Buyer beware

4

In the morning I was thankful that I hadn't dreamed.

I reached out, slapped down the sharp button on the jangling alarm clock and lay for a moment in its vibrating aftermath of silence. There was a sour taste in my mouth and a numbness in my left arm where I'd lain on it in my sleep. I remembered then that I'd been on one of my alcohol-induced self-pitying binges the night before. I hated the sniveling, masochistic self-analysis to which I sometimes fell prey, hated the lethargic uselessness that often evolved from it. Every day I met people more mutilated by fate than myself. The most maudlin word in the English language is "I"-at least for me, past a certain number of drinks.

The black arrow hands on the alarm clock indicated six forty-five, the minute hand pointing toward the door in a broad hint. No time for breakfast. Just as well. As my thoughts focused on the Melissa Clark case, the familiar knot tightened in my stomach and quashed what little desire I had for food.

I managed to get my feet on the floor and commanded them to propel me to the bathroom, where I showered, shaved without nicking myself, combed my hair, and brushed my teeth with toothpaste that tasted like chalk. Gazing at my lean, somewhat lopsided features in the mirror, I wondered if my hair had started to thin. I'd be the last to know.

As soon as I was dressed I drove from the motel, in the direction of Star Lane. Halfway there I stopped at a dingy little doughnut shop built like a castle and got a cup of black coffee to go. By the time I was parked near the end of Star Lane, I'd only burned my hand twice and still had a squishy paper cup half full of coffee.

At twenty minutes to eight the first child came out, a boy of about twelve carrying a ponderous armload of books. Within a few minutes two girls, younger than the boy, emerged from the white frame house nearest my car. The girls walked to where the boy was standing, and though he carefully avoided looking at them, they stood close to him on his left. More children, mostly very young, came out of the houses on each side of the street and stood in a cluster that seemed to center around the boy with all the books.

The school bus arrived promptly at seven forty-five, big and yellow and noisy; and when it had rumbled around the corner, with more noise than speed, Star Lane was again deserted. Melissa Clark hadn't come out of the yellow house fronted by the faded picket fence.

I waited until eight o'clock. Several tired types left to go to work, and the teen-age boy I'd seen yesterday passed in his old Buick. My coffee had long since got cold. I tossed the dark liquid out the window, crumpled the cup and stuck it above the sun visor. Then I drove down the street and parked across from Number 355.

The paper was still on the lawn, the folded magazine still protruding from the mailbox. In the brightening morning there was still a faint yellow glow behind the front curtains.

I decided to be an aluminum siding salesman and got out of the car and crossed the street. When I stepped up on the porch of Number 355 and knocked, I had the feeling I was rapping on the door of an empty house. It's an instinct anyone who's knocked on enough doors acquires.

I waited a few minutes before stepping down from the front porch and walking around to the back of the house. An old rusty swing-set frame in the far corner of the yard now supported only a bald tire suspended by a rope. The grass, where it wasn't worn away, stood about six inches high.

No one was home, I was ninety-nine percent sure, but I went up on the porch and knocked on the back door for the other one percent.

"Whad'ya want, mister?"

It was a boy of about eight, standing near the corner of the house, looking at me with the open expression of fearless curiosity possessed only by young boys and terriers.

"I'm looking for Melissa's mother. You know where she is?"

"No, sir." He was wearing a blue T-shirt about five sizes too large, and he unconsciously gripped it and stretched it down on himself almost to his knees while he stared at me.

"What's your name?" I asked in a friendly voice.

"Mick."

"How come no school today, Mick?"

"I felt bad when I woke up."

"You don't look sick."

"It's on the inside."

"How come Melissa didn't go to school?"

Mick shrugged inside his T-shirt. "Maybe she's sick, i '» too.

"How long's it been since you've seen her?"

"Few days. She was with her mom and dad."

A scraggly-haired woman in a rumpled pink housecoat stepped partway out of the back door of the house on the left. "Mick, you get back in here! If you're too sick to be in school you ain't gonna be out runnin' around!"

I smiled at her, but she didn't smile back, and I didn't like the way her hand clutched her housecoat between her breasts.

"I gotta go," Mick said.

"I would if I were you," I told him. I knocked on the back door again, loudly this time, to appear above-board.

That's when I saw the bullet hole.

It was from a large-caliber bullet and it was just below the doorknob, where it wasn't too noticeable. And it was neat, as if the bullet had gone through the wood from the outside.

I looked the door over and saw another neat round hole, up near the top, alongside the door frame. The bullet had made a thin groove in the frame, as if it had been fired at an angle. Stepping back on the porch, I looked over the rear of the house as if figuring a siding estimate. There was another neat bullet hole in the bottom-left corner of the window beside the back porch.

My throat went dry. I was afraid now of what might be inside the house. Squatting on the back porch, I tried to see through the lower of the two bullet holes in the door, but all I could make out was what looked like the bottom of a picture frame against the pale green of the opposite wall.

I straightened and drew a deep breath that made me light-headed for a second. Maybe the bullet holes meant nothing; maybe they'd been there for years.

Feeling a bit steadier, I went to the window and tried to peer in between the drawn curtains. They overlapped too much and it was impossible. I saw something else, though. Directly opposite the neat hole in the window pane was a neat hole in the curtain.

My breath caught in the dryness of my throat and lumped there, and my stomach felt as if it had been stabbed with a tuning fork. There was no walking away now. It was time to have Mick's mother call the law.

They got there in five minutes and I showed them my identification and they weren't impressed. A tall man with dark hair combed like Hitler's introduced himself as Lieutenant Frank Dockard, the stocky uniformed policeman with him as Sergeant Avery. By their manner I saw within a few minutes that Avery was the silent servant and that Dockard fashioned himself the brains.

Mick and his mother watched soberly from their front porch as I told my story, and Dockard made notes in a leather-covered note pad with the diligence of a monk copying an ancient manuscript. When I was finished, he snapped the note pad shut and gave no indication of what he thought, and the professionally placid, thick features of Sergeant Avery were unchanged.

After a while Dockard rubbed a long forefinger behind his right ear, as if checking for an injury. "Let's take a look at these bullet holes," he said, and led the way toward the back of the house.

The three of us stood on the back porch while Mick and his mother looked silently on from next door. Dockard grunted when he saw the holes in the door, stepped down off the porch and grunted again when he saw the bullet hole in the window and the corresponding hole in the curtain.

"Phoned Mr. Carlon," Dockard said as Avery inserted a pencil into the bullet holes to check the angles of the shots. "He said he hasn't heard from his daughter in months but knew she wasn't in Layton."

"If he hasn't heard from her in months," I said, "how can he know where she is?"

"He can know where she isn't."

I decided not to rise to that bait. I got a roll of antacid tablets from my pocket and popped one of the white disks into my mouth.

"What's that for?" Dockard asked.

"Nervous stomach."

He looked me over appraisingly with small brown eyes. "Can't blame you for that."

I could feel the veiled suspicion, the catlike waiting to pounce on my first wrong move, my first indication of whatever they thought I was trying to pull off.

"Look," I said to Dockard, "I'm only doing my job. We're in the same business… You ought to understand that."

"I don't understand what a Carlon and her daughter would be doing living in a little dump like this, especially here in Layton. And I don't know if I like your line of business, either. It's legalized kidnapping."

"So is what Joan Clark did. The father has as much right to the child as she does. Besides, after I make the snatch I always let the child decide."

"Decide what?"

"Whether to go or stay."

"And what do they do?"

"After we talk it out they usually pick the parent who cared enough about them to hire me."

"And if they don't?"

"I leave them and refund my client's fee. It's in the fine print of my contract."

"That's stupid business."

"It doesn't happen very often. I'm a persuasive talker"

Avery was finished fooling around with the bullet holes.

"Why don't we go in?" I asked, but I was afraid to go in and Dockard could see that.

"Better the front way," he said, and we walked around the house. We must have been driving Mick and his mother crazy.

The front door was locked, and at a nod from Dockard, Avery leaned his bulk against it and the latch splintered from the wood frame. My heart tried to scramble up my throat as we went in.

The inside of the tiny house was uncomfortably hot, stuffy, with the thick stillness of a place that has been closed tight for a long time. We were in the living room-red shag carpet, worn sofa, recliner chair, incongruously expensive stereo set up along one wall. The lamp on the table by the front window was still glowing.

None of us said anything. The kitchen was right off the living room; I could see a corner of the green refrigerator. As we walked toward the doorway, a peculiar odor, as of something putrescent, struck me, and my legs began to tremble. The kitchen doorway seemed farther away.

There was no one in the kitchen. One of the chrome-legged chairs was on its side near the stove. On the table a horde of gnats swarmed about the rotting remains of a carryout chicken dinner in a red and white cardboard bucket.

The wood on the inside of the door had splintered away from the bullet holes. The two bullets fired through the door had lodged in the wall above the sink; the shot fired through the window had left a bullet somewhere inside a cupboard containing a jumble of aluminum pots and pans. Silent Sergeant Avery pointed a square-tipped finger at something lying on the white porcelain surface of the ledge of the sink. It was a woman's ring, a ruby surrounded by a circle of diamonds in a gold setting. A jeweler's appraisal wasn't needed to see that its value reached the thousands.

"Keeh-rist!" Dockard said with appropriate respect for wealth. He bent closely over the ring but didn't touch it.