Final Notice (12 page)

It wouldn't do to tell Gerald Arnold that I was a private investigator. Not until I was certain he wasn't the guy I was after. I certainly didn't want to scare the Ripper into thinking he was being watched. There was no telling what that might do to a mind like his. I just wanted to identify him and to have him sit tight long enough for Al Foster and his forensic team to make an air-tight case for the grand jury. So what I needed was a legitimate excuse to come calling at dinner time. Something that would get me through the door and give me a few minutes to look Gerald Arnold and his rooms over.

I took another look at the house and asked myself what alias would appeal to a hippie living in a run-down apartment. And it came to me effortlessly. Housing inspector. Housing inspector investigating a complaint against the landlord filed by one of the other tenants. If I knew his type, it would be perfect. And it would also give me a reason to explore his rooms. I debated about whether I should pull the Colt Commander from the gun rack beneath the dash board. It was probably the prudent thing to do. But then I didn't expect to be put in a position where I might have to use it. Not if I played my cards right.' And having it around might just tempt me into overplaying the hand. So I left it where it was, cracked open the door and walked up the cemenf path to the stoop.

I got the name of one of the tenants from the old iron mailboxes hung beside the hall door. Ms. Clio Rosen sounded feisty enough. And I found the name of the realty company, Clancy & Sons, on a white placard taped beneath the mailboxes. I walked through the door into a dark corridor that smelled of cooking grease and mildew, then up six half-flights of rickety stairs, to the third-floor landing. According to the mailboxes, Gerald Arnold was 3-N. But I wouldn't have needed directions to find his rooms. Not when the northside door had a huge peace emblem spray-painted on its panels and a feathery white cross painted beneath it. I put on my most officious face, loosened my shirt collar, ruffed my hair a bit to suggest that I was coming to the end of a hard day, and knocked.

"Yeah, man?" a voice called from behind the door. It was a husky, soporific voice, as sluggish as a tortoise. I figured that Gerald Arnold was thoroughly stoned.

"Mr. Arnold?" I chirped. "Mr. Gerald Arnold?"

"Yeah?" he said in a sleepy drawl.

"My name is Stoner, Mr. Arnold. I'm with the metropolitan housing authority. We've had a complaint about the owner of this house. Clancy & Sons?" I took out my official detective's notebook and riffled a few pages to make it seem as if I was checking details. "A Ms. Clio Rosen filed a complaint of neglect of property. I'm here to collect evidence for a condemnation hearing. I'd appreciate a few minutes of your time."

"They're going to condemn this place?" he said.

"That's what I'm here to determine."

"Well, all right!" Gerald Arnold said. He flung the door open. "Come on in. I've got nothing to hide."

Gerald Arnold had the shaggy blonde mane and long, doleful face of a grocery-calendar Jesus. Dark, soulful eyes. Hollow cheeks. A thin mouth. And a scribble of yellow hair on his chin and above his upper lip. He was dressed in jeans and a checked, long-sleeved shirt rolled at the cuff; and he was wearing a heavy gold cross around his neck that caught the light from the naked bulb in the hallway. The room behind him smelled strongly of marijuana smoke. I could see a couple of roaches, lying like the burnt tatters of a love letter on a big black porcelain ashtray on the floor. It wasn't much of a room. Say twelve by twelve with a mantlepiece on the far wall, a painted-over gas outlet in the center of the ceiling, and a pair of big, old-fashioned radiators, twisted like inductor coils, beneath the window to the left of the door. Three kitchen plates were set beneath the radiators to catch the overflow when the pipes were bled; a small calico cat was lapping furiously from another plate, propped on a painted table next to the radiators. The rest of the furniture in the room, what there was of it, was Heart Mart stuff. Two stuffed chairs with sprung cushions. A mattress with a Madras throw lying in front of the windows. An end table at the foot of the mattress, stacked with six or seven books. The one on top had a cross embossed on the cover. There were three pictures of Christ set like family portraits on the mantlepiece.

Arnold caught me staring at the pictures and said, "Heavy, huh?"

"Heavy," I said.

"You into Christ?" he said earnestly and bounced up and down on his toes. "I am. I'm born again, man. Honest! He changed my life."

Gerald pulled a sheaf of pamphlets from a drawer in the painted table and handed them to me.

"Read them. They'll do you good, man. I got plenty more, so you can keep them. God loves us all, brother. Even that son-of-a-bitch landlord of mine."

I could see that He hadn't completely changed Gerald's life. And on closer inspection, one of the portraits of Jesus turned out to be a photograph of Eric Clapton. Which was O.K: by me. Because I kind of liked Gerald Arnold, with his pamphlets and his profanities and his funny way of bouncing on the balls of his feet, as if he were getting set to go into the Big Game on God's Side. I pretended to inspect the apartment, while Gerald bent my ear about Jesus and about what a wreck his life had been before he found Him.

"I'm from Detroit, man. Some heavy dudes in Detroit. Real hard-ass town. Had to get of there, man. Had to!"

He started bouncing up and down so quickly that I began to suspect that born-again Gerry wasn't above taking a taste of meth from time to time. Say every four hours. He was haggard-enough looking to be a speed freak. And his teeth were discolored, which could have been from meth. Or just poor health habits, Harry, like it used to say on your gradeschool report card. Either way, I didn't have to pump him for information. He just kept right on talking about himself, answering every question I could have put to him without making me open my mouth. It appeared Gerald had been in a motorcycle gang, the Silver Horsemen, up in Motor City. Riding the midwest with a chain belt and a denim vest full of uppers. And just generally having a good ol' time, terrorizing small town cops and stomping on rival gangsters. Until one fine day, two years before, his best friend, Mickey had stomped on him. What a falling off was there!

"Man, he almost blew me away," Gerald said. "I mean for all time. And I loved that dude. Like a brother, man. I mean it was heavy. Took me almost a year to get my shit together after that. Wandered around some. Like I was in a daze, you know? Finally came down here to work at the Ford plant with another buddy. Only the foreman on the night shift starts riding me about my hair. Can you believe that shit, man? It got so bad I had to wear a hair net. Like a fucking girl. I mean I was ready to kill somebody I was so messed up. And then I met Brother Thomas Stearns at a union meeting about nine months ago. Man, he just turned my life around. Got me into reading books man. And going to church. And now, man, when that asshole foreman starts riding me, you know what I do?" He grinned at me. "I just flash him the other cheek, man! Wow, that burns him up!"

I laughed. I couldn't help it.

"You want to hear how I got turned on to Christ?"

I shook my head. I didn't think I could take a blow-by-blow account of Gerald's rebirth. Anyway, after listening to him talk for more than ten minutes, I was fairly well satisfied that he wasn't my man. For one thing he wasn't quiet enough. For another, speed freak or not, he was too damn normal at heart. And for a third, when I asked him if he ever thought of getting back at his friend, Mickey, for beating him up, he snorted and said, "Are you shitting me? This.guy would make you look like a fire plug."

That didn't sound like a man who thought he was invincible. In fact, most of what Gerald Arnold said made him sound eminently vincible. Just a cheerful hop-head who thought he'd found his niche with the Almighty. Which was all right, too. So I looked him in the eye and said, "Do me a favor, Gerald?"

He said, "Sure!"

"Roll up your sleeves."

"My sleeves?"

He shrugged and rolled up his sleeves. Both forearms were as unmarked as a baby's bottom.

"Are you a cop?" he said. "I mean if you're a cop, I'm clean, man. You can see for yourself. No tracks. I don't even pack works anymore. Not since I was saved. I mean I know it must sound corny, but I kicked, man. Cold-turkey. I still get high on grass. But no more hard stuff. Honest!"

I wasn't sure whether I believed that or not. I'd never talked to an addict who hadn't just kicked or wasn't about to. But Gerald seemed to believe it. And if it made him feel good to think that God had helped him straighten up, I wasn't going to argue with him.

"That's really something," I told him.

Gerald Arnold wiped a loose strand of blonde hair from his wan, apostle's face, nodded solemnly, and said, "Praise God, it is."
 

I LEFT Gerald to his new life and walked back down the stairwell to the street. If they're all as easy as that, Harry, I said to myself, you could wrap this thing up by tomorrow night.

The sun was setting behind the rooftops and oak trees on the west side of Ogden, and the air had a vivid, velvety feel to it, the way it feels after a hard spring rain. I glanced at my watch. It was a quarter to seven. I spent a moment sitting on the car seat, taking in the night air. A black kid in a striped T-shirt and jeans sauntered by, a transistor radio to his ear. He had a big afro comb in one of his back pockets and a can of beer in the other. He pulled the beer can out, still shuffling to the tinny beat of the radio, took a quick sip, and wedged the can back in his pocket. I grinned at him, but he didn't see me.

Ah, Harry, I thought. And sighed peacefully. It was one of those moments, and God knows they're rare enough in my life, when I felt perfectly content. I liked the smell of the evening and the funny cool of the black kid with the radio and the beer can and the nervous patter of Gerald Arnold, the bemused Jesus-freak. It seemed worse than a shame to spoil it all by going back to work. But Haskell Lord only lived three blocks east of Ogden on Stettinius. And it was on my way back to the library. And if I was as lucky with Mr. Lord as I'd been with Gerald Arnold, I could go back to Kate Davis with the good news that two of our suspects had been eliminated. But, oh, the feel of the night wind and the look of the oak trees in the sunset.

I turned on the igilition and pointed the Pinto east, toward Stettinius.
 
 

It was nearly dark when I pulled up in front of the Lord home. But there was still enough blue light left in the sky to see that this was a very different neighborhood than Ogden Street. Lawns so trim they looked barbered. Newspapers piled neatly beside wire trash bins. The smell of burning leaves in the air like a peppery cologne and somewhere, in a back-yard arbor, the anise-scent of sweet goldenrod. The night air was so rich-smelling it cheered me up again. And then the look of the Lord home itself was modestly reassuring.

No peeling paint here. No ragged guttering. Just a two-story red brick house with a pitch roof and white Williamsburg trim, as solid and decent-looking as a cedar chest. Planters in the windows. A stone stoop with glass inserts on either side of the front door and a pearly white facade above the doorway, shaped like a fluted scallop shell. There were no lights on in the front windows and the top floor was curtained, but I could see a yellow, prismatic glow through the inserts on either side of the door. Maybe from the dining room, where Haskell and the rest of the family were gathered about the table.

According to my notes, Haskell Lord was a little older than my other suspects. Twenty-seven. And while there was no occupation listed on Miss Moselle's card, he was either living with his parents or doing pretty well for himself, because that house and the yard that stretched out behind it was prime property. Jessie had remembered him as being a ruddy, quicktempered fellow. The type who might not take kindly to a dinner-time visit. On the other hand, it was my best chance of catching him at home. Telephone solicitors know that. So do process-servers and private detectives. I ran through my repertoire of aliases once again. Decided that housing inspector wouldn't do. And any kind of salesman, magazine to insulation, would get the boot. Then I remembered what Jessie Moselle had said about the notice she'd been forced to send him and thought, why not? I could simply tell him the truth. That I was employed by the library and was investigating the disappearance of several books he had taken out. There had been some mix-up in the library records and I was just checking to see if he had returned them on time. And if he asked, why me? I could always bring up the final notice that had been sent to him several months before. It would give me an excuse to take a quick look at him and, if I were really lucky, to spot the tattoo on his forearm. I didn't feel the need to examine the interior of the house, although certain kinds of solid Republican decency can be a lot more disturbing than the rundown pad of a born-again hippie.

I took out my trusty notebook, smoothed my hair, rebuttoned my shirt and stepped up the stone walkway to the front door. The doorbell went off as if it were set in a steeple. Bing-bangbong! A minute or so passed and, just as I was about to ring again, the door opened.

I looked at the arms before I looked up at the face, only this guy was wearing a white Angora sweater. And his face was fair, freckled, and affable-looking. I did a bit of a doubletake and wondered if I'd gotten the wrong address.

"Does Haskell Lord live here?" I asked the kid, who was about twenty-three and as decent-looking as the house he was living in.