Prayers for Rain (13 page)

“And
drive
her to suicide?”

“Not necessarily, though I’m not ruling it out. For now, let’s just say I think someone was determined to destroy her life in increments.”

She nodded and we sat on the edge of the pool, and she idly ran her fingers through the water.

“Wetterau and Ray Dupuis set up their film equipment supply company, and Sallis & Salk ran checks on all of their employees and interns. They all came out clean.”

“What about Wetterau?”

“What about him?”

“Did he check out?”

She glanced at her reflection in the glassy water. “He hired us.”

“But he wasn’t the money man. He drove a VW, and Karen told me they’d bought a Corolla because they couldn’t swing a Camry. Did Ray Dupuis ask for a background check on his partner?”

She watched a ripple flow from her swaying fingers. “Yeah.” She nodded, eyes still on the water. “Wetterau checked out, Patrick. With flying colors.”

“Is there anyone at Sallis & Salk who does handwriting analysis?”

“Sure. We have at least two forgery experts. Why?”

I handed her the two samples I had of Wetterau’s signature—one with the “P” and one without.

“Could you do me a favor and see if both these signatures were written by the same hand?”

She took them from me. “I guess.”

She turned, pulled a knee up to her chest, propped her chin on top, and stared at me.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing. Just looking.”

“See anything good?”

She turned her head back toward the church, a dismis
sive gesture, one that said flirting wasn’t part of the menu today.

I kicked at the stone foundation of the wading pool and tried not to say what I’d been feeling these past few months. Eventually, though, I gave in.

“Ange,” I said, “it’s starting to wear me down.”

She gave me a confused look. “Karen Nichols?”

“All of it. The job, the…It’s not…”

“Fun anymore?” She gave me a small smile.

I smiled back. “Yeah. Exactly.”

She lowered her eyes. “Who said life’s supposed to be fun?”

“Who said it’s not?”

The small smile tugged her lips again. “Yeah. Point taken. You’re thinking of quitting?”

I shrugged. I was still relatively young, but that would change.

“All the broken bones getting to you?”

“All the broken lives,” I said.

She lowered her knee and her fingers found the water again. “What would you do?”

I stood, stretched aches and cramps in my back that had been there since Cody Falk’s house that morning. “I don’t know. I’m just really…tired.”

“And Karen Nichols?”

I looked back at her. Sitting on the ledge by the glassy pool, her skin honeyed by the summer and her dark eyes as wide and frighteningly intelligent as ever, every inch of her just broke my heart.

“I want to speak for her,” I said. “I want to prove to someone—maybe the someone who tried to destroy her life, maybe just to myself—that her life had value. That make sense?”

She looked up at me and her face was tender and open. “Yeah. Yeah, it does, Patrick.” She shook her hand free of water and stood up on the pavement beside me. “I’ll make you a deal.”

“Shoot.”

“If you can prove that David Wetterau’s accident deserves a second look, I’ll come in on the case. Pro bono.”

“What about Sallis & Salk?”

She sighed. “I dunno. It’s like I’m starting to worry that all the shit cases they’ve been assigning me aren’t simply about paying my dues. It’s…” She raised her hand from the water, then dropped it again. “Whatever. Look, I don’t break a sweat over there. I can help you—use a vacation day here and there if I have to—and maybe it’ll be—”

“Fun?”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

“So I prove Wetterau’s accident was fishy, and you come on the case. That’s the deal?”

“I don’t
come on
the case. I help you with it here and there, when I can.” She stood.

“Sounds good.”

I held out my hand. She shook it. The press of her palm against mine opened holes in my chest and stomach. I was starving for her. I’d melt right there if she asked.

She pulled her hand back, stuffed it in her pocket as if it were burning.

“I—”

She stepped back from whatever she saw in my face. “Don’t say it.”

I shrugged. “Okay. I do, though.”

“Sssh.” She put a finger to her lips, smiled around it, but her eyes shimmered with moisture. “Sssh,” she said again.

The Holly Martens Inn sat fifty yards off an overgrown, yellowed grass stretch of Route 147 in Mishawauk, a blip-on-the-map sort of town not far from Springfield. A two-story cinder-block collection of units arranged in one long T, the Holly Martens ran across the length of a brown dirt field and ended at a puddle so wide and black there could have been dinosaur remains in it. The Holly Martens looked as if it had been part of an army base or air-raid shelter in the fifties, and nothing about the design seemed to beckon the weary traveler to a second stay. A swimming pool sat to my left as I pulled in toward the front office. Empty and surrounded by chain link with cyclone wire on top, it was littered with shattered green and brown beer bottles, lawn chairs caked with rust, fast-food wrappers, and a three-wheel shopping cart. A peeling sign affixed to the chain link read:
NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK
. Maybe they’d drained the pool because people kept throwing their beer bottles in it. Maybe the beer bottles had been thrown in because they’d drained the pool. Maybe the lifeguard had taken the water with him when he left. Maybe I had to stop wondering about things that didn’t concern me.

The front office smelled like matted animal hair, wood shavings, Lysol, and newspapers spoiled by fecal
pellets and dribbles of urine. That’s because behind the reception desk were at least seven cages, and all of them had rodents inside. Mostly guinea pigs, a few hamsters squeaking at their hamster wheels, feet pedaling like crazy, snouts pointed up at the wheel as they wondered why they couldn’t reach the top.

Just no rats, I thought. Please, no rats.

The woman behind the desk was bleached blond and very slim. Her body looked like it was all gristle, like the fatty deposits had run off with the lifeguard, taken her breasts and her ass with them. Her skin was so tan and hard it reminded me of knotted wood. She could have been anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-eight, and there was a sense to her of a dozen lives lived and spent before she’d turned twenty-five.

She gave me a great, wide-open smile that had a touch of challenge in it. “Hey! You the guy that called?”

“Called?” I said. “About what?”

The cigarette between her lips jumped. “’Bout the unit.”

“No,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”

She laughed with the cigarette gritted between her teeth. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

She removed the cigarette, flicked the ash on the floor behind her, and leaned into the counter. “Like Magnum?”

“Just like Magnum,” I said, and tried to give my eyebrows that patented Tom Selleck rise and fall.

“I catch it in repeats,” she said. “Boy, he was cute-cute. You know?” She arched an eyebrow at me, lowered her voice. “How come men don’t wear mustaches no more?”

“Because people immediately assume they’re either homosexual or redneck?” I offered.

She nodded. “There you go, there you go. Damn, it’s a shame.”

“No argument,” I said.

“Nothing like a man with a good mustache.”

“Damn straight.”

“So what can I do for ya?”

I showed her the driver’s-license photo of Karen Nichols I’d cut from the newspaper. “Know her?”

She gave the photo a good long look, then shook her head. “But ain’t that the woman, though?”

“What woman?”

“The one jumped off that building downtown?”

I nodded. “I heard she may have stayed here for a while.”

“Nah.” She lowered her voice. “She looks a little too, ahm, buttoned-down for a place like this. You know?”

“What kind of people stay here?” I asked, as if I didn’t know already.

“Oh, nice folks,” she said. “Great folks. Salt of the earth, you know? But maybe they’re a little rougher-looking than your average. A lot of bikers.”

Check, I thought.

“Truckers.”

Check again.

“Folks needing a place to, ahm, get their heads together, take stock.”

Read: junkies and recent parolees.

“Many single women?”

Her bright eyes clouded over. “All right, honey, let’s cut to the chase. What are you after here?”

Just like a hardened moll. Magnum would have been impressed.

I said, “Has any woman been staying here who hasn’t paid her rent in a while? A week or more, say?”

She glanced down at the ledger below her. She leaned her elbow on the counter and the fun returned to her eyes. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” I leaned my elbow on the counter near hers.

She smiled at me, moved her elbow a little closer. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Can you tell me anything about her?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. She smiled. She had a great smile;
you could see the child in it, before the road wear and the cigarettes and the sun poisoning. “My old man can tell you even more.”

I wasn’t sure if “old man” meant father or husband. These parts, it could mean either. Hell, these parts, it could mean both.

I kept my elbow where it was. Out in the sticks, living dangerously. “Such as?”

“Such as, why don’t we spread some introductions around first? What’s your name?”

“Patrick Kenzie,” I said. “My friends call me Magnum.”

“Shit.” She gave me a low chuckle. “I bet they don’t.”

“I bet you’re right.”

She opened her palm and extended it. I did the same and we shook with our elbows resting on the counter like we were about to arm wrestle.

“Name’s Holly,” she said.

“Holly Martens?” I said. “Like the guy in the old movie?”

“Who?”

“
The Third Man
,” I said.

She shrugged. “My old man? He takes over this place, it’s called Molly Martenson’s Lie Down. Got a real nice neon sign on the roof, lights up sweet at night. So my old man, Warren, he’s got this friend, Joe, and Joe’s real good with fixing stuff. So, Joe, he knocks out the M, replaces it with an H, and then blacks out the O-N-’postrophe-S. Ain’t centered, but it looks good at night all the same.”

“What about the Lie Down part?”

“Wasn’t on the neon sign.”

“Thank the Lord.”

She slapped the countertop. “That’s what I said!”

“Holly!” someone called from the back. “Goddamn gerbil shit on my paperwork.”

“Don’t own no gerbils!” she called back.

“Well, the friggin midget pig thing, then. What I tell you about letting ’em out of their cages?”

“I raise guinea pigs,” she said softly, as if it were a secret dear to her heart.

“I noticed. Hamsters, too.”

She nodded. “Had some ferrets, but they died.”

“Damn,” I said.

“You like ferrets?”

“Not even a little bit.” I smiled.

“You need to loosen up. Ferrets are fun.” She clucked her tongue. “Whole damn lot of fun.”

I heard a clacking and squeaking from behind her that was too heavy for the hamster wheels, and Warren rolled out into the front office in a black leather and bright chrome wheelchair.

His legs were gone below the knees, but the rest of him was massive. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt over a chest as broad as the hull of a small boat, and thick red cords stood out angrily under the flesh over his forearms and biceps. His hair was bleached blond like Holly’s, shaved tight against the temples, but swept back high off the forehead and hanging down to his shoulder blades. Jaw muscles the size of tea saucers worked up and down in his face, and his hands, clad in black leather fingerless gloves, looked capable of snapping an oak fence post like it was plywood.

He didn’t look at me as he approached Holly. He said, “Honey?”

She turned her head and looked into his handsome face with such immediate and total love that it invaded the room like a fourth body.

“Baby?”

“You know where I put them pills?” Warren wheeled himself up near the desk, peered in its lower counters.

“The white ones?”

He still hadn’t looked at me. “Nah. Those yellow ones, hon. The three o’clock ones.”

She cocked her head as if trying to remember. Then that wonderful smile broke across her face and she clapped her hands together, and Warren smiled, too, enthralled by her.

“’Course I do, baby!” She reached under the counter and pulled out an amber bottle of pills. “Think fast.”

She tossed them at him, and he snatched them from the air without glancing in their direction, his eyes on her.

He popped two in his mouth and chewed them. His eyes were still locked with hers when he said, “What you looking for, Magnum?”

“A dead woman’s last effects.”

He reached out and took Holly’s hand. He ran his thumb over the back of it, peered at the skin as if committing each freckle to memory.

“Why?”

“She died.”

“You said that.” He turned her hand over so it was palm up, traced the lines with his finger. Holly ran her free hand through the hair on top of his head.

“She died,” I said, “and no one gives a shit.”

“Oh, but you do, huh? You’re a real great guy that way, right?” Running his fingers along her wrist now.

“I’m trying.”

“This woman—she small and blond and fucked up on quaaludes and Midori from seven in the morning on?”

“She was small and blond. The rest I wouldn’t know about.”

“C’mere, honey.” He tugged Holly gently onto his lap and then stroked strands of hair off her neck. Holly chewed her lower lip and looked into his eyes and the underside of her chin quivered.

Warren turned his head so that Holly’s chest was pressed against his ear and looked directly at me for the first time. Seeing his face full on, I was surprised by how young he looked. Late twenties, maybe, a child’s blue eyes, cheeks as smooth as a debutante’s, a surfer boy’s sun-washed purity.

“You ever read what Denby wrote about
The Third Man
?” Warren asked me.

Denby was David Denby, I assumed, long the film critic for
New York
magazine. Hardly someone I expected to
hear referenced by Warren, particularly after his wife had claimed to not even know what movie I’d been talking about.

“Can’t say I have.”

“He said no adult in the postwar world had the right to be as innocent as Holly Martens was.”

His wife said, “Hey!”

He touched her nose with his fingertip. “The movie character, honey, not you.”

“Oh. Okay, then.”

He looked back at me. “You agree, Mr. Detective?”

I nodded. “I always thought Calloway was the only hero in that movie.”

He snapped his fingers. “Trevor Howard. Me, too.” He looked up at his wife, and she buried her face in his hair, smelled it. “This woman’s effects—you wouldn’t be looking for anything of value in it, would you?”

“You mean like jewelry?”

“Jewelry, cameras, any shit you could pawn.”

“No,” I said. “I’m looking for reasons why she died.”

“The woman you’re looking for,” he said, “stayed in Fifteen B. Small, blond, called herself Karen Wetterau.”

“That’d be her.”

“Come on.” He waved me through the small wooden gate beside the desk. “We’ll take a look together.”

I reached his wheelchair, and Holly turned her cheek on his head and looked up at me with sleepy eyes.

“Why you being so nice?” I asked.

Warren shrugged. “’Cause Karen Wetterau? Nobody was ever nice to her.”