Buyer beware

3

My flight to Orlando, via Atlanta, took off on time into a sky resembling lovingly polished fine crystal. The ground that fell away lost movement, then detail, and became a well defined, multicolored quiltwork of neat, if sometimes unsymmetrical, patterns. It was all simple from up there, where I sat behind the wing. Too bad everything didn't fall into such simple, neat patterns. Or maybe everything did, from a distance.

I settled back in the comfortable padded seat and semislept, my scant knowledge of aerodynamics balancing out my natural queasiness at flying.

Two drinks and a sampling of Southern dialect was it for the Atlanta layover, then back on the 747 and it was Georgia's red clay falling away beneath the wing. They seemed always to be constructing something in Georgia, as if only for an excuse to lay bare acres of red earth.

The plane rolled slightly to the left, altering the stark pattern of sunlight on the wing, and we headed south, proceeding toward Orlando at what seemed to be a much higher altitude.

After landing at Orlando's sun-drenched airport, I collected my baggage and made my way to a Hertz desk, where I rented a shiny new green compact. The little car was good of its kind, but there was just enough room for me and my luggage, and I had to be on the alert for pebbles and bottlecaps on the road.

I took Interstate Four out of Orlando, turned south on Twenty-seven, then drove for a while and angled west on Thirty-two, toward the Gulf Coast. Layton was twenty-five or thirty miles inland, southeast of Tampa Bay. I made the ENTERING LAYTON-POP. 3,605 sign a few minutes before five o'clock.

There was a good fishing and boating lake nearby, and Layton was close enough to the coast to have some tourist appeal. The main street was lined with motels. Bat off to the left I could see what had to be Layton's main industry-a huge complex of low, dark buildings set near the crest of a hill, with half a dozen tall smokestacks looming over the town like guard towers.

Disregarding the garish signs near the street, I decided one motel looked about in a league with the other, so I pulled into the lot of one called the Clover Inn, which advertised fifteen dollars and up in sun-paled flashing neon.

"Up" turned out to be twenty-two dollars, but I stretched cramped muscles and signed the register anyway. The Clover Inn had several little flat-roofed cabins spaced far enough apart to guarantee quiet at night, and it featured a clean-looking, if plain, restaurant, the Clover Grill. Besides, I couldn't face the idea of climbing back into the little green compact with the big name.

I told the man at the desk, an old guy named Eddie, that I'd be staying a few days and paid in advance. He handed me a key chained to a plastic clover engraved with a numeral. Leaving the car where it was parked, I got my luggage and carried it to Number 5.

Cool air hit me when I opened the door to the boxy stucco cabin, and it felt good. I stepped inside, kicked the door shut behind me and my three-suiter, and looked around.

Nice. Restful. Light green walls, dark furniture and a bed with a thick mattress. I was satisfied with my choice.

After tossing the suitcase onto the bed, I began to unpack what I wanted to hang the wrinkles out of-a pair of slacks, pale blue shirt and a tan sport coat. I glanced at the alarm clock on the nightstand by the bed. Still plenty of daylight left, enough to take a quick shower, get something to eat at the Clover Grill and look into things. I was tired but I was working.

As I was walking across the parking lot, toward the motel restaurant, I decided to drop into the office and talk to Eddie. I could see through the window that he was alone, slouched in a leather chair near the desk, reading a magazine.

"Evening," I said as I entered the tiny paneled office.

Eddie looked up from his magazine and nodded, waiting for me to get to what I really wanted to say. He was a dehydrated old bird with a narrow face, wispy gray hair and blue eyes containing a quiet humor that life hadn't broken.

"Layton's a bigger town than I imagined," I said.

"You must not have much of an imagination. Thought you might want towels."

"Nope. Plenty of towels. How's the food in the restaurant?"

"Make you deathly ill. Don't tell 'em I said so."

"Sure." I saw that he was reading one of those factual detective magazines, with a cover featuring a bound girl in panties and bra, begging to be spared while the determined type who stood over her with a ripsaw seemed to be listening to distant sirens.

"'Bout the Michigan Mutilator," he said, noticing that I'd scanned the cover. "You remember him?"

"Vaguely."

"Killed six."

"What's that big cluster of buildings east of town?" I asked.

"Used a chain saw, though. Black and Decker. That's Carlon Plastics you're talkin' about. Employs nearly half the town."

It was what I'd been afraid of. And now that I knew for sure how big Carlon Plastics was in Layton, my stomach arranged itself into a knot that would have done a scoutmaster proud. If anything did go wrong, I knew how the authorities would deal with me. Roughly and on the edge of the rules.

"What do they make up there?" I asked.

"Different things, from plastic cups for vending machines to some kind of parts for the government. There's nine more Carlon plants spread around the country, but this one was the first. Worked for 'em myself up to six years ago, in the molding section. Then I inhaled enough fumes to mess up my lungs. Had to quit, take my disability pay."

"Worth a lot to a town, an operation like that."

"Wouldn't be no town without it."

"Is there still a Carlon in the business?", "Better believe it! Dale Carlon himself. Lives up near the plant in a ritzy place you wouldn't believe. He's the son. Father's dead."

"Carlon live alone in a place like that?"

"Yeah. Wife died nearly five years ago. No live-in servants. Got two daughters somewhere, though." He tilted his head slightly, much like the Michigan Mutilator on the magazine cover. "You here for the fishin'?"

"I wish I was. Business."

I headed the compact back toward the motel, my uneasy feeling growing claws. At a big drugstore with a flashing neon palm tree I stopped and bought some antacid stomach tablets, a spray can of dog repellent and a bottle of blended whiskey. Dog repellent is almost as effective as Mace, and the can doesn't attract nearly the attention.

The vending machine outside the office at the Clover Inn furnished me with ice, and I mixed myself a drink and sat in my cabin, thinking about Lornee, as I usually did at some point or other when I was on a job. We'd had some fine, if precarious, years, some fine children; but when Mr. Happy was found to be having an affair with the wife of a city alderman, politics entered the somewhat muddled picture. Politics and divorce.

No one would believe that the affair was one-sided and far less serious than the press had intimated. The alderman's wife was one of those bored, self-styled eccentrics with money who'd met me when I was taking part in a local charity-celebrity function, and she had talked too much and thrown herself at me more jokingly than anything else. But the press was controlled by the rival party, and when her husband had me removed from the department, he only fanned the flames-or rather, the smoke.

I didn't contest when Lornee filed for divorce, and I thought it right to give her custody of Danny and Lynn as long as I had visitation rights. Then, a year later, Lornee left the state with a man named Hogan-a close friend of mine, a tall, lonely man who drank not a lot but a bit too much-and on a Texas highway he drove into a parked car at high speed and killed himself and my ex-wife and my children.

Nobody to blame, really. Nobody deserving of blame for that much horror; nobody, dead or alive, to take it out on, to hate. And only one survivor to harbor the memory.

Now I was lonely, the way Hogan used to be, and I was drinking, not a lot but a bit too much, the way Hogan used to drink.

Some people are star-crossed.