Hunting Sweetie Rose

CHAPTER 36.

Before I’d gone to bed the previous night, the Internet told me that all three Fairbairn Wire and Cable assembly plants were still making wiring harnesses for automobiles, trucks, and appliances.

By ten o’clock the next morning, a FedEx driver had delivered an overnight envelope containing the Visa card George Koros said he’d send along.

By twelve o’clock, I knew, from the telephone, that none of the Fairbairn plants was big enough to have a full-fledged human resources department, that each relied on a single clerk to do the personnel work. None of the three clerks had been working for Fairbairn Wire back when Sweetie might have been there, which I guessed was at least ten years before, but each of the clerks had just learned, through the twin miracles of gossip grapevines and cable television news, that Silas’s widow had disappeared, up in Chicago, following the murder of her bodyguard. None of the clerks had ever heard of Silas befriending any woman in their plant, and each supposed that if such a thing had happened, everyone in town would have known about one of their own striking it rich.

So, by noon, I was done, smacked flat against a dead end.

And I was out of Ho Hos.

The Ho Hos I could do something about. I went outside and took the wood trays of flowers off the Jeep’s hood, top, and spare tire. Using the flowers to convert the Jeep into a multitiered lawn planter had worked so far-Benny Fittle had issued me no tickets-but the victory was temporary; a lizard was surely at work drafting a new lawn decoration code, specifically prohibiting the use of red Jeeps. For now, though, my potted, planted Jeep represented a victory and, as such, deserved to be celebrated. With Ho Hos.

I headed east, toward the supermarket, but then responsibility slapped a sudden, shocking hand against me and forced me to do something I hadn’t done in a month. I took a hard left turn and bobbed onto the cratered parking lot of the Rivertown Health Center. Dropping the transmission into first gear, as one would to navigate the surface of the moon, I eased the Jeep over the potholes to my usual spot next to the doorless Buick that had rested there for decades. There would be Ho Hos-but first there must be exercise.

It was midday. There were still a few hours before the thumpers, Rivertown’s least-evolved grade of criminal, would arrive. Delinquents from the high schools, and in some cases the grammar schools, thumpers were trainees, interns of a sort. They came to the health center parking lot to study at the studded boots of the more hardened scumbags who congregated at dusk to sell their powders, plan their burglaries, and decide which automobiles might offer the most reward from disassembly that night.

I made sure both of the Jeep’s doors were unlocked, so that even the most untutored of an early-bird hoodlum could see that the radio had already been ripped out, grabbed the gym bag I keep in the backseat, and went in.

I changed into my gym duds under the supposedly dozing eye of the locker room attendant. I never bring a lock to dull his bolt cutters, and always take my wallet and keys with me. Still, I’m sure he always does a fast search of my locker before he returns to his nap, if only as a matter of self-respect.

Frankie was roosting on a broken exercise cycle upstairs, regaling Dusty, Nick, and the other retirees with the same jokes he’d been telling since the factories used to pulse in Rivertown. Dusty, Nick, and the others never waited for Frankie’s last line to begin laughing. They knew the jokes. What counted were the words and the laughs from their pasts, reminders of times when their knees were steady and the backs of their hands hadn’t yet darkened from enlarging veins and spreading spots of brown. They waved me over. I shook my head. I had to run.

I’d built up a high sweat when, thirty minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was Miss Logsdon, one of the personnel clerks I’d talked to earlier that day. She worked at the Fairbairn assembly plant in Whitaker Springs, Missouri.

“I believe I’ve found someone you might be interested in speaking with, Mr. Elstrom. One of our longer-term employees told me of a woman who used to work here a number of years ago. Her name is Linda Coombs.”

I leaned against a wall, trying to not pant like a St. Bernard. “She remembers someone Silas Fairbairn had a relationship with?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t know what Ms. Coombs remembers. All our employee remembers is that Linda Coombs once said that Silas Fairbairn was involved with a woman from Whitaker Springs. Our employee doesn’t think the woman’s name was Sweetie, though.”

“Do you have a phone number for Linda Coombs?”

“Ms. Coombs has no phone, and lives on the outskirts of town. I don’t have the names of any of her neighbors, and I don’t want to intrude on anyone’s privacy. I’m afraid you’ll have to arrange a visit if you want your questions answered.”

I thanked her and hung up. My breathing had slowed. Certainly, the news justified suspension of any further exercise. I headed for the showers, my mind firing thoughts of an airplane trip and an expedition-sized bag of Ho Hos.

I called the bankcard company from the turret, to activate Koros’s Visa, and the nice lady asked if I wanted to activate the ATM feature as well. I said you betcha, real fast, and logged on to their Web site to provide a PIN. Two hours later, just to be confusing, I’d stopped at four ATMs on my way to Midway Airport and withdrawn the two-thousand-dollar maximum that was available for the month. Koros would get receipts, and an accurate accounting of my expenses, but he wasn’t going to find out where I was searching for Sweetie Fairbairn until I’d finished.

I caught a last-minute flight to Kansas City. In Missouri, I rented a tiny Ford, pointed it southwest, and got to Whitaker Springs at dusk.

The town looked about as I’d expected-three blocks of tired storefronts, half of which were empty. A drive-in called the Dairy Delight stood in the middle of the middle block. Three older men wearing overalls sat outside on a picnic bench, eating sundaes. I pulled over and powered down the window.

“Is there a motel in this town?”

One man nodded. “Marge’s,” he said, “right around the next corner.” He said it would be a fine place to spend an evening or two. In fact, he added, he said he could guarantee it, since Marge herself was his cousin on his mother’s side of the family.

Marge’s Stop and Rest was a single-story white building with a VACANCY sign in the window and nothing parked in its lot. Marge Herself told me I could have my pick of rooms, as they had vacancies at the moment. And, she added demurely, a very select number of those very rooms had original marine art, painted directly on the walls by her Daughter Herself. If that sounded appealing, she especially recommended the room next door to the office.

I’ve never been one to turn away from free art, nor had I ever thought that art in a motel room mattered, one way or another. I was wrong. As soon as I stepped into my room, I realized I’d rather be bunking with Norman and what was left of his mother at the Bates Motel. The original art on my wall consisted of octopuses, dolphins, and a bloated manatee, painted in what Daughter Herself must have imagined to be playful poses. They were not. The sea creatures were all frozen in contortion, their eyes bulging as though they were suffering the last spasms of painful deaths.

Even worse than their popping eyes were their teeth. Either Daughter Herself did not know what was in the mouths of octopuses, dolphins, and manatees, or she had issues that demanded psychiatry. For instead of teeth, she’d given her sea creatures long, saw-toothed fangs, and tinted them in varying shades of pink, as though blood were washing from them as they writhed away their last seconds.

It was art to induce nightmares. I threw my duffel on the bed and went out.

By now the sky and most everything along Main Street were dark. I walked down to the Dairy Delight and told the young girl behind the window that I’d like to be delighted. When that dropped a blank veil over her features, I told her I’d have two cheeseburgers, an order of fries, and a cherry Coke. She smiled with relief.

The three men eating sundaes I’d seen earlier were gone. Every table was now filled with the youth of Whitaker Springs, set frantically alive by the smells, sounds, and possibilities of a midwest midsummer night. It would be no place to savor fine cuisine. Yet I dared not bring the food back to my room, for fear that the smells and sounds of me eating would excite the pained painted creatures and draw them from the walls.

I went down to the end of the block, to a bench in front of a vacant hardware store that had a sheriff’s foreclosure notice in its window. I sat and ate and watched boys, in old cars with new, big-pipe exhausts, rumble back and forth past the Dairy Delight. Whitaker Springs seemed as good a place as any to while away a summer night. And I supposed it could have been as good a place as any for a woman to meet a rich man who’d buy her a new life in a big city.