Everything but the Squeal (27 page)

26 - The Last Picture Show

M 
orris was at his house writing code and working on the scanner, and I was at home fighting down the impulse to dive into a bottle of Singha. Woofers was under the couch worrying at a flea. As tempting as the Singha sounded, some tiny vestigial Puritan remnant of conscience was suggesting that I needed a clear mind to make sure that what I was doing wasn't just plain crazy.

On the face of it, the problem was simple. With Birdie dead, I needed someone else to take me to Aimee. That part was easy. Where we began to get into trouble was the fact that the only remaining possibility was Mrs. Brussels.

Unless I'd read her completely wrong, Mrs. Brussels wasn't going to open up the way that Birdie had. She'd just deny everything I confronted her with and then, as soon as she could, she'd cut her losses, pull money out of the bank, and disappear. Judging from what Birdie had told me and from the volume of orders in the data base, she had enough money to disappear to someplace very far away.

And whatever I did couldn't point directly at Aimee. If it did, she'd be dead in a minute—assuming that she wasn't dead already. As far as I could see, there was no reason why she should be dead; the kidnap note and the ransom had been Birdie's idea, his endearing way of getting some of what he saw as his by right. The little weasel wouldn't have told Mrs. Brussels anything about it.

So I was looking at a teenage sidekick who blew his nose in polysyllables and a plan that was technical and complicated, and I distrusted it for both reasons. But I couldn't think of anything else, so I was stuck with it.

I gave up and went to bed. The moment I turned the light off, Woofers climbed up on the bed and nestled on my chest. Swell. I couldn't even turn over. This was going to be the longest night's sleep I'd had in months, and I was going to spend it flat on my back with a Yorkshire terrier listening slavishly to my heartbeat. To my surprise, I fell asleep instantly.

I forced myself to doze until eleven the next morning. Upon arising I made and actually choked down about a pound of pasta covered with tomato sauce. Eleanor would have called it carbo-loading. I ate it anyway because I had a feeling I might need endurance. Woofers ate the leftovers. She liked them better than I did.

At one, I made my first call.

She answered herself, as I'd anticipated she would. “Brussels' Sprouts,” she said, sounding harried and snappish.

“Mrs. Brussels?” I said. “This is Dwight Ward.”

“Mr. Ward,” she said, warming slightly. “You certainly dropped from sight, didn't you?” There was a trilling sound from the other end of the phone. “Damn,” she said, “there's my other line. Will you hold on for a moment?”

I said I would.

“Mr. Ward?” she said less than a minute later. “Excuse me. I'm handling the phones myself. My secretary seems to have decided to take the day off. How's our sweet little Jewel?”

“She's fine.”

“Her flu is better?” Her voice was full of matronly concern. “She's such a pretty little girl.” She paused.

“Well,” I said into the silence, “that's why I'm calling. I'm ready to sign those papers.”

“Wonderful. I think I can put her right to work. Did you say you objected to her traveling?”

“No,” I said.

“We've got a lot to do,” she said. “You and I have to have a good talk first, of course, and then if we come to an agreement we'll have to get some pictures taken. I'm sure she'll photograph beautifully.”

“We'll come to an agreement,” I said. “Don't worry about that.”

“That's grand, just grand. Can you come today?”

“Is fourish all right?” It would begin to get dark at five.

“Let me check my book.” I held on, regulating my breathing, as she left the line again. Four had to be all right. By tomorrow she might know Birdie was dead.

The line clicked. “Four's fine,” she said.

“Swell,” I said heartily, “that's great. See you then.”

The pay phone at the Oki-Burger was busy. Five minutes later it was still busy. At ten till two I was ready to get into Alice and drive down there, but I dialed the number one more time as I went out the door, and this time the Mountain answered.

“Christ,” I said, “what the hell have you got, a party line?”

“I got one of them to call home,” he said proudly. “Guess which one.”

“I don't want to guess,” I said. “I haven't got time.”

“Apple,” he said.

To my surprise, I found myself grinning. “I'll be damned,” I said. “How’d you do it?”

“Donnie didn't come back,” he said. “She was scared to death.”

“But she was afraid to go home.”

“She's got some aunt in Utah. They talked for two hours. Apple was a mess, you should’ve seen her, crying and laughing at the same time. I got her nose blown and her face dried and loaned her the money for a bus ticket and got her into a cab, and she's gone.”

“You're just fine, Mountain.”

“She kissed me good-bye.”

“Hell,” I said, “if I'd been there I'd have kissed you myself.”

“Then I'm glad you weren't here.”

“Remember when I told you I might need help?”

“Sure.”

“How about I pick you up a little after three behind the Thrifty at Sunset and Fairfax? I don't want anyone to see you get into my car. And, Mountain,” I said, “bring a gun if you can get one.”

He considered it. “I can't,” he said. “Anyway, I hate the goddamn things. But I don't need one.”

Three hours later, I was early and Mountain was late. I used the time to go into the Thrifty and call Morris to synchronize our watches. It wasn't necessary, but I knew it would thrill him.

“They look great,” he said, meaning the pictures. “You should see them on the screen.”

“And the message?”

“All in caps, like you said. I found this really fancy font. They look like they came out of the Bible.”

“That's great, Morris. I'm going to buy dinner for you and your parents if this works. Someplace fancy.”

“Just not Cap'n Cluckbucket’s,” he said. I realized that Morris had made a joke, and I was so nonplussed that I laughed. “And Jessica,” he added, sounding gratified. “Can Jessica come too?”

“Morris,” I said, “you're on your way to being a
mensch
”

The Mountain was waiting in the parking lot, red-faced, sweaty, and fetid, when I came out of the store. A tight little band of Japanese tourists was giving him a wide berth, trying desperately to pretend he wasn't there. Once they were safely behind him, one of them, a shrunken old man in loud plaid slacks, lifted a little camera to one eye and snapped a picture.
They
got
people
there
who
look
like
this
, he would say as his neighbors in Osaka registered thrilled disbelief.

“So,” the Mountain said, lumbering toward me as the tourists climbed hurriedly into their van, “what's the skinnies?”

“You go with me to Sunset Plaza,” I said, maneuvering upwind. “I go into an office and you wait in the car. Then I come out and we see what happens.”

“And?”

“And maybe all hell breaks loose.”

He gave me the kind of gargoyle's smile that you sometimes see in cognac-fueled dreams. If you're lucky, it wakes you up. The last time I'd seen one, I'd sworn off cognac. Temporarily. “Here's hoping it does,” he said.

It was almost four when we rolled into the parking lot at Brussels' Sprouts. The weather was obliging us: an oppressive lead-gray layer of clouds had rolled in from the Pacific, and senior-citizen drivers, alert to any impending emergency, were driving dead center in the street with their headlights on full bright. The lights were on in the stores of Sunset Plaza too, picking out the spangles and bugle beads sprinkled across the fronts of overpriced dresses and the gleam of silk in handmade men's shirts. None of the little spotlights, I noticed, was focused on a price tag.

“Nice neighborhood,” the Mountain said. “How much per breath?”

“If you have to ask, you can't afford it,” I said, quoting J. P. Morgan. “Exhale only.” I opened Alice's door. “You're going to stay right here, right? When I come out we may have to move in a hurry. I don't want to have to go looking for you.”

“What a shame,” the Mountain said, gazing with exaggerated longing at a beauty parlor. “I'm overdue for a facial.”

“If this works out,” I said, “I'll buy you a new face.” I closed the door and started across the parking lot. A muffled rapping sound made me turn back. The Mountain had been knocking on the passenger window. Now he held up two crossed fingers and shook them at me. I returned the salute and went around to the front of the building, checking my watch as I went. It was 4:03.

Morris was supposed to start sending at ten after four.

The doors into Mrs. Brussels' waiting room whispered open. Birdie's desk was empty, and the Flash Gordon door leading into the inner sanctum gaped at me. One of the lines on the phone was blazing away. Woofers' plaster-of-paris pawprint still sat on the desk, but the appointment book was missing. Presumably she'd taken it inside. It was 4:04.

I could hear her voice from the other room. She sounded normal, sane, persuasive. If I hadn't seen obedience school and if Jessica and Morris hadn't figured out the code identifying the pictures in the
Actors'
Directory
, I would have begun to wonder whether I were right.

The voice stopped.

“Mrs. Brussels,” I called. “Mrs. Brussels, I'm here.”

My pulse was hammering against my wrists. It was pounding with such urgency that I thought it might show, so I jammed my hands into my pockets and waited. After a moment she came out. She was wearing a tailored buff-colored linen suit with the trendy linen wrinkles in all the trendy linen places. A ruff of collar rose up almost to her chin, covering the not-so-trendy wrinkles on her throat. The smile she gave me was professional but hardly warm. It was, if anything, a conspirator's smile.

“Mr. Ward,” she said. “So glad you could make it. I'm afraid we're a bit crazy here, what with Bertram gone missing.” She gestured at the empty desk.

“Does he do this often?”

“Only when he's got boyfriend trouble,” she said, speaking to me as though I were already one of the family. “Frankly, I thought he'd finished with all that a year ago. Birdie's
meticulous
,” she said, “but he's not really
stable
.”

“Can you trust him?” I asked.

She gave me a measured glance. “He worked for my husband before I took over,” she said. “He's proved himself. Some of the information he handles is
extremely
sensitive.”

I tried not to imagine the way Birdie would look by then. “I'm sure it is,” I said. “I just need to know.”

“Of course you do,” she said with the barest of smiles. “Jewel's your ward and I'm sure you must love her very much.” She managed to make the words sound as though they'd been coated in rancid baby oil, smooth, shiny, and foully suggestive.

I just smiled.

“Come in,” she said, all business. “I've found your papers.”

She turned her back and vanished through the door. Wisps of hair hung over her collar. As I followed I yanked a hand out of my pocket and sneaked a look at my watch: 4:05.

Mrs. Brussels was fast; she'd already seated herself behind her desk by the time I entered the room. The desk was clean and uncluttered except for a wad of stapled legal-size sheets of paper covered with very small writing. The computer console was turned part of the way toward me. My heart sank as I realized that its screen was dark.

That was something that had never occurred to me. In my projections of the scene, it had always been on. I developed an immediate stomachache.

“The contracts,” she said, lifting one corner of the stack and then letting it flop back onto the desk. Then she sat back and threw one arm over the back of her chair, regarding me like a fisherman estimating the weight of his catch. Without the third-grade teacher's smile she looked older and considerably meaner. Gravity had done its work on her face; gravity and something else, something she supplied from within.

“We're going to need many signatures,” she said, tilting the chair back even farther. “I hope your writing hand is in good shape.”

“I even brought a pen,” I said, pulling out one I'd stolen from Morris. I was trying to figure out how to get her to turn the damned computer on.

“Good, good, good,” she said automatically. “But first, before you sign, I'd better tell you that I think we can put Jewel to work almost immediately. Will that be all right with you?”

“Anything that gets the cash flow going,” I said, trying to keep my eyes away from the empty screen.

“It'll flow,” she said. “You have no idea how it will flow. However, there are technicalities. I already asked you if she could travel, so that's out of the way. But there is one other point, and it's an important one.”

“And what's that?” I was beginning to perspire.

“I need to know that you have the legal right to sign these papers.”

“I told you,” I said, working up a semblance of affronted indignation. “She's my ward.”

“And you told me that her parents are dead.” Her gaze was as steady as a dial tone.

I could hear my watch ticking and I fought down the impulse to check the time. Morris was probably keying in by now. “Dead as Marley,” I said.

“Aunts? Uncles? Cousins two or three times removed? Anybody who might suddenly take an interest in the child? Anyone who might get someone looking for her?”

It had to be 4:10. I leaned forward and put my hands on my knees so I could see my watch: 4:09. “Forget it,” I said. “I'm the whole story. It's just Jewel and me.”

“We both know what we're talking about,” she said. She was looking through me. This was a conversation she'd had many times.

“Honey,” I said, licking my lips. They were drier than dry cleaning. “Even Jewel's not completely in the dark.”