The Shadow Cabinet (42 page)

Wilson's logic had led him that far, but beyond that his suspicions had quickly evaporated. Now he heard them being revived in Buster's meandering voice. “Find out what?”

“Could be anything. That he doesn't have a license. That maybe it's not his car. If it's not his car, it's not his card. A hot car, maybe?”

“I don't think so,” Wilson said. “If it's a hot car, all he cares about is not getting nailed on the spot. He's going to ditch it after he rolls away, or get the hell out of town. He's not going to hang around long enough to drop off the three hundred. So that means he's still hanging around.”

“So you think he's still around town somewhere.”

“Probably.”

Buster held out his hand. “O.K., let's have the license number. I'll see what I can find out.”

Dr. Foster had been in the front office some of those evenings, toiling away on his testimony for his appearance before the House subcommittee, scheduled for the coming week. Angus McVey's granddaughter, Jennifer, had also dropped by, escorting a young man in a long leather coat through the complex. She introduced him as a former college classmate, now a producer of television documentaries, planning a series on Washington policy institutes and think tanks. She'd volunteered the Center's cooperation, but Wilson wasn't sure Angus McVey had approved.

Nick Straus's office was curiously empty.

5.

It was a cold, raw morning and Wilson was wearing a crushed felt hat and a lined raincoat, both taken from the rear closet in the expectation of freezing rain, possibly snow. The commuter rush had eased by the time he reached the industrial zone north of Alexandria. Behind the ribbon of commercial buildings along the boulevard lay a wasteland of razed lots, railroad yards, an occasional warehouse and gasoline storage tank, and weedy or cindered acres behind chain-link fences. It was ten-thirty as he parked his car on the potholed side street in front of a wooden building painted bright yellow. A neon beer sign glowed in the dark window of the bar in front; a padlocked metal grille protected the front door. Next to it stood a clapboard house, isolated on a grassless lot. An old Ford truck rested next to the mesh fence of a diesel fuel depot. A line of drab wash whipped in the wind. A small girl was pulling a rusty wagon along the path to the wooden steps. Seeing Wilson pass along the deserted street, she dropped the handle and called out to him. He watched her pull a bedraggled doll from the wagon and skip toward him, holding the doll out. She hung over the fence. “See,” she said. On the doll's cracked pink cheeks were the same plum-colored jelly smears that daubed her own face.

“No school today?” he asked.

“Benny's took sick.” She held toward him the heel of toast spread with jelly, but just as quickly took it back to hold in her teeth, as she continued to hang over the fence. The blue vein in her neck stood out; her face was pinched with the cold. No other houses were in sight. A fuel depot, a utility substation, a line of boxcars. A rusty West Virginia license plate hung from the front bumper of the immobilized Ford truck, a derelict from the West Virginia mountains, like the child.

The cold had settled in his feet and stung his face as he crossed the street toward the Embassy Car Rentals reserve and maintenance lot. He went in through the open gate. The office building was off to the side, an aluminum-paneled portable structure mounted on a concrete-block foundation, reached by a set of recently painted wooden steps. He ignored the building, hoping no one would appear, and inspected the dozen foreign cars lined up on the opposite side of the lot. Most were Fiats and Subarus, bright new economy models, recently waxed. The rear of the lot was formed by the high wall of an abandoned brick warehouse and the corrugated steel maintenance garage. Through the high windows he saw the bluish-white glare of an arc welder's torch. An old Ford and a Chevrolet were parked in front.

Buster Foreman had been unable to trace the Alfa, and Wilson didn't really expect to discover it here, but then, beyond the weeds to the side, he saw three old foreign cars resting on blocks, their paint faded, their engines gone, their hulks awaiting the claw of a lifting crane. The hood of one was raised and as he moved beyond it he saw the gray Alfa Romeo convertible. It had recently been in an accident. The hood was deeply pleated and the windshield and driver's window were smashed. Only as he peered in through the broken glass and saw the road maps lying in the bucket seat was he convinced it was the same car. A few business cards were scattered along the dashboard shelf. He reached in gingerly through the smashed glass and retrieved the three he could reach. Two were Caltronics cards, like the one passed to him that morning on the beltway ramp.

He stood up. Below the gray belly of overcast, a 727 was lifting from National Airport in the distance and the fierce horneting sound carried his eyes with it. He should have felt satisfaction but discovered only annoyance, a fatalism as cheerless as the windswept lot beyond. He didn't know what he'd discovered. He didn't even know what he was doing there.

The short, balding mechanic at the metalshop bench in the garage wasn't too cooperative. He was fingering a grimy master cylinder as Wilson asked him about the Alfa. A gangling, dark-haired apprentice was more forthcoming.

“Used to be a rental, but not no more,” he said.

“Not worth toting away,” said the older man. “Engine's froze up, frame's out of line, not worth shit. Got stole, drove without oil, then wrecked. How come you're asking?”

Wilson said he had a similar one he was restoring. He asked when it had been stolen.

“Six months ago, maybe.”

“Cronin fixed it up,” the young man said. His thick dark hair was uncombed and his bony, unbearded face was that of an adolescent. Only his height and hands were those of a man; his fingers were large and the cracked knuckles embedded with grime. “Got it running good and drove it around town, a pickup car. Then he wrecked it again, couple of weeks ago.”

“How?” Wilson asked.

“Have to ask him; no one's seed him since.”

“Yeah, Cronin—Cronin shit,” said the mechanic, crossing to a Fiat sedan with its hood up.

“Who was Cronin? A mechanic?”

“Pickup and service man,” said the young man. “Used that car all the time after he got it running again. Only one it'd run for.”

The mechanic wandered back to the bench for a socket wrench. “Screwy as that car was,” he said. “Agent Orange, cowboy, whatever you wanna call him, a real junkie weirdo.” He banged a crescent wrench into a metal drawer and went back to the Fiat.

“He was a good mechanic, Cronin was, only a little crazy,” the young man continued.

“So he knows the car,” Wilson said. “Someone wanted to rebuild it, maybe he could.”

“I reckon he could if he had his head straight.”

“You know where I could find him?”

“I dunno; he never would hardly say. Living with that same girl, I reckon.”

“Maybe I'll talk to them up front.” He watched the mechanic as he bent under the Fiat hood. “You wouldn't happen to know where this girl lives, would you?”

“No, sure don't. Worked at a pizza place over on Telegraph Road is all I know. She used to call here.”

“You remember her name?”

The young man thought for a minute, shaking his head. Then he hesitated and smiled awkwardly in a moment of pure adolescent divination. “Yeah,” he recalled. “Wendy, like the hamburger place.”

“Screwy, got a screw loose,” explained the rental manager in the front office. “Junkie, pothead, I don't know what all.” A voluble, middle-aged man, he followed Wilson out of his small office, counting a handful of coins he'd taken from his pants pocket. His pants sagged low on his hips. Pushed back on his head was a pearl-gray fedora with a thin brim. He wore a butterscotch sports shirt buttoned at the collar, but no tie. “Tried to meet him halfway, give him a chance, the way I would any vet, but it didn't do no good. In an' out of the VA hospital, in an' out of trouble, sometimes wouldn't show up at all. No telling where he's running loose at.” He paused in front of the soft-drink dispenser in the customers' waiting room, still fingering the coins. “Slept in a cot back in the parts room first month he was here; didn't know it till the mechanic back there told me. Had to put a stop to that. Told me he couldn't get a place. Had to garnishee his wages a couple of times. Still owes me a hundred, but I'm not looking for him. Not looking for no trouble, neither.”

He'd told Wilson to write him a letter and offer a price if he was interested in the junked Alfa. He didn't have Cronin's address—he'd kept on the move, one room after another every month and they couldn't keep up—but he was a good mechanic, factory-trained by a foreign-car agency in Flushing, New York. Then he'd had some problems with the VA and come to Washington. The last time he'd seen Cronin was the day before Wilson's accident on the beltway. They'd found the Alfa, wrecked, at the rear of the lot a day later. “He was supposed to be in Atlantic City, picking up a car, but he doesn't show up and we find the car in the back there. What happened was he had a headful of something and come in that night and run that Alfa into the tow truck that was in the back, got scared and took off. When he called in the next day, I fired him. He was drunk on something then. Don't know what it was, don't wanna know.…”

His hands had returned to his pants pockets and now he brought the coins out again, separating them carefully. “It's a shame,” he said, “that's what it is. The VA hospital puts a man on drugs and turns him loose, no telling what he's gonna do.…”

“I appreciate your help,” Wilson said, pulling on his coat. “Thanks again.”

“No trouble, friend.” He stopped to count the coins again as he stood in front of the soft-drink machine. The office was deserted, like the windy lot outside. No customers had called, the phones were silent. In his careful segregation of the palmful of coins, Wilson saw the hebetude of an idle service bureaucracy: car salesmen, clerks at their counters, barbers behind their empty chairs, gas station attendants on the midnight watch—all groping in frustration to unlock their boredom, like a child shaking a useless clock. “Don't know what it's all comin' to,” the manager complained. “Try to help someone out and you just get yourself in trouble. But try telling that to some junkie Vietnam vet thinks folks like you an' me owe him a living. Get educated right quick. Better have yourself a baseball bat ready when you do.”

He grinned at Wilson suddenly, as if they were fellow sufferers, middle-aged, middle-class, and everywhere oppressed.

Maybe that's it, Wilson thought as he crossed toward the gate.

Telegraph Road was a long, dreary boulevard. The rain began, stopped, and began again. He counted four pizza parlors along the way. At a phone booth outside a drugstore he called two before he located one where a girl named Wendy had once worked. She'd left several weeks earlier. The order clerk who told him this hung up when he learned Wilson wasn't phoning in an order. He drove back to the pizza parlor, a new building painted in bright colors, like a carnival midway's version of an old trolley car. The counter clerk wasn't helpful, but the young blond girl who took his order in a rear booth had just come on duty. Her pink gingham dress was crisp and clean, her eyes bright, and he was her first customer. She brought him a pizza and a draft beer and said she thought one of Wendy's friends still worked in the kitchen. As she gave him his check, she supplied a street name but no number, just a neighborhood not far away—an intersection with a traffic light, a gas station on the corner, then a furniture refinishing shop, a duplex next door with rooms in the back.

He found himself on a rain-darkened walk between two clapboard houses. Beyond a sun porch whose windows were hung with green plants was an entry door, the gray paint worn with passage. Two of the four metal nameplates on the post held no cards; the names on the others weren't familiar. Inside was a small hall, a set of chairs, and the doors to the unfurnished downstairs rooms. One door was open, but the room inside, painted an electric blue, was empty except for a mattress in the middle of the floor. He heard the sound of a television set within the door facing the front of the house. A dog began to bark furiously as he knocked and he heard its nails scratching against the linoleum inside as the door opened a crack and a pair of dark-brown eyes peered out.

He took off his hat and said he was looking for a girl named Wendy. The door opened further. The woman who appeared was gray-haired, her face as plain as a dumpling, but her eyes were as brisk as her voice. “Gone; moved out a couple of weeks ago.” She nudged the slavering Boston bull terrier back into the sun porch with her foot. “That's her place across the hall there, used to be.”

The television had grown louder, aromas from a kettle of steaming vegetables bathed his face, and the pop-eyed bull terrier eluded the landlady's ankles to stand at Wilson's feet, stiff-legged and harmless, panting in the cool of the hallway. The girl had left ten days earlier, but without a forwarding address. She'd left the mattress behind; the landlady had her room deposit and wouldn't return it until the flat was emptied.

“Living alone? No, there was this fella moved in with her. That's why I told 'em to git, both of 'em. No doubles here. He was trouble too, trouble from the first. Played that stereo turned up loud all the way. Couldn't hardly hear yourself think, it was so bad. You a relative of hers?”

“No, just a friend.”

“That girl needs friends. She sure does.”

He asked the landlady if he could leave a message for Wendy. She seemed hesitant at first. “Less I see of them, the better.”

“I'd appreciate it,” Wilson said.

The woman nodded. “I could leave it with her mail, I suppose.”