The Fan

23

Jewel Stern parked in front of the peeling three-decker. The green garbage bags were no longer on the porch. She was about to buzz number four, Renard, when she saw that the front door was open an inch or two. She went in.

On either side were the doors to one and two; ahead, the stairs. She climbed them. At the next landing, she found number three on her left and a dim corridor on her right. She followed it, past a closed and numberless door-the bathroom; she could hear the toilet running-to number four at the end. Like the front door, it too was slightly ajar. She pushed it open a little more so she could see inside.

The room was small and without belongings: no clothes, no papers, no bedding. Deserted, abandoned, tenantless: except for the man in jeans and a T-shirt, standing at the window, his back to the door. Jewel cleared her throat.

He wheeled around. A slightly built man with wire-rim glasses, freckles, and red hair, graying at the sides, thinning on top.

“Mr. Renard?” she said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” Remembering Bobby Rayburn in the pool, she wondered whether she had advanced beyond merely making men emotionally uncomfortable, as her mother would have it, to some ultimate disjunctive phase of physically terrifying them.

Like Bobby, the red-haired man said, “You didn’t scare me.”

“Of course not,” Jewel said.

His eyes, narrow to begin with, narrowed some more. “Who are you?”

“Someone looking for Gil Renard. Have I found him?”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Nor you mine.”

“The difference is,” said the red-haired man, unfolding a badge, “I’m a cop.”

Jewel crossed the room and read it. The red-haired man was a sergeant in some town up north she’d never heard of. His name was Claymore.

“Has there been a crime?” she said.

Sergeant Claymore stuck out his jaw. She could picture him as a kid: scrawny red-haired scrapper. “I’m still waiting,” he said.

“Jewel Stern,” she said. “I’m a reporter.” She handed him her press card.

He examined it carefully. “What kind of reporter?”

“Sports,” she said. “Baseball, particularly.”

He gave it back. “And what are you doing here?”

“Working on a story.”

“What story?” he asked, and before she could settle on just the right evasive answer, his eyebrows, bushy and rust-colored, went up and he said, “Don’t tell me he still plays ball?”

“Who?” said Jewel.

“Gil Renard. Isn’t that who you said you’re looking for?”

She nodded. “But I didn’t know he was a ballplayer.” Her assumptions about the encounter in the men’s room at Cleats began to change shape in her mind.

“I don’t know as he still is,” said Sergeant Claymore.

“But he was?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“At what level?”

“What would you mean by that?”

“The majors? Triple A? Double A?”

Claymore smiled a shy, small-town smile. “Oh, nothing like that, to the best of my knowledge.”

“College? High school? Legion?”

He laughed, embarrassed. “We played Little League together, is all.”

“I see,” said Jewel, although she didn’t, not at all. The puzzle of what had happened at Cleats, barely begun, fell apart completely.

“Getting back to the story you were working on,” he said.

A scrapper. Well, she could scrap too. “I don’t have to tell you.”

He surprised her. “That’s true. Constitutionally, although I’m no expert. But on top of that I’m out of my jurisdiction. And it’s my day off. So you don’t have to tell me a thing.”

“You’re friends, is that it?”

“Who?”

“You and Gil Renard.”

“What makes you say that?”

She shrugged. “Little League.”

“We’re not friends. Never were.”

“Then there has been a crime,” Jewel said.

He gave her a long look. “Yes.”

“What kind of crime?” Jewel said. Sergeant Claymore stuck out his jaw again. “You don’t have to tell me, of course,” she added. “Constitutionally.”

He smiled, and was still smiling when he answered, “The crime of murder. Double murder.”

“And Gil Renard did it?”

“I’m a long way from knowing that.”

“But you suspect him?”

“Suspect is too strong a word. It’s just that…” He paused. Whatever thought he was pursuing went unspoken.

“That what?” Jewel said.

He sighed. “The victims were stabbed, for one thing.”

“And Gil Renard sells knives.”

“Did, until he was fired. But it’s much more than selling knives. His father was a well-known blade maker back home, a real artist. Gil’s been around knives his whole life.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“And what else have you got?”

Sergeant Claymore’s face colored slightly. “You seem to be asking all the questions.”

“Let’s not stop,” she said. “We’re getting along so well.” His face colored some more; then he shook off his annoyance, almost visibly, and pressed on, like a tourist coping with a foreign culture. “What else I’ve got is something a little weird. One of the victims was buried in Gil’s father’s grave. Right on top of the coffin.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Neither do I. He was a local guy, a thief and brawler named Len Boucicaut.”

“Like the Crusader.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. Who was the other victim?”

“His girlfriend. A prostitute, just out of jail.”

“Did Gil Renard know them?”

“I couldn’t say about the woman, but he knew Boucicaut. Long ago, that was. Gil left town and never came back.” He hesitated. “As far as I know.”

“What does that mean?”

“Probably nothing. I stopped Boucicaut for speeding a while back. Not unusual. He had a passenger. Didn’t make much of an impression at the time, but when Boucicaut’s body turned up where it did, I got to thinking.”

“That the passenger was Gil Renard.”

“That it might have been,” Claymore corrected. “Until I can establish that Gil did come back, that they’d been together, it’s just a stack of guesses.”

Jewel nodded. A fly buzzed around Claymore’s head and darted off. “Did you recover the knife?” she said.

“That’s another problem,” Claymore replied. “Not just that we don’t have the knife, but it looks like two different weapons were used, and one might not have been a knife at all-the wound’s too deep.”

Claymore sat on the bed, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes. A scrapper, but tired. So what? So was she. So was everyone she knew, except the ballplayers: they got all the sleep they wanted, like babies.

“What about motive?” Jewel said. “Were they enemies?”

“As kids? Far from it. In fact-”

“Boucicaut was on the team too.”

“How did you know that?”

I know boys and their games, Jewel thought, but she didn’t say it. “Were you the star, Sergeant?”

“They were the stars, the two of them. Gil was the pitcher, Boucicaut was the catcher. They took us all the way to the regionals.”

“That means you won the state.”

“We won the state.” Claymore looked inward for a moment, and seemed about to say something more, but did not.

The fly returned, buzzed Jewel. She swatted at it, missed. It was hot in Gil Renard’s old room, and airless. No motive, no connection; she was getting nowhere. “This man you saw in Boucicaut’s car-”

“Truck,” he said.

Connection. “A red pickup?”

“That’s right. How-”

“Was he a big man?”

“Yes.”

“Round face? Long black hair? Black beard?”

Sergeant Claymore got off the bed.

“Is that Gil?” she asked.

“Not Gil,” he told her. “Boucicaut. Where did you see him?”

Jewel went to the window, pointed down into the alley. “Right there.” She told him what had happened. Even as she spoke, he was inching toward the door. “Where are you going?” she said.

“No more guessing. I’ll put him on the computer right away.” Almost across the threshold, he turned, came back, shook her hand. “Thanks,” he said. Then his eyes narrowed, just the slightest bit this time. “The story you’re working on,” he said, “any murder in it?”

“Oh, no,” Jewel said. “Nothing like that.”

Sergeant Claymore left. Jewel stayed for a few minutes, opened every drawer, peered under the bed, saw nothing. She left Gil Renard’s room, went back down the corridor. At the base of the stairs leading to the top floor, she heard something from above. It sounded like a woman crying.

Jewel felt the personality of the house around her. She got out as fast as she could.