Fire Lake (17 page)

It was a tiny, dry-walled office--not much bigger
than the anteroom and furnished in the same chic, gallery style with
posters and sleek Italian furniture. On the far side of the room,
across from the door, a very pretty woman in a pale gray silk dress
was sitting behind a white lacquered desk. The woman had a round,
high-cheeked, light brown face, and curly, dark brown hair cut short
and tinted with henna. She'd made herself up expertly--pale blue eye
shadow that gave her black eyes an almost Egyptian look and bright
red lipstick that made her large, sensuous mouth gleam like cut
strawberries. There was something not quite sober about the woman's
beautiful eyes. They were slightly unfocused-looking, as if she'd
been drinking. But nothing else about her suggested that she was
drunk. She smiled at us as we entered the room.

"Hello, Karen," she said in a sweet,
lilting voice. "It's been a long time."

"Hello, Leanne," Karen said with a stab at
a smile. "You look prosperous."

"That's what I've become," Leanne
Silverstein said with an abrupt laugh. "Prosperous."

"You're not complaining, are you?" Karen
said sarcastically.

Leanne Silverstein shook her head. "No. It's
just that prosperity wasn't all I expected, if you can dig where I'm
coming from. How about you?" She stared at Karen with open
curiosity. "How did things work out for you and Lonnie?"

Karen sighed heavily. "Not so good," she
said with an effort. "We're not together anymore. And neither
one us is ... prosperous."

The two women stared at each other silently for a
long moment. Karen glanced at me uncomfortably. She wanted out--I
could see it in her face and so could Leanne Silverstein. I felt a
little embarrassed for both of them. I also felt distinctly like a
third wheel.

Leanne Silverstein leaned forward, planting her
elbows on the desktop and resting her lovely face in her hands. A
strand of pearls she was wearing at her throat fell forward and
clicked against a gold bracelet on her right wrist. "You're
still mad at me, aren't you, Karen?" she said, stating what was
obvious.

Karen looked nonplussed, then said, "Yes. A
little. Aren't you mad at me?"

"A little," Leanne admitted. "But I
can handle it. The older I get, the more important friends become to
me. I can't afford to hold grudges anymore. It's just too damn cold
outside."

Karen half smiled at her.

"Who is your friend?" Leanne said, glancing
my way.

"I'm Harry Stoner," I said.

"Sit down, Mr. Stoner. You, too, Karen."
She gestured to two handsome chairs in front of her desk. When Karen
hesitated, Leanne added: "Please."

We sat down across from her.

Leanne kept staring at Karen in a wistful, vaguely
remorseful way.

"Are you in town for long, Karen?" she
said. "I'd like you to come out to our farm if you have the
time. We call it the farm, although it's just a house and a duck
pond."

"We?" Karen asked.

"I've got a husband now and a couple of sons. I
married Jon Silverstein. Remember him?"

Karen looked surprised. "Jon the Postman?"

Leanne nodded her head and mugged long-sufferingly.
"Jon the Postman. He doesn't deliver mail on Calhoun Street
anymore. He's got his own real estate business. I manage this theater
and a small gallery around the corner. We do all right, I guess. But
it's tame, compared to the old days."

Karen smiled. "Sometimes I think tame is
better."

The two women eyed each other again, a little less
tensely.

Leanne leaned back in her chair. "I guess I owe
you something like an apology," she said, after a time. "I
mean, for the way I carried on after Lonnie and I broke up."

Karen shook her head. "What's the point? We were
different people then."

"Still," Leanne said. "I shouldn't
have put you through all those changes. I just didn't have anyone but
Lonnie to hold on to."

"Did you ever make it up with your folks?"
Karen asked.

Leanne nodded. "Eventually. I guess we all do,
eventually. As soon as I got a job and started making some money,
they took me back in the fold. And, of course, I married a honkie.
And that pleased Dad."

Karen smiled, but Leanne didn't look particularly
happy about the dispensation.

"Dad and I still don't see eye to eye on most
things. But he's older now, and I'm older too. So . . . it doesn't
seem to matter like it used to. He and Mom stay out at the farm, now
that they're retired. In fact, the place really belongs to them. Jon
and I just go out for dinner every once in a while and on the
weekends. Mom's got a garden. Dad does some hunting and fishing. They
seems to like it out there, especially when the kids come out to
visit, although Dad's still kind of hardnosed when I'm around."

Leanne Silverstein got a troubled look on her face,
as if talking about her father had upset her.

"Last I heard, you and Lonnie were in
Hollywood," she said, abruptly changing the subject.

"That was a long time ago," Karen said.

"You know, I was out in L.A. for a while, too,
back in ' 71 and '72. I did some graduate work at UCLA. Spent most of
the time stoned out of my head. Made a lot of guys. It was my last
fling before I came limping back home to Cincinnati and got reformed.
I didn't know I was going to get reformed. I just thought I was
paying the folks a visit. Looking for a little TLC and some home
cooking. Looking to get my head straight after L.A. But the weeks
stretched into months. And the times ... they do keep changing. And
here I am. Still." She looked thoughtfully at her desk. "I
kept thinking maybe I'd run into you or Lonnie out in L.A. After I
came home, I used to brood about that a lot. It was like a chance I'd
missed--a chance to patch things up."

"We weren't there for very long, Leanne,"
Karen said. "Things didn't go well for Lonnie in L.A. We moved
to New York at the end of '70. After that, we drifted around."

Leanne nodded. "How is Lonnie?" she said
delicately. "I mean, is he all right?"

"I don't know," Karen said with a frown.
"That's why I'm here. We're trying to find him."

"Find him?" Leanne said, looking confused.
"Is he lost?"

"Lonnie's still a junkie, Leanne," Karen
said flatly. "He was in Lexington for the last two years. He was
released a couple of weeks ago, and apparently got himself involved
in a drug deal here in Cincinnati. Something went wrong, and now he's
in trouble."

Leanne put her hands to her face and pulled down on
either cheek, stretching her mouth into a ripe red grimace. "Lonnie's
in trouble?" she said with real pain in her voice.

Karen nodded. "Harry and I are trying to bail
him out--if it's not too late."

"Jesus," Leanne said, looking horrified.
"How can I help?"

"You've got a guy working for you here--Norvelle
Thomas," I said. "We'd like to talk to him."

"Norvelle?" she said. "Why Norvelle?"

"Lonnie might have been in touch with him,"
Karen said. "Sy Levy said that he was talking about paying
Norvelle a visit, last Wednesday. Something about getting the band
together again."

"I'm off on Wednesday," Leanne said with an
uneasy look. "And I haven't talked to Norvelle in a couple of
weeks." She dropped her hands from her cheeks and sat up in her
chair. "Do you know anything about the drug deal that Lonnie was
involved in?"

We both looked at her uncertainly.

"I have a reason for asking," Leanne said,
when we didn't answer her right away.

"It was crack," I said. "And it must
have been a sizable amount, because the folks Lonnie was dealing with
want it back in the worst way."

"Which folks?" Leanne said.

"We're not sure. But they're young and they're
black and they're tough."

Leanne nodded angrily, as if I'd confirmed what she'd
been thinking. "That fucking Norvelle!"

"You think he was involved in this?" I
asked.

"Of course he was involved." She glared at
me as if that should have been obvious. "I never should have
given him a job. If it hadn't been for old times, I wouldn't have.
God damn him."

"Norvelle deals crack?"

"Norvelle does anything for a dime bag,"
she said. "He's been strung out so long, it isn't funny. He's
one of those guys from the sixties who just never made it to the
other side of the decade. I hate to say it, but he probably put
Lonnie in touch with the man."

"It would help if we could get Norvelle's
address."

"He used to live on Cross Lane in East Walnut
Hills. Last house on the left. But a guy like Norvelle usually goes
where the action is--where the junk is. And I don't know where that
would be."

"Is there any way we can find out?" I said.

Leanne started to answer me when a tall, red-haired
man with a drooping mustache walked into the room. He had a pleasant,
horsey face-ruddv, freckled and lit up with the sort of toothy,
feckless grin you see on rookie ballplayers. Although he was dressed
in tailored business clothes, the outfit didn't suit him. He moved
inside his pinstripes as if he were wearing a spacesuit, as if he
could hardly wait to doff the woolens and pull on a pair of jeans.

Leanne looked startled by the interruption. She put
both hands on her desk and stared at the man coldly.

"Don't you ever knock?" she snapped.

The man shrugged good-naturedly. "Can't I pay
you a lunchtime visit?" he said with his loopy smile. "After
all, I own the joint."

"You own it. I run it. This is my office, and I
expect some privacy. I thought we'd agreed on that. God knows I get
little enough of it everywhere else."

The man's big grin just disappeared, as if all of his
teeth had fallen out on the ground in front of him. "Jesus,
Leanne," he said, looking embarrassed and bewildered. "It's
not as if I'm a stranger."

Leanne stared at him for a second, as if that were
precisely what he was to her-a stranger. Then she made her beautiful
face over into a mask of amiability. "I'm sorry, Jon. Karen and
I have been talking over old times, and I guess it's got me a little
rattled."

Jon Silverstein went behind Leanne's desk and put a
comforting hand on her shoulder. Leanne sank beneath it, as if he
held the weight of the world in his palm. Silverstein sighed and took
his hand away.

"Hello, Karen," he said, glancing red-faced
at us. "Remember me? Jon the Chauvinist?"

Karen smiled at him affectionately. "Of course I
remember you, Jon."

"You look great, Karen," Silverstein said.
He stared at me blankly.

"Stoner," I said, reaching across the desk
to shake with him. "Harry Stoner."

Silverstein shook with me. The encounter with his
wife had unsettled him, because his palm was sweaty and his hand was
trembling. "You two are . . . ?"

"Friends," Karen said.

Silverstein nodded. "So where's Lonnie?"

"That's what we're trying to find out,"
Karen said. Silverstein looked confused. "He's not with you?"

"We're separated, Jon."

"I'm sorry to hear it," Silverstein said,
looking down at Leanne, "although that does seem to be the way
it is with our generation. Nobody stayed together very long. In fact,
none of our friends from the sixties is still married. Except for
us."

"And we're getting a little rocky," Leanne
said pointedly.

There was a momentary lull, in which everyone in the
room looked off in a different direction. It was clear that the
Silversteins' marriage was more than a little rocky. I felt bad for
the man, mainly because he looked as if he was still in love, where
Leanne looked as if she'd stopped caring.

"I guess it didn't work out the way anyone
expected," Jon Silverstein said, filling the silence.

"Why don't you and Mr. Stoner go out in the
hall, Jon," Leanne said suddenly. "Karen and I have some
girl talk to finish."

"Sure," Silverstein said. All of the boyish
energy in his face and voice had vanished in the course of the
conversation. He literally dragged himself across the room and
stepped into the hall.

I followed him, closing the door behind me.

Silverstein leaned against a wall and sighed.
"Women," he said, trying to make light of the scene in
Leanne's office. "I guess she's had a bad day."

I smiled at him. "I guess we didn't help."

"You two were . . . you're looking for Lonnie?"

I nodded. "He's gotten himself into some
trouble."

Silverstein laughed coarsely. "That's all he's
ever been-trouble." He said it bitterly. But then, I'd seen
the look on his wife's face when she heard that Lonnie was missing;
I'd heard the history of her relationship with Lonnie. I guessed Jon
Silverstein had had to live with that history for too long, even if
Lonnie had once been a friend of his. Frankly, I could feel for him.