Mourn The Living (9 page)

Dinneck was on the floor, screaming, fingers clawing his face.

Nolan slapped him. “Shut the fuck up, before the whole motel’s in here.”

Dinneck quieted, still a blind man, his eyes squeezed together and his face slick with tears.

“Who sent you, Dinneck?”

“I’ll . . . I’ll never tell you . . . you lousy cocksucker!”

Nolan seized Dinneck by the scruff of the neck and dragged him over to the pool. Nolan knelt him down and said, “Now I’m going to ask you some questions.”

Dinneck kept swearing at Nolan and Nolan pushed Dinneck’s head under water for sixty seconds. Dinneck came up gasping for air.

“Who sent you, Dinneck? George?”

“You son-of-a-bitch, Webb, goddamn you . . .”

Nolan put him back under for another minute. When he brought Dinneck back up he had quit talking, but his breath was heavy and his unconsciousness only a ruse.

“Did George Franco send you?”

Dinneck kept his eyes closed, tried to act unconscious.

“The next time I put you under,” Nolan said, “you won’t be coming back up.”

No response.

Nolan shrugged and pushed Dinneck toward the water. Dinneck screamed, “No!” and Nolan hesitated before dunking him again, holding him an inch above the water.

“Who, Dinneck?”

“Not George, he doesn’t know anything about this . . . George claims he never saw you!”

“You still haven’t said who, Dinneck.”

“Elliot, his name is Elliot! He’s the one in charge . . . George doesn’t have any power.”

Nolan released Dinneck and the man fell in a heap at the pool’s edge.

Nolan grabbed up his towel, slung it around his shoulders and headed for the door. His cigarettes were in a small puddle in the corner so he let them lay.

“You . . . you gonna leave us? Just like that?”

Nolan turned toward the voice. Tulip, coming out of his stupor, was standing in the pool, looking puzzled and wet.

“I’m not going to kiss you good night.”

Tulip, dripping wet, looking ridiculous, pouted.

“And get out of those clothes, Tulip. You’ll catch your death.”

Tulip crawled out of the pool. He was hefting his friend Dinneck over his shoulder as Nolan left.

Back in the room, door locked, Nolan laid a loaded .38 on the nightstand by his bed, then washed up and treated his head wounds. Next time he wanted to relax, he thought bitterly, he’d take a hot shower. Hell with swimming.

He was asleep when his head hit the pillow.

4

SHE WORE
a black beret, had dark blonde hair and was smoking a cigar. She was looking into the sun, squinting, so it was hard to tell if her features were hard or soft. Her body was bony, though she had breasts, and she was leaning against a ’30’s vintage Ford, holding a revolver on her hip. The woman was staring at Nolan from a grainy, black-and-white poster that was a yard high and two feet wide.

The poster was tacked onto a crumbling plaster wall in a room in what had once been a fraternity house. No one Nolan spoke with in the house seemed to know what fraternity it had been—just that about four years before the frat had been thrown off campus for holding one wild party too many—and since had been claimed by assorted Chelsey U males on the hippie kick. The fraternity symbols over the door were Greek to Nolan.

The room in which Nolan stood staring back at the stern female face was inhabited by a Jesus Christ in sunglasses and blue jeans. Underneath a beard that looked like a Fuller Brush gotten out of hand, the thin young man sported love beads and no shirt. Outside of the beard and shoulder-length locks his body was hairless as a grape.

“Doesn’t she just blow your mind?”

Nolan said, “Not really.”

“Bonnie Parker,” the young man said with awe. He wiped his nose with his forearm. “Now there was a real before-her-time freak.”

“Freak?”

“Right, man. Before her time. She and that Clyde really blew out their minds, didn’t they?”

“They blew minds out, all right.”

“Don’t believe what the press says about them, man! They were alienated from the Establishment, persecuted by society, victims of police brutality.”

“Oh.” Nolan glanced at the poster next to Bonnie Parker’s which was a psychedelic rendering in blue and green; as nearly as he could make out, it said, “Love and Peace Are All.”

“Some of the other freaks got pictures of the movie Bonnie up on the walls. Not me. I insist on the genuine article.”

“Swell,” Nolan said. He lit a cigarette and said, “Got a name?”

“Me?”

“You.”

Jesus thought for a moment, scratched his beard. “I’m called Zig-Zag.”

“Good,” Nolan said. “You’re the one I was looking for.”

Nolan strolled around the room, glanced at other posters hanging on the deteriorating green plaster walls. Dr. Timothy Leary. Fu Manchu For Mayor. The Mothers of Invention. Kill a Commie For Christ.

There were some paperback books in one corner, several ashtrays scattered around, a few blankets by the window. Alongside one wall a radiator spat underneath Dr. Leary’s picture. The air was singed with incense.

“Irene Tisor,” Nolan said. He looked out the window and watched the Chelsey River reflect the sun.

“What?”

“Irene Tisor. Did you know her?”

The mass of hair nodded yes.

“What happened to her?”

“Bad trip.”

“Bad trip?”

“A down trip, straight down.”

“Fell?”

“I wasn’t there, man. Nobody was there but her . . . and she must’ve not been all there herself.”

“What’s the word?”

“Huh?”

“What do people say about it?”

“Nothin’ . . . just that Irene thought she could fly. Guess she couldn’t. Bummer.”

“Was she a friend of yours?”

“So-so.”

“How’d you know her?”

“She hung around the Third Eye. We talked.”

The Third Eye was a nightclub frequented by Chelsey’s would-be hippie element. The local underground newspaper was also called the
Third Eye
and the club was its editorial headquarters. Zig-Zag was the sixth person Nolan had spoken to that morning, and all had mentioned Irene as a regular at the Third Eye.

“What’d she like to talk about?”

“Life.”

“Life.”

“That’s right, man. Philosophy one-oh-one.”

“What’d she think of it?”

“Of what?”

“Life. What’d she think of it?”

Zig-Zag flashed a yellow grin. “Groovy.”

Right.

“Was Irene Tisor one of you?”

Zig-Zag flashed the grin again. “I give, man. What am I?”

“Whatever the hell you call it. Hippie.”

“I’m not a hippie, that’s a label hung on my generation by a biased press!”

“Flower child, love generation, freak, whatever. Was she one of you?”

“Well, in spirit, man . . . but in spirit only. There’s a lot of us, we live kind of foot to mouth, know what I mean? We don’t want for much, but hell, we don’t want much.”

“Irene lived pretty good?”

“Better than that. She had an apartment, I hear, with that straight Trask chick.”

“But she was thick with your crowd?”

“She sympathized. She heard the music, all right, she just couldn’t take her clothes off and dance.”

“She heard enough to dance off a building.” Nolan walked over to Dr. Leary’s picture. Down the hall somebody was playing a Joan Baez record, and though Nolan didn’t recognize the voice and was no judge of music, he knew what he didn’t like. Nolan ground out his cigarette in Leary’s bleary left eye.

“Hey, man, what the fuck you doin’, there!” Zig-Zag got up and started toward Nolan, flexing what muscle there was on his skeletal frame.

Nolan’s mouth became a humorless line. “You’re the love generation, remember?”

Zig-Zag brushed the ashes off Leary’s face and said, “What is it buggin’ you, man? You come in here all straight and polite, then you get nasty. What’s
buggin’
you?”

“Irene Tisor is dead. I want to know why.”

Zig-Zag shrugged. “Anybody can pull a bad trip, man.”

“Wasn’t she a ‘straight,’ like me?”

“She wasn’t all
that
straight, man. But I admit I never heard of her taking a trip before this. She got a little high once in a while, blew some pot, all right, but that’s all I ever saw her take on, besides a guy or two.”

“Did she take you on, Zig-Zag?”

“Naw, we just shot the shit. But there’s a guy in the band at the Third Eye she saw pretty regular.”

“What’s his name?”

“Broome. Talks with an English accent, but it’s phony.”

“Broome. Thanks.”

Nolan turned to leave, then stopped and said, “Pot cost much around here? LSD and the rest, it sock you much?”

“Cost of living’s high, man. Somebody’s making the bread in this town.”

“How about you, Zig-Zag? Your old man, what kind of business is he in?”

“My old man? He’s a banker.”

“I see. Where?”

“Little town north of Chicago.”

“You get this month’s check okay?”

“Huh? Oh. All right, so he sends me a little bread to help out. Big deal.”

Nolan nodded to Bonnie Parker’s picture. “You’re lucky Bonnie and Clyde were before their time, Zig-Zag.”

“Huh?”

“They were in the banking business, too.” Nolan turned and left the room, went down the stairs and out the ex-frat.

5

IT WAS ALMOST NOON
now and Nolan, sitting behind the wheel of the Lincoln, looked back on a morning of interviews in Chelsey’s quote hippie colony unquote. It had gotten him nothing more than a few scraps of information and a bad taste in his mouth.