The Night Remembers

23

By the time I reached Ellis Boulevard the snow was coming down in earnest, cars spinning back wheels at stoplights and sliding forward in little unwanted bursts of power, people leaning over windshields and scooping off handfuls of cold numbing white stuff after having forgotten to buy gloves and scrapers, tiny old people walking with sad comic caution down slippery sidewalks.

There were no lights in Mr. Bainbridge’s.

I was on the sidewalk about ten seconds when Dolores appeared, bundled up in a large red coat. She grinned. “My kids still don’t think you’re really a private detective.”

I smiled. “Did you get a look at the man in the car?”

“Not really.”

“About how long ago do you think he left?”

“Twenty, twenty-five minutes.”

“And you haven’t seen Bainbridge on the street?”

“No.”

“Maybe he just went to sleep.”

“Not Bainbridge. He always watchin’ that religious channel on the TV and keeps the sound up real loud, especially when they playin’ music. Man, does he like loud music.”

“Why don’t I go up to the door?”

“Go ahead, but it won’t get you nothin’.”

“There’s a positive attitude.”

Her laughing behind me, I went up to the door. Through the small glass of the door window, I looked inside. Nothing. No light; no sign of life. I knocked. It was like tossing a coin down a very deep well. It got lost before it touched bottom.

“Tol’ ya,” Dolores said.

I turned around. “I appreciate all the confidence you have in me.”

“You sure are a smart-ass.”

I turned back to the door and knocked again. Two cars of teenagers went by. Several generations of Cedar Rapids kids had driven down Ellis Boulevard, all in search of the same elusive things. Pretty soon they’d have beer bellies and mean factory foremen and then it would be their own kids who went looking for all those lovely things young people make fools of themselves over. You could hear their radios now; you could smell their underage beers.

“You scared to try the side door?” Dolores said.

“You’d be great during a burglary. You could stand down on the sidewalk and shout out instructions to me.”

She started laughing again.

So of course I went around the side of the house, sticking to the smashed concrete walkway, sort of bobbing up and down for a dark useless look inside the side windows.

I pounded on the side door with the authority of a cop effecting a bust. And got, for my trouble, the same response I’d gotten from the front door.

Dolores came around to the side of the house. “You want inside?”

“I don’t have a key.”

“The way I’ve got in mind, you won’t need a key.”

“Really?”

“Really, Mr. Private Eye.”

“Why’re you being so helpful?”

“Because this will make a great story at my Amway party next week.”

“I see.”

“I hope you find him dead.”

“Bainbridge?”

“You got it. First, ’cause I’d like to see him dead, the way he feels about black people. Second, ’cause it would make my story better.”

“Well, I sure hope I can oblige you, Dolores, and find a corpse inside.”

“You ever actually find one before?” Now she didn’t seem quite so certain she wanted me to find Bainbridge dead.

“Couple of times, when I was with the Sheriff’s Department.”

“It scare you?”

“Didn’t scare me but I’ve never forgotten them. One was a two-year-old that the mother had walked off and left. He died when the gas started leaking.”

“You believe in the death penalty?”

“Yep.”

“So do I, for shit like that anyway. How about the other one?”

“Old man who’d fallen down and hit his head on the edge of the coffee table. The fall induced a stroke. It was two weeks before they found him.”

“Musta stunk.”

“You wouldn’t have believed it.”

She said, “I shouldn’t a said that.”

“Said what?”

“About Bainbridge.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t really wish he was dead.”

“I know.”

“It’s just how he carries on about black people.”

“I understand. I really do.”

“So maybe we better check him out. For his own sake.”

“Good idea.”

“Let me lead you around back.”

She got ahead of me on the walk in her big red coat. The darkness took some of the color from the material. But nothing could take the confidence from her stride.

In the rear were two slanting doors leading to a cellar. I hadn’t seen one of these in thirty years. She went over and opened one of the doors. It made a scrawing, rusty-hinged sound as she pulled it back. She said, “This is as far as I go. I got to get back home. One of my kids is sick.”

“I certainly appreciate this.”

“I really shouldn’t a said that about him.”

“It’s nice to know you’re guilty about it.”

“You bein’ a smart-ass again?”

“No; knowing you’re feeling guilty means you didn’t really mean it in the first place.”

She laughed. “You’re a strange man, Walsh. Just like my husband.”

“Thanks for helping.” I put my hand out and we shook. She waved goodbye and said, “I’ll be going down the alley here,” and then she was gone.

Up from the cellar came the dank smells of mildew and dampness. The place appeared to be deep as a pit.

I put a tentative foot through the slanting doorway. I half-expected a monster to grab it and eat it.

My foot found a step; my other foot found another step. I started my descent, using my Zippo, best as I could, as a frail torch here in the gloom.

The mildew smell got overpowering. The dampness at once seeped through my clothes and began brushing at my flesh like something wraithlike and unclean.

The wooden stairs were warped. Twice I nearly tripped and fell forward. Quickly enough, my Zippo went out.

By the time I reached the floor of the cellar, darkness had sealed me inside. Behind me the open cellar door showed only the faintest evidence of night sky. It was as if somebody had closed the door.

Ahead of me I heard the whoof of a furnace catching wind. Keeping my hand ahead of me like an antenna, I moved down a dirt floor path between cardboard boxes that had been piled high on either side. Around a corner, I saw the blue glow of a gas jet. I walked over to the furnace, feeling as exultant as the prehistoric man who had discovered fire.

From the plump belly of the furnace came warmth and enough light to see the outline of rickety wooden stairs rising at an angle to the upstairs of the house.

I went up the stairs carefully, afraid they would literally disintegrate beneath me. The wooden steps were rank with the smell of mildew. The rot had seeped into the deepest fiber of the wood.

At the top I found a door and tried the knob. Unlocked. I put my head against the door and listened, hearing nothing but the groaning noises old houses make.

I opened the door and went inside.

During my time as a detective, I had seen many houses where lonely old people had died. Invariably, I’d found at least some evidence of the pack-rat mentality. I’m not sure what it’s all about. Perhaps it’s as simple as this — amassing things is a way of building a fortress against the outside world, a variation on the idea that some fat people have that their fatness forms a protective wall around them, inside of which they are secure. Whatever the impulse, a surprising number of the elderly follow up on it. You find houses and apartments packed with newspapers, canned goods, a jungle of ancient furniture, clothes, anything that a human being can bring inside.

Bainbridge’s house was not much different except for one thing: The rows and rows of packing crates that filled each room were far more orderly than you usually encountered. In fact, my first impression was that the place was a warehouse of sorts. After looking through my third room on the first floor, that was still my impression.

Enough dirty electric light came through the windows to guide me through the first floor. I saw all the things I’d expected to find — lumpy, dumpy furnishings; wallspace packed with paintings of Christ, the sort that depict him as Elvis Presley’s religious older brother; the smells of cigarettes and cold pizza boxes and cough medicine and liniment for tired bones; and a glowing TV set in a small room that looked like one of those forlorn little nooks you see in VA hospitals, where you spend half an hour with the carnage of a man hacking his way through the final stages of lung cancer. An empty Pepsi bottle lay overturned on a coffee table that had only three legs, like a maimed dog, and several ashtrays with gnarled butts.

On the tube a TV minister was bowing his head to pray for people. I hoped he was including me. I couldn’t be sure because the sound was off.

The only thing I knew for sure was that Bainbridge wasn’t on the first floor. I had even checked all the closets.

Above me stretched a staircase that rose toward and then vanished into utter darkness. I tried the light switch. Nothing; no light on the staircase. I listened for the reassuring sounds of traffic on Ellis. I started up the stairs. Long ago they had been carpeted; now the carpeting was barely a nub, and the stairs made more noise than an old man with asthma. Decades-old dust filled my nose and mouth; I coughed.

I was two steps across the landing at the top of the stairs when I stumbled over something. It might have been one of those comic pratfalls we all take from time to time, arms flailing, mouth yawped open without any dignity whatsoever, head aimed directly for the floor. But this was different because as I started to fall, my foot kicked into something that I recognized immediately as a human body.

I didn’t have much doubt about who it belonged to.

I landed on all fours, which saved me a headache anyway. I crawled over to Bainbridge and tried to see him, but it was too dark. I stood up and started groping around for a light switch. I found one in the bathroom, the smell of which was acrid. I soon enough discovered why. Either Bainbridge didn’t believe in flushing or the toilet didn’t work properly. Cupping a hand over my nose to kill the smell, I wobbled back to Bainbridge.

On his forehead you could see a faint red indentation where somebody had hit him, probably with a fist. At his age, in his condition, it hadn’t taken much to knock him out.

I went into the bathroom, cupping my nose again, and soaked one towel in cold water, grabbed another that was dry, and started back to him. Then I stopped. Though the bathroom was small, it was packed tight with the same kind of crates that filled the first floor. Here, in the light, I saw that the crates had a company name printed on them: Vandersee Import-Export.

I thought of Stella Czmek and how her fortunes had improved so abruptly and mysteriously once she’d gone to work for Vandersee. Then I remembered that Vandersee had died a few years ago. Now I was curious about how he’d died.

Bainbridge had started to moan by the time I knelt next to him again and began to daub his face with cold water.

“Bainbridge?”

Moaning.

“Bainbridge? Who hit you?”

Moaning.

“Bainbridge. I want to help you. Tell me what happened here tonight.”

Still moaning, but now the tiny mad eyes beginning to open and peer up at me; the eyes of a predatory bird.

“Bainbridge. Was it Conroy who was here tonight? A private detective named Conroy?”

He spoke then, and for all his pictures of Jesus, for all his Biblical talk of sin and salvation, his words were most inappropriate. He said, “You go to hell.”