Fire Lake (6 page)

She tapped her leg nervously with her fingertips. "So
you'll just have to forgive me, Harry, if I don't meet your
expectations when it comes to men," Karen said in a voice that
was meant to be lighthearted but that was cracking under the strain
of the past. "When it comes to men, I've had it. All I want now
is my own life. No more train rides, thank you. No more commitments."

I glanced at her. She'd turned her head away, toward
the side window.

I cleared my throat and said, "Are you okay?"

"Fine," she said abruptly, without turning
around. "Strolling down Memory Lane always has this effect on
me. Put on the radio, will you? I don't want to be the main
attraction anymore."

I flipped on the radio and
concentrated on the road.

***

As we rounded the final cut bank above the river, the
city came into view, white and shimmering in the snow, like a city of
marble.

"He always liked this place," Karen said.
"He made a lot of friends here."

"Do you think that's why he came back,
yesterday?" I said. It was a question that had been bothering me
since Claude Jenkins had phoned the previous night.

Karen didn't answer me just stared at the beautiful
skyline.

"What I said before," she said after a
time. "It wasn't always like that."

"We don't have to talk about him anymore,"
I told her.

"No," she said stoutly, "let me say
it."

"All right."

"He was never really a bad man," Karen
said. "He was just too naive about things. The sixties did that
to him--to all of us. Primed us for disappointment. Raised our hopes
too high. The old J-curve. When expectations outrun your ability to
meet them." She laughed. "I sound like a graduate student,
but who could have guessed what the last fifteen years were going to
be like? Who could have guessed what a falling-off there was going to
be? God, what an awful decade this is. So selfish and inhospitable.
So cocksure of itself. So unimaginative. You know what I mean?"

I nodded. "It's different," I said.

"The last ten years practically killed Lonnie,"
she said bitterly. "He just couldn't stop living the sixties
dream. Me neither, I guess. The accommodations I've made . . . I've
had to make. But inside . . ." She touched her breast, over her
heart. "I'm still for peace and love. I still make the marches,
when they're marching. I still want to believe in all that stuff.
Like I still want to love Lonnie, I guess. The two of them are hard
to separate out in my head--Lonnie and the past." She lowered
her voice to a whisper. "He never really meant to hurt anybody.
Christ, he really believed in peace, love, sharing. He just didn't
want to be hurt himself. And he'd been hurt so many times. His
parents, his brother, the band, agents. Me. You. Did you know that
you hurt him, Harry?"

"Yes," I said, "I think I do know
that."

"All he ever really wanted was to be loved
uncritically--the way he thought he loved other people. It's what we
all wanted, wasn't it? He'd open himself up to strangers, time and
time again. Really show them his heart and soul. And every time
they'd disappoint him or use him or hurt him. It got so that he
expected it. And then it got so that he couldn't handle it without a
fix. He just didn't have it inside. It was like he was born without
the right stuff. He used to joke about it, feebly. He said he was
missing a bone--the heart."

"We all have to live with disappointments,
Karen," I said.

She stiffened up on the car seat. "I'm not
excusing him," she said coolly. "I'm the last person on
earth who would excuse Lonnie Jackowski. I'm just saying that he did
what he did out of weakness and despair--not out of any deliberate
desire to hurt."

I crossed the river on the Brent Spence and took I-7I
north to the Reading Road exit. We didn't say another word, until I
pulled into the Delores's parking lot on Burnett.

"We're here," I said, flipping off the
engine.

Karen looked up at the red-brick apartment and
shivered.

"If you don't feel like this," I said
gently, "we could get you a hotel room."

She shook her head. "I came to help him."

"There could be a scene," I said in a
warning voice.

"I can handle Lonnie," Karen said, with
just a touch of contempt in her voice. "Let's go."

I guided her around to the front, up the stairs
leading to the narrow court. The slush in the courtyard was dimpled
with footprints, filling up with new snow. The limbs of the dogwoods
were encased in ice, dripping down in sharp, conical icicles. Karen
brushed against one of the dogwoods and the icicles tinkled like wind
chimes.

As we stepped into the lobby, Karen stared ominously
up the stairs.

"All set?" I said.

She took a deep breath and nodded.

We walked up two flights to my floor. When we got to
the top floor, I put my hand across her chest, brushing her breasts
again.

She laughed and said, "Are you trying to tell me
something?"

When I didn't laugh, she stared at me curiously and
asked, "What's wrong, Harry?"

I pulled her back to the landing. "My
apartment's at the end of the hall on the left."

"And?" she said.

"The door is open."

"Maybe he opened the door," she said, "to
air the place out?"

I shook my head. "I don't think so."

"Well, we don't have to make a melodrama out of
it," she said, peeking around the corner of the landing, "let's
just go see."

"I'll go," I said.

She gave me a disappointed look. "You're not
going to be like that, are you, Harry? A male chauvinist prick?
Lonnie would have told me to go ahead. In fact, he would have pushed
me in front of him."

"I'm not Lonnie," I said.

I put my hand on her shoulders, backed her gently
against the landing wall, and stared into her eyes. "Humor me
and stay here, Karen. Okay?"

"For chrissake," she said with disgust.
"All right. Go already."

I stepped back into the corridor and walked slowly
down the hall. As I got closer to the door, I could see that the
apartment had been ransacked. I unbuttoned my topcoat and pulled the
Gold Cup out of the shoulder holster. It was cocked and locked. I
flipped off the safety and stepped into my living room.

All the drawers of my desk had been emptied on the
floor. The cushions on the couch were slashed; and the stuffing had
been pulled out and scattered around the room. A big wad of it was
hanging from a lamp by the door. I swiped it off with the gun barrel.

"Lonnie?" I called out.

Nobody answered.

I walked into the bedroom and flipped on the light.
The bureau drawers had been emptied and the mattress had been ripped
open.

I walked back into the living room. Karen Jackowski
was standing in the doorway, surveying the damage with an aghast look
on her face.

"Did Lonnie do this?" she said with horror.

"I don't know. He's not here now."

"He must be completely out of his mind,"
she said, giving me a helpless look. "God, what are we going to
do?"

I put the safety on and stuck the gun back in my
holster.

"Find him," I said.
 

9

I searched the apartment to see if Lonnie had left
anything behind that might tell us where he was headed. But the
closer I looked, the less certain I was that Lonnie had done the
damage. There was something unmistakably methodical about the way the
place had been tossed--bureau drawers emptied, mattress slashed, the
shoe boxes and clothes bags in the closets opened and rifled. Very
little had been broken; and that seemed strange too. No broken
mirrors, no broken dishes, no broken lamps or glasses. It seemed to
me that a man in a frenzy, a man enraged enough to tear open the
mattress and the cushions on the couch, should have been a little
less careful about what he broke or didn't break. It almost looked as
if the apartment had been tossed by professionals. Of course, the
fact that I didn't want to believe that Lonnie had wrecked my
apartment colored my judgment. And thirty bucks was missing from a
glass tray on the bedroom bureau, along with Lonnie's Missouri
license, the photograph, and the return bus ticket to St. Louis.
Still, the rest of the mess made me dubious and more than a little
worried about what might have happened to Lonnie. Although it was
hard to believe that he could have involved himself in drug trouble
so soon after he'd been released from Lexington, that was what the
evidence suggested. Karen herself saw that.

As I came back into the living room, she looked up
from where she was kneeling on the floor and said, "It looks
like a bust."

I nodded grimly. "Yes, it does."

Stuffing a handful of loose wadding back into the
sofa, she asked, "Why would he do this?"

"I don't know," I said. "If this was
somebody else's apartment, I'd say that it had been searched by
pros."

"Pros?" she said, dropping the wadding she
was holding.

"Looking for what?"

I shrugged. "For whatever you might conceal in a
cushion, a mattress, a desk drawer, or a shoe box."

"Drugs?" Karen said, with a frown.

"That would be my first guess."

Karen shook her head. "I don't understand any of
this. Did Lonnie have drugs on him when you found him last night?"

"No."

"Then what . . . ?"

"I don't know, Karen. I don't know what he's
been up to since he got out of jail. I don't know why he came back to
Cincinnati yesterday. I don't know what he was doing at that
godforsaken motel. Or why he did this."

"Maybe he didn't do this," she said with a
tremor in her voice. "That's what you're implying, isn't it?"

"I don't know," I said, trying not to sound
overly concerned. "It's possible."

She gave me a nervous look. "Then what happened
to Lonnie, while these . . . people were searching for drugs?"

"I don't know that, either." I walked over
to the desk and started to pick up the phone.

"Who are you calling?" Karen said.

"The police. I think we can use their help
tracking Lonnie down."

"No!" she said sharply. "Don't do
that!"

I turned back to her. "Look," I said, "be
reasonable, Karen. Either Lonnie did this, which means that he's gone
over the edge and may try to kill himself again. Or somebody else
came looking for him and did this, which means that he's in deep shit
with the worst kind of people."

"People who did what? Ransacked your apartment
and kidnapped Lonnie?" she said it facetiously, as if she were
trying to make herself believe the possibility was preposterous. "You
just don't know him, Harry. You don't know what he's like when he's
mad or stoned. He probably tore your bed up because of me. It's a
symbol. Get it? That's how his mind works."

"And the couch and the bureau and the desk?"

She shrugged. "He was looking for money. He was
looking for ... I don't know what. For some way to strike back at the
world."

"There aren't any signs of a struggle," I
admitted.

"Signs of a struggle?" she said blankly.
The certainty drained out of Karen's pretty face. "You mean
Lonnie might have been hurt, right? Somebody might have come here and
. . . hurt him?"

"I don't know, Karen," I said. I was
beginning to scare her and I didn't want to. But it was a scary
situation, any way you looked at it. And the fact that there weren't
any bloodstains on the floor didn't mean that all the violence had
been directed against the furniture.

"How did these kidnappers know Lonnie was here?"
Karen said, as if she was trying to confound me with common sense.

It was a good question. And the only answer I could
come up with was the Encantada Motel. Lonnie had used my name and
address when he'd registered. Someone might have noted it, and then
followed us to the Delores. That was, if Lonnie hadn't trashed the
apartment himself, as Karen had said.

The Encantada seemed like a good place to start
looking for Lonnie anyway. Something was wrong at that motel. I'd
known it the night before. The beating Lonnie had taken, the fact
that his money was missing, Claude Jenkins's intransigence about the
police--there was something wrong with all of it. It would have
helped to know why Lonnie'd gone to the Encantada in the first place.
But the fact that Jenkins had said there were bikers there--bikers
who dealt dope--was a fairly disturbing piece of information.

I explained to Karen about the Encantada, the bikers,
and the fact that Lonnie had registered under my name. "I
realize it's a long shot, but I'd better try to find out what was
going on at that motel. And whether Lonnie did this or not, I also
think we should call the cops."