Prayers For Rain

13

The Holly Martens Inn sat fifty yards off an overgrown, yellowed grass stretch of Route 147 in Mishawauk, a blip-on-the-map sort of town not far from Springfield. A two-story cinder-block collection of units arranged in one long T, the Holly Martens ran across the length of a brown dirt field and ended at a puddle so wide and black there could have been dinosaur remains in it. The Holly Martens looked as if it had been part of an army base or air-raid shelter in the fifties, and nothing about the design seemed to beckon the weary traveler to a second stay. A swimming pool sat to my left as I pulled in toward the front office. Empty and surrounded by chain link with cyclone wire on top, it was littered with shattered green and brown beer bottles, lawn chairs caked with rust, fast-food wrappers, and a three-wheel shopping cart. A peeling sign affixed to the chain link read: NO LIFEGUARD ON DUTY SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK. Maybe they’d drained the pool because people kept throwing their beer bottles in it. Maybe the beer bottles had been thrown in because they’d drained the pool. Maybe the lifeguard had taken the water with him when he left. Maybe I had to stop wondering about things that didn’t concern me.

The front office smelled like matted animal hair, wood shavings, Lysol, and newspapers spoiled by fecal pellets and dribbles of urine. That’s because behind the reception desk were at least seven cages, and all of them had rodents inside. Mostly guinea pigs, a few hamsters squeaking at their hamster wheels, feet pedaling like crazy, snouts pointed up at the wheel as they wondered why they couldn’t reach the top.

Just no rats, I thought. Please, no rats.

The woman behind the desk was bleached blond and very slim. Her body looked like it was all gristle, like the fatty deposits had run off with the lifeguard, taken her breasts and her ass with them. Her skin was so tan and hard it reminded me of knotted wood. She could have been anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-eight, and there was a sense to her of a dozen lives lived and spent before she’d turned twenty-five.

She gave me a great, wide-open smile that had a touch of challenge in it. “Hey! You the guy that called?”

“Called?” I said. “About what?”

The cigarette between her lips jumped. “’Bout the unit.”

“No,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”

She laughed with the cigarette gritted between her teeth. “No shit?”

“No shit.”

She removed the cigarette, flicked the ash on the floor behind her, and leaned into the counter. “Like Magnum?”

“Just like Magnum,” I said, and tried to give my eyebrows that patented Tom Selleck rise and fall.

“I catch it in repeats,” she said. “Boy, he was cute-cute. You know?” She arched an eyebrow at me, lowered her voice. “How come men don’t wear mustaches no more?”

“Because people immediately assume they’re either homosexual or redneck?” I offered.

She nodded. “There you go, there you go. Damn, it’s a shame.”

“No argument,” I said.

“Nothing like a man with a good mustache.”

“Damn straight.”

“So what can I do for ya?”

I showed her the driver’s-license photo of Karen Nichols I’d cut from the newspaper. “Know her?”

She gave the photo a good long look, then shook her head. “But ain’t that the woman, though?”

“What woman?”

“The one jumped off that building downtown?”

I nodded. “I heard she may have stayed here for a while.”

“Nah.” She lowered her voice. “She looks a little too, ahm, buttoned-down for a place like this. You know?”

“What kind of people stay here?” I asked, as if I didn’t know already.

“Oh, nice folks,” she said. “Great folks. Salt of the earth, you know? But maybe they’re a little rougher-looking than your average. A lot of bikers.”

Check, I thought.

“Truckers.”

Check again.

“Folks needing a place to, ahm, get their heads together, take stock.”

Read: junkies and recent parolees.

“Many single women?”

Her bright eyes clouded over. “All right, honey, let’s cut to the chase. What are you after here?”

Just like a hardened moll. Magnum would have been impressed.

I said, “Has any woman been staying here who hasn’t paid her rent in a while? A week or more, say?”

She glanced down at the ledger below her. She leaned her elbow on the counter and the fun returned to her eyes. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?” I leaned my elbow on the counter near hers.

She smiled at me, moved her elbow a little closer. “Yeah, maybe.”

“Can you tell me anything about her?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. She smiled. She had a great smile; you could see the child in it, before the road wear and the cigarettes and the sun poisoning. “My old man can tell you even more.”

I wasn’t sure if “old man” meant father or husband. These parts, it could mean either. Hell, these parts, it could mean both.

I kept my elbow where it was. Out in the sticks, living dangerously. “Such as?”

“Such as, why don’t we spread some introductions around first? What’s your name?”

“Patrick Kenzie,” I said. “My friends call me Magnum.”

“Shit.” She gave me a low chuckle. “I bet they don’t.”

“I bet you’re right.”

She opened her palm and extended it. I did the same and we shook with our elbows resting on the counter like we were about to arm wrestle.

“Name’s Holly,” she said.

“Holly Martens?” I said. “Like the guy in the old movie?”

“Who?”

“The Third Man,” I said.

She shrugged. “My old man? He takes over this place, it’s called Molly Martenson’s Lie Down. Got a real nice neon sign on the roof, lights up sweet at night. So my old man, Warren, he’s got this friend, Joe, and Joe’s real good with fixing stuff. So, Joe, he knocks out the M, replaces it with an H, and then blacks out the O-N-’postrophe-S. Ain’t centered, but it looks good at night all the same.”

“What about the Lie Down part?”

“Wasn’t on the neon sign.”

“Thank the Lord.”

She slapped the countertop. “That’s what I said!”

“Holly!” someone called from the back. “Goddamn gerbil shit on my paperwork.”

“Don’t own no gerbils!” she called back.

“Well, the friggin midget pig thing, then. What I tell you about letting ’em out of their cages?”

“I raise guinea pigs,” she said softly, as if it were a secret dear to her heart.

“I noticed. Hamsters, too.”

She nodded. “Had some ferrets, but they died.”

“Damn,” I said.

“You like ferrets?”

“Not even a little bit.” I smiled.

“You need to loosen up. Ferrets are fun.” She clucked her tongue. “Whole damn lot of fun.”

I heard a clacking and squeaking from behind her that was too heavy for the hamster wheels, and Warren rolled out into the front office in a black leather and bright chrome wheelchair.

His legs were gone below the knees, but the rest of him was massive. He wore a sleeveless black T-shirt over a chest as broad as the hull of a small boat, and thick red cords stood out angrily under the flesh over his forearms and biceps. His hair was bleached blond like Holly’s, shaved tight against the temples, but swept back high off the forehead and hanging down to his shoulder blades. Jaw muscles the size of tea saucers worked up and down in his face, and his hands, clad in black leather fingerless gloves, looked capable of snapping an oak fence post like it was plywood.

He didn’t look at me as he approached Holly. He said, “Honey?”

She turned her head and looked into his handsome face with such immediate and total love that it invaded the room like a fourth body.

“Baby?”

“You know where I put them pills?” Warren wheeled himself up near the desk, peered in its lower counters.

“The white ones?”

He still hadn’t looked at me. “Nah. Those yellow ones, hon. The three o’clock ones.”

She cocked her head as if trying to remember. Then that wonderful smile broke across her face and she clapped her hands together, and Warren smiled, too, enthralled by her.

“’Course I do, baby!” She reached under the counter and pulled out an amber bottle of pills. “Think fast.”

She tossed them at him, and he snatched them from the air without glancing in their direction, his eyes on her.

He popped two in his mouth and chewed them. His eyes were still locked with hers when he said, “What you looking for, Magnum?”

“A dead woman’s last effects.”

He reached out and took Holly’s hand. He ran his thumb over the back of it, peered at the skin as if committing each freckle to memory.

“Why?”

“She died.”

“You said that.” He turned her hand over so it was palm up, traced the lines with his finger. Holly ran her free hand through the hair on top of his head.

“She died,” I said, “and no one gives a shit.”

“Oh, but you do, huh? You’re a real great guy that way, right?” Running his fingers along her wrist now.

“I’m trying.”

“This woman-she small and blond and fucked up on quaaludes and Midori from seven in the morning on?”

“She was small and blond. The rest I wouldn’t know about.”

“C’mere, honey.” He tugged Holly gently onto his lap and then stroked strands of hair off her neck. Holly chewed her lower lip and looked into his eyes and the underside of her chin quivered.

Warren turned his head so that Holly’s chest was pressed against his ear and looked directly at me for the first time. Seeing his face full on, I was surprised by how young he looked. Late twenties, maybe, a child’s blue eyes, cheeks as smooth as a debutante’s, a surfer boy’s sun-washed purity.

“You ever read what Denby wrote about The Third Man?” Warren asked me.

Denby was David Denby, I assumed, long the film critic for New York magazine. Hardly someone I expected to hear referenced by Warren, particularly after his wife had claimed to not even know what movie I’d been talking about.

“Can’t say I have.”

“He said no adult in the postwar world had the right to be as innocent as Holly Martens was.”

His wife said, “Hey!”

He touched her nose with his fingertip. “The movie character, honey, not you.”

“Oh. Okay, then.”

He looked back at me. “You agree, Mr. Detective?”

I nodded. “I always thought Calloway was the only hero in that movie.”

He snapped his fingers. “Trevor Howard. Me, too.” He looked up at his wife, and she buried her face in his hair, smelled it. “This woman’s effects-you wouldn’t be looking for anything of value in it, would you?”

“You mean like jewelry?”

“Jewelry, cameras, any shit you could pawn.”

“No,” I said. “I’m looking for reasons why she died.”

“The woman you’re looking for,” he said, “stayed in Fifteen B. Small, blond, called herself Karen Wetterau.”

“That’d be her.”

“Come on.” He waved me through the small wooden gate beside the desk. “We’ll take a look together.”

I reached his wheelchair, and Holly turned her cheek on his head and looked up at me with sleepy eyes.

“Why you being so nice?” I asked.

Warren shrugged. “’Cause Karen Wetterau? Nobody was ever nice to her.”