The Night Remembers

20

Before checking out the second address in Conroy’s log, I went to Donutland and had two cups of coffee and a donut. The sweet-faced waitress kept looking at my hands and how they still shook. It’s nice to tell yourself that in your prime you could have handled punks like the two at Kathy Stacek’s place, but the fact was that I’d never been especially tough. When I lost my temper I was liable to pick up something and hit you with it, but I’d never been gifted with quick or terrible fists. Even back in my detective days, I’d always fought only as a last resort. So now I shook from lost pride and animal fear and great useless rage.

I sat for a while looking around at the other people in the small shop on Mt. Vernon Road. They talked in little groups or sat staring off alone just as I did. This was one of winter’s first overcast days and it was taking its toll.

The second address was a new Drive-Mart farther out Mt. Vernon Road. There were six pumps on the drive and an overhang to protect customers from the worst of the elements. Inside, the mini-grocery store had the air of a long-ago corner store. There would be everything from baby food to cigarettes to toilet paper; the only thing there wouldn’t be was an immigrant Irish or Jewish owner, the way Costello’s or Mendlebaum’s used to.

“You know what used to be here?” I asked the girl behind the counter.

“A lot.”

“A lot?”

“Vacant lot. I know because I used to live in this neighborhood and I always played baseball with my brothers here.”

“Oh.”

She grinned. She had bright blue eyes and soft bottle-blonde hair and that peculiar vulnerability that accrues to young girls with dental braces. “It’s weird when you think about it.”

“What’s weird?”

“Oh, you know, you play baseball on this vacant lot when you’re growing up and then you move away and then fourteen years later you move back and work in a store that’s built on the same vacant lot. It’s just kind of weird, you know, how things happen over the years.”

I smiled. “That’s pretty smart, what you just said.”

“Aw.”

“Really.” I gave her a small wave and walked out.

There was a pay phone on the corner. I walked over to it, a hard winter wind pushing me faster.

I phoned a friend of mine named Sweeney.

“Can you hold on?”

“Sure.”

“It may take a little while.”

“That’s fine.”

Whenever I need to find out something about real estate, I call Sweeney. He works in the courthouse. He’s about my age and he’s a Democrat the way other people are Hare Krishnas. FDR was the Father, JFK the Son, and Jimmy Carter the Holy Ghost. The first two I might be able to buy, but Carter I never could stand. Maybe it was that psychotic smile.

Usually, Sweeney can find the previous owner of a given address in under five minutes.

This time, it took him eight. “Marvin Scribbins. Owned it for fifteen years. 1971–1986.”

“He sold it?”

“Ummm. To a developer who put up some kind of Dairy Queen deal. Insty-Freeze. Lead balloon.”

“Huh?”

“Lead balloon. You know, ‘sank like a lead balloon.’ ”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Then they sold it to the corporation that owns the Drive-Marts.”

“Anything on Marvin Scribbins?”

He riffled some papers. “Just the usual stuff. No forwarding, if that’s what you’re looking for.”

“So he could still be here in Cedar Rapids?”

“I suppose.”

“Well, I’ll check it out. Thanks.”

He said, “I didn’t see you at the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner this year.”

“Busy, I guess.”

“The party really needs your help, Walsh. It needs everybody’s help.”

“I’m going to pitch in. I promise.”

He laughed. “I don’t know why I put up with this stuff.”

“You know something? Neither do I.”

He laughed again and hung up.