walt Morgan bought the farm?! Big deal! People died every day; what did it matter if you died in your sleep or if you had your head ripped off like an overripe melon? You were still dead, still just a memory, you were still someone they'd called 'late,' whatever the hell that was supposed to mean.
Bud took an almost perverse delight in treating the subject of death as if it were nothing but an adolescent joke. That may have been because death had never come close to touching him or anyone he knew. What he knew about it was only what several thousand hours of watching the tube had shown him—a version of death that was as sanitized and lily white as the people who sold detergent and toilet paper or as overblown and exploitive as a bout of professional wrestling.

He said aloud, with feeling, "Hey, Mr. Werewolf, fuck you, and fuck the horse you may or may not have rode in on!" He chuckled. He was an apprentice copywriter in Advertising at Kodak's State Street office and was in The Park only because his girlfriend, Sandi
Hackman
, worked there, and he was on his way to see her to take her out when her shift came to an end at 4:30. He didn't need to go through Building Seven's basement corridor to get to her office, of course, but there was no way he was going to bypass it. It was, again, a way of sneering at Death. Like he did, he thought, when he drove with twelve beers in his gut, or went deer hunting in a camouflage suit—the other hunters wouldn't see him, of course, but then, neither would the deer. A way of sneering at Death. And a way of sneering at the horrific things, like this werewolf, that carried Death with them.

~ * ~

Roger
Crimm
, Doug Miller's new boss in Emulsion Technology, said, "Have you been to see her, Doug?" It was the first time the two had spoken that day. Roger had been in another part of the plant for most of the day, and for the past hour and a half he'd been shut up in his office going over Walt Morgan's Employee Performance Charts. At last he'd tipped them all into the circular file with a sigh, a shake of his head, and a mental note that The Peter Principle—which said that people worked up to their level of incompetence—had really applied in Walt's case.

"Who?" Doug said, looking up and smiling amiably from behind his desk.

"Greta. From what you've told me, I thought you'd be camped out at her door."

Miller shook his head once, quickly. "No, I'm sorry, I don't understand."

"At the hospital. I thought you'd be camped out by her door at the hospital, Doug."

"Greta's in the hospital?" Miller was stunned; it was the first he'd heard of it. The previous day, a Monday, had been his regular day off, and Sunday had been his golfing day with Jack Youngman. "I don't understand. I thought this was her day off." For the last two weeks, Tuesdays had been Greta's regular day off, a situation she'd arranged because it gave her three days in a row away from Doug Miller. "Why's she in the hospital?" He stood shakily. "What happened?"

Roger
Crimm
went over to him, put a hand comfortingly on his shoulder. "Are you okay, Doug? Can I get you something?"

"No!" Miller shook his head quickly, in agitation. "No!" He looked urgently, pleasingly at
Crimm
. "What hospital? Please. Which one?"

"Strong Memorial. I thought you knew. I'm sorry—"

And Doug sprinted around from behind his desk and headed for the Ridge Road exit. He got all the way to the street and stopped.
What the hell was he doing?
he asked himself. His car was in the north parking lot on the opposite side of the plant, where he always parked it.
Greta
, he told himself.
Greta; it's you, isn't it?!
Because there were those countless end-of-shifts when he'd walked her to her car out the Ridge Road exit, and now, with
her
so much on his mind . . .

He turned around and went back through the doors he'd just come out, because it was easier to get to the north parking lot by going through the plant than going all the way around outside.

He stopped.

Above him he saw the magnificent
Ansel
Adams mural–transparency—"Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico."

And he felt something strange inside him, as if there were insects loose in his belly, and in his groin.

~ * ~

Sandi
Hackman
tugged on Bud
Wygant's
arm as he led her through Building Seven's basement corridor. "Bud," she said testily, "I mean it, I really do mean it. If you make me do this, we're done, through, kaput, over, finished!"