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.”
14
There was a barn out back, about three hundred yards from the rear of the motel, past a blighted grove of bent or broken trees and a small clearing dyed black with motor oil. Warren Martens propelled his wheelchair through decayed branches and the mulch of a few seasons’ worth of unraked leaves, the litter of nip bottles and abandoned car parts, and the crumbled foundation of a building that had probably died somewhere around the time Lincoln did, as if he were riding atop a lane of fresh blacktop.
Holly had stayed back in the office in case anyone showed up here because the Ritz was full, and Warren led me out the back and down a wooden ramp toward the sagging barn where he stored the contents of abandoned units. He got ahead of me in the grove, pumping those wheels until the spokes hummed through crackling leaves. The leather back of his chair had a Harley-Davidson eagle sewn into the center and bumper stickers affixed on either side of the bird: RIDERS ARE EVERYWHERE; ONE DAY AT A TIME; BIKE WEEK, LACONIA, NH; LOVE HAPPENS.
“Who’s your favorite actor?” he called back over his shoulder as his thick arms pumped the wheels over crackling leaves.
“Current or old-time?”
“Current.”
“Denzel,” I said. “You?”
“I’d have to say Kevin Spacey.”
“He is good.”
“Fan of his since Wiseguy. ’Member that show?”
“Mel Profitt,” I said, “and his incestuous sister, Susan.”
“Well, all right.” He tipped a hand back and I slapped it. “Okay,” he said, getting excited now that he’d found a fellow cine-geek out here in the dead trees. “Favorite current actress, and you can’t say Michelle Pfeiffer.”
“Why not?”
“The babe factor’s too prevalent. Could skew the objectivity of the poll.”
“Oh,” I said. “Joan Allen, then. You?”
“Sigourney. With or without automatic weapons.” He glanced over at me as I caught up, walked alongside him. “Old-time actor?”
“Lancaster,” I said. “No contest.”
“Mitchum,” he said. “No contest. Actress?”
“Ava Gardner.”
“Gene Tierney,” he said.
“We might not agree on specifics, Warren, but I’d say we both got impeccable taste.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” He chuckled, leaned his head back, and watched the black branches roll overhead. “It’s true what they say about good movies, though.”
“What do they say?”
He kept his head tilted back, kept thrusting the wheelchair forward as if he knew every inch of this wasteland. “They transport you. I mean, I see a good movie? I don’t forget I don’t have legs. I have legs. They’re Mitchum’s because I’m Mitchum and those are my hands running down Jane Greer’s bare arms. Good movies, man, they give you another life. A whole other future for a while.”
“For two hours,” I said.
“Yeah.” He chuckled again, but it was more wistful. “Yeah,” he repeated, even more softly, and I felt the sharp tonnage of his life roll over us for a moment—the broken motel, the blighted trees, the phantom limbs at thirty, and those hamsters climbing their hamster wheels back in the office, squeaking like mad.
“It wasn’t a motorcycle accident,” he said, as if answering a question he knew I wanted to ask. “Most people see me, they think I dumped my hog on a turn.” He looked back over his shoulder at me and shook his head. “I was shacking up here one night when it was still Molly Martenson’s Lie Down. Shacking up with a woman wasn’t my wife. Holly shows up—all piss and vinegar and fuck you, motherfucker—and she throws her wedding ring at me in the room and bolts. I go chasing her. There wasn’t no fence around the pool then, but it was still empty, and I slipped. I fell in the deep end.” He shrugged. “Cracked myself in half.” He waved his arm at our surroundings. “Got all this in the lawsuit.”
He wheeled to a stop by the barn and unlocked the padlock over the door. The barn had been red once, but the sun and neglect had turned it a sallow salmon, and it sagged hard to its left, leaning into the dark earth as if any moment it would roll onto its side and go to sleep.
I wondered how a cracked spine had led to the removal of both of Warren’s lower legs, but I decided he’d tell me if he felt like it, leave me wondering if he didn’t.
“Funny thing is,” he said, “Holly loves me twice as much now. Maybe it’s ’cause I can’t go out catting around no more. Right?”
“Maybe,” I said.
He smiled. “Used to think that myself. But you know what it is? What it really is?”
“No.”
“Holly, she’s just one of those people truly comes alive only when someone needs her. Like those midget pigs of hers. Simple bastards would die if left to their own devices.” He looked up at me, then nodded to himself and opened the barn door, and I followed him inside.
Most of the barn was a flea market of three-legged coffee tables, ripped lamp shades, cracked mirrors, and TVs with picture tubes shattered by fists or feet. Rusted hot plates hung from their cords against the rear wall alongside third-rate paintings of empty fields, clowns, and flowers in vases, all the surfaces soiled by orange juice or grime or coffee.
The front third of the barn, though, was a collection of discarded suitcases and clothes, books and shoes, costume jewelry spilling from a cardboard box. To my left, Holly or Warren had used yellow rope to cordon off a section neatly stacked with a never-used blender; cups, glasses, and china still in the boxes from the store; and a pewter serving plate that bore the engraving LOU & DINA, ALWAYS-N-FOREVER, APRIL 4, 1997.
Warren saw me staring at it.
“Yeah. Newlyweds. Come here on their wedding night, unwrapped their gifts, then had this big blowout around three A.M. She takes off in the car, cans still tied to the rear bumper. He runs down the road after her, half naked. Last I ever saw of them. Holly won’t let me sell the stuff. Says they’ll be back. I say, ‘Honey, it’s been two years.’ Holly says, ‘They’ll come back.’ And that’s that.”
“That’s that,” I said, still a bit in awe of those gifts and that serving plate, the half-naked groom chasing his bride into oblivion at 3 A.M
., all those cans rattling up the road.
Warren wheeled to my right. “Here’s her stuff. Karen Wetterau’s. Ain’t much.”
I walked over to a cardboard Chiquita Banana produce carton, lifted the cover off. “How long since you last saw her?”
“A week. Next I heard, she dove off the Custom House.”
I looked at him. “You knew.”
“Sure, I did.”
“Holly?”
He shook his head. “She wasn’t lying to you. She’s the kind of woman puts a positive spin on everything. If she can’t, then it didn’t happen. Something in her don’t allow herself to make the necessary connections. But I saw the picture in the paper, and it took a couple minutes, but I put it together. She looked real different, but it was still her.”
“What was she like?”
“Sad. Saddest person I come across in a long, long time. Dying from all that sad. I don’t drink no more, but I’d sit with her some nights while she did. Sooner or later, she’d come on to me. One of the times I turned her down, she gets all nasty, starts insinuating that my equipment don’t work. I go, ‘Karen, lot of things got lost in that accident, but not that.’ Hell, I’m still eighteen that way; soldier stands to attention when the breeze shifts. Anyway, I say, ‘Look, no offense, but I love my wife.’ And she laughs. She says, ‘No one loves. No one loves.’ And I’ll tell you something, man, she believed it.”
“No one loves,” I said.
“No one loves.” He nodded.
He scratched the crown of his head, looked around the barn as I picked up a framed photo from the top of the box. The glass had been shattered, and pebbles of it stuck in the frame’s grooves. The photo was of Karen’s father, wearing his marine best, holding his daughter’s hand, both of them blinking in the glare.
“Karen,” Warren said, “I think she was in a black hole. So the whole world’s a black hole. She’s surrounded by people who think love is bullshit, then love is bullshit.”
Another photo, glass also shattered. Karen and a good-looking, dark haired guy. David Wetterau, I assumed. Both of them tanned and dressed in pastels, standing on the deck of a cruise ship, eyes a little glassy from the daiquiris in their hands. Big smiles. All was right with the world.
“She told me she’d been engaged to a guy got hit by a car.”