The Girls He Adored

75

Pender nearly knocked his Stetson off again entering the Old Umpqua Pharmacy. It felt like going back in time, to the drugstore on the corner of Clinton and Main, in Cortland, in the early fifties. Wooden floors, ceiling fan, white-jacketed pharmacist behind a high marble counter decorated with antique apothecary jars. Pender would have bet a week's salary that the old fellow was known as Doc to the townspeople. The only thing missing was the soda fountain where you could buy a cherry phosphate for a dime.

“Good afternoon,” said the pharmacist. “What can I do for you?”

Pender identified himself, flashed his tin, and slid Maxwell's mug shot across the counter. “Seen this fella lately?”

“Can't say I have.”

“Does the name Max ring a bell?”

“ 'Fraid not.”

“Christopher? Lee? Lyssy?”

“Nope, nope, and nope.”

“He was in the news about ten, twelve years ago-a fire, maybe a scandal?”

“Sorry-I only moved down from Portland five years ago. Always had a dream of owning a place like this.”

Pender switched from the official to the conversational mode. “So how's it working out?”

“It was working out pretty well, up until they built that Rite-Aid across town.”

“Happening all over the country, from what I hear. Damn shame, too. Listen, Doc-do they call you Doc?”

“Some do.”

“Well, Doc, this fella here, I know he was in here around a year ago. My witness said he disguised himself to look older-maybe he was wearing a gray wig.”

“Oh, him.”

Oh- ho! Two little words, and the universe undergoes a paradigm shift.

“That's Ulysses Maxwell. Caretaker for a woman named Julia Miller. They live way out on Scorned Ridge. He first came in to get her prescription for morphine ampoules refilled not long after I bought the place. Of course I couldn't do it, just give out morphine sulfate to a third party like that. It's a Schedule Two narcotic. I told him he had to get some paperwork filled out. Oh my, if looks could kill!

“But he came back the next day with all the forms. Comes in regular, now, every month or so.”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Yesterday afternoon, around two o'clock. Picked up Miss Miller's refills and a bottle of Lady Clairol-Strawberry Blonds Forever, as I recall.”

Oh-ho. Oh — fucking- ho. “Do you happen to have an address on file?”

“Sure do. Hold on, I'll find it for you.”

Just as the pharmacist disappeared into the back room, the bell over the door tinkled, and an elderly woman entered. Pender tipped his hat to her. He'd never worn a cowboy hat before-he found he enjoyed tipping it to people. Especially now that he was high as a kite on adrenaline and a sense of destiny.

Because while the extraordinary run of luck Pender had been enjoying for the last three days-Anh Tranh to Big Nig to Caz Buckley to Doc to a live address-wasn't unprecedented in his experience (and long overdue when you considered he'd gone several years without a single damn break in the case), the way the pieces were falling into place, Pender was ready to believe that destiny, or fate, or God, or whatever you wanted to call it, had selected him for this particular job.

Once again he glimpsed that mental image of the strawberry blonds waiting for him in the darkness. And although thus far Ed Pender had never seen much evidence of order to the universe (an occupational hazard), much less the hand of a micromanaging God, it now occurred to him that perhaps his whole life had been leading up to this day.