Lullaby Town

CHAPTER EIGHT

Two hours and ten minutes later I was on a United Airlines L-1011 as it punched its way up through the haze layer and climbed out over the Pacific. The air was slick and clear and, below us, the red of the mountains and the desert and the gray of the ocean looked clean and warm. It was your basic outstanding Southern California afternoon. The people around me were relaxed and pleasant, and the flight attendant had a deep tan and when her smile was wide enough she dimpled. She was from Long Beach. Outstanding.

Five and one half hours later we landed at Kennedy airport beneath an overcast layer so thick and so dark that it looked like casket lining. Unseasonable cold snap, the papers had said. Arctic air down through Canada, they'd said. First snow of the season. I had brought a brown leather Navy G-2 jacket and a couple of sweaters and a pair of black leather gloves. It wasn't enough, even for standing around in the terminal.

While I waited for my suitcase at the baggage carousel, three different guys asked if they could borrow cab fare and another wanted to know if I'd found Jesus. An airport security cop arrested a pickpocket. The air smelled like burning rubber. A woman with a baby told me she didn't have enough money to feed her child. I gave her fifty cents and felt like I'd been taken. Maybe I looked like a tourist I frowned and looked sullen and tried to make like a native. That seemed to work. I got a couple of road maps and a metallic-blue Taurus from Hertz and drove over to the Kennedy Hilton and took a room for the night. Dining-room service was slow and the food was bad and the hostess in the bar had an attitude. A guy on the radio said that the cold air was going to keep pushing down from Canada and that maybe we'd get some more snow. The room cost two hundred a night and nobody had deep tans and dimples. This was my fourth time visiting New York in eleven years. Nothing much had changed. I ♥ NY.

The next morning I checked out of the Hilton and took the Van Wyck Expressway north to Connecticut. Through most of Queens and the Bronx everything looked dirty and gray and old, but farther along the building density diminished until, as I approached White Plains, stretches of empty land appeared, bordered by stands of trees, and, just north of White Plains, there were lakes. The empty land became fields and the woods grew deeper, and though some of the trees were dark and bare, most were still locked in their explosions of yellow and red and purple, and the sight and the smell of them made me think of squash and wild turkeys and neighborhoods where children yelled 'Trick or Treat!" Maybe the Northeast wasn't so bad after all.

Four miles east of Rockwood Lake, there was a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge and a green exit sign that said CHELAM next right. I got off and followed a state road for a mile and a half through woods and farmland and there it was, a little place of clapboard and brick buildings around a town square, maybe two blocks on a side. There were plenty of trees and lawns, and the streets were narrow and without curbs and looked more like they were made for velocipedes than for automobiles. The overcast and the cold gave a barren quality to the town, but there was still enough green in the lawns and color in the leaves to let you know that, come spring, Chelam would look like one of those quaint little upstate hamlets that are always pictured on the postcards your cousin Flo sends.

I let the Taurus roll down the main street past a Texaco station and a White Castle hamburger stand and the First Chelam National Bank and a barbershop with an honest-to-God barber's pole. A whitewashed gazebo sat on the town square across from a courthouse that was big and old, with a second-floor balcony ideal for mayoral speeches on the Fourth of July. Several big elms dotted the square, their dead leaves a fragile brown carpet over the lawn. Two young women in down jackets stood in the leaves, talking. An old man in a bright orange hunter's parka sat on the gazebo steps, smoking. Next to the courthouse there was a mobile home permanently mounted on cement footings. A big gold star was painted on the side of the mobile home along with the words CHELAM POLICE. Across the square there was a little building just about the size of a pay toilet that said U.S. Post Office. Eight years ago Karen Nelsen had gone in there and mailed the letter to Miriam Dichester. Maybe she had been on her way up to Maine, just passing through when she thought, oh, Christ, I've gotta get this money back to Miriam, and she had stopped and bought the money order and mailed it and continued on her way. But maybe not. Maybe she had stayed the night or had gotten something to eat and had said where she was going and someone would remember.

One block past the post office the town ended. I turned around and drove back to the Texaco station and pulled up to the full-service pumps. An old geez in a stained gray Texaco shirt and a cammie hunting cap was leaning back in a chair beneath a sign that said WE HAVE PROPANE. I turned off the engine and got out and said, "How about some high-test?"

He tilted the chair forward and came over and put in the nozzle. A dirty blond Labrador retriever was lying between the chair and a Pepsi machine. The Lab had its chin down and its paws out to either side. He didn't move when the old man got up, but his eyes followed the old man to the car. Someone had put down a piece of cardboard for the dog to lie on.

I said, "Pretty town."

The old man nodded.

"Picturesque."

He made a sucking sound through his nose, then hocked up something heavy and spit it toward the road. "You want me to check the hood?"

"Hood's okay. If I wanted to stay a few days, where would I go?"

"Ho Jo's out on the highway."

"Here in town."

He squinted at the gas pump. Nine-forty and rising.

I said, "There a little hotel? Maybe a boardinghouse? Something established?"

He made the sucking sound again, and this time he swallowed it.

I fed seventy-five cents into the Pepsi machine, pulled out a Barq's root beer, opened it, then sat down in the old man's chair. The dog still hadn't moved, but now it looked at me. So did the old man. Neither of them liked me in the chair. I said, "Think I'll set for a spell and chew the fat." Elvis Cole, the Bumpkin Detective.

The old man said, "Guess you might try May Erdich's place."

"She the only place in town?"

"Ayuh." I guess that meant yes.

"Were there any other places, say, about ten years ago?"

"Shit." I guess that meant no.

"How do I get to the Erdich place?"

The gas pump dinged. He put the nozzle back in the pump, then reset the counter. The dog's eyes moved from the old man to me, then back to the old man. Every time its eyes moved, its eyebrows shifted like it was watching a tennis match. It looked like Fred MacMurray.

I said, "May Erdich."

He told me, but only after I got out of his chair.

I drove back through the town and found May Erdich's place on a residential street two blocks behind the square. It was a big yellow two-story house with a gravel drive and a covered porch and a little sign out front that said rooms to let. Pockets of hard snow hid in the eaves and under the porch, safe from the sun. I parked in her drive and went up to the front door and knocked.

A woman in her late forties opened the door and looked out at me. She had fair skin and a pale green apron over blue jeans and a coarse yarn sweater, and her hair was held up with bobby pins so that wisps of it floated down into her eyes. It was warm in her house, and the warmth rolled out at me and felt good.

I said, "Are you May Erdich?"

"That's right."

"My name is Elvis Cole. I'm a private detective from Los Angeles. I'm trying to find someone who may or may not have stayed here about eight years ago."

She smiled. The smile was where the lines came from. "A private detective."

"Pretty hokey, huh?"

The smile got wider and she nodded.

I showed her one of my cards and gave her a little Groucho Marx. "Sam Grunion, private eye. Secrecy is our motto. We never tell."

She laughed and slapped the towel against her thigh and said, "No shit." I was going to like May Erdich just fine.

She opened the door wider, let me come in, took the G-2, then had me sit on a big overstuffed couch in a room she called the parlor. "Would you like a cup of hot tea? I just put some up fresh."

"That'd be great. Thank you."

She went out through a swinging door. The parlor was neat and clean, with a hardwood floor that showed neither dust nor scuff marks.

She came back with two glass cups of honey-colored tea on a beaten-pewter tray. There was a bowl of sugar with a little gold spoon in it and a few packets of Sweet'N Low and a saucer of sliced lemons and two glass spoons for stirring the tea and another saucer mounded with what looked like homemade blueberry cookies. The apron was gone and the wisps of hair were now neatly under the pins. I took one of the cookies. "Delicious."

"Would you like sugar or lemon?"

"I take it plain."

She made a face. "Ugh. It's so bitter that way."

"Private detectives are pretty tough." I had some of the tea. It was mellow and sweet with mint. Sugar would've ruined it.

She said, "Is it exciting to be a detective in Los Angeles?"

"Sometimes. Most of the time it's doing things that people never think of, when they think of private investigators."

"Like what?"

"Like looking through phone bills and credit card receipts and being put on hold when you're talking to people at utility companies and the DMV and that kind of thing."

She nodded, trying to imagine Tom Selleck on hold.

"But sometimes you get to help people and that feels pretty good."

"Who are you trying to find?"

"A woman named Karen Nelsen. She might've been using the name Karen Shipley. Eight years ago, she would've had a toddler with her. A little boy, maybe three or four years old."

She sipped more of the tea and thought about it, then shook her head, a little half shake. "No. No, that doesn't ring a bell."

I took out the 8 x 10 and showed it to her. The photo had been folded and there were creases that I tried to smooth.

May Erdich leaned forward and smiled the wide smile and said, "Are you serious?" like maybe I was pulling her leg.

I said, "What?"

"That's Karen Lloyd. She works at the bank."

I looked at the picture as if it might've changed. "She works at the bank?" We exciting L.A. detectives are quick on the uptake.

"She's got a twelve-year-old boy named Toby. I see her in the market. We used to be in PTA together."

"This woman lives here, this woman and her son, Toby." Swift, we are.

"That's right."

I folded the picture and put it back in my pocket. Sonofagun. "Karen Lloyd."

May Erdich nodded. "That's right. She works at the First Chelam. I think she's the manager or something."

I finished the tea and stood up and May Erdich stood up with me. "Why are you trying to find her? Did she do something bad?" Her eyes were bright and mischievous, thinking how great it would be if someone in town had done something bad.

I said, "It involves family business, and you won't be doing her a favor if you tell people that a private cop has been asking about her. Do you understand that?"

May Erdich gave me some Groucho and squeezed my arm. "Secrecy is our motto."

"Right."

She led me to the door. "You must be a pretty good detective, all the way from Los Angeles to find somebody here in Chelam."

I put on the G-2 and went out into the cold. 'That's right. I am. In another life I could have been Batman."