They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

Ice Fishing

I hate this part of me, the part that could stand back and rub its white-gloved fingers along the edges of perfection looking for hidden dust. I don’t know if I was born with it or if it is the Brooklyn in me, but my nature runs towards distrust. Well, that’s not exactly true. To be precise, I more readily accept the wrong, the failed, the negative numbers. It isn’t affection, but comfort. It is easier to believe deformity.

I was hating myself a lot right then, Kira sleeping softly beside me. She had come to me in spite of herself, kissed me until I lost all sense of time and place. She stunned me with the eloquence of her surrender. And there I was-my lips and beard wet with her, her scent filling every corner of the night-unable to sleep as I looked for the fault lines along the gentle curves of her torso. And what wrong had she done other than to like me and my silly books, to enjoy the feel of me inside her?

I thought back to the previous night, my pulp detective suspiciously poking through the woman’s handbag with the barrel of his gun. Wasn’t that what I was doing now, sorting through Kira’s every nuance: the way she threw back her head when I licked her breast, her every sigh and shudder?

Wasn’t I as cheap and hollow as my own detective, searching for duplicity not in a handbag, but where shadows fell across the breathing landscape of my lover’s body? No, I was worse.

“Urnmm.” Kira rolled over in my arms, stretching. “You’re still up?”

“Yeah.”

“Is anything the matter?”

“Nothing,” I lied.

“Uncle Dylan is a bad liar.” She ran her finger over my mouth. “Lies are transparent in the dark.”

She replaced her finger with her lips and rolled me over onto my back. Even as she kissed me into forgetfulness, I fought a quiet battle with my own suspicions. Suspicions which said much more about me than their target.

Kira was up already when I opened my eyes. She was dressed and seated on the edge of the bed reading my fax. When she noticed I was awake, she smiled, putting the papers down on the desk.

“Come on,” she said, “I want to take you to breakfast.”

“What about class?”

“I’m a diligent student, but even I give myself a rest on Saturday.”

I showered. Before we headed downstairs, I let her in on my new found life of crime and my run-in with Dean Dallenbach. I told her we were going to be followed and that I would understand if she didn’t want to be seen with me. She could, she said, handle Dean Dallenbach’s wrath, but that if she didn’t get some food in her soon, I’d have a corpse on my hands.

“Forget that,” I said. “The hotel charges extra for heavy-duty cleanup.”

My pal was back at work behind the front desk. When I stopped to ask him how the coffee delivery went, he was inexplicably cool to me. He barely managed an; “Okay,” before turning his back on me. I figured it had to be my morning breath or Kira’s presence at my side. And since I’d brushed and gargled, I supposed it was Kira. I was really beginning to hate this town. When I opened my mouth to call the desk clerk on his attitude, Kira tugged me by the elbow and urged me out the door.

“What an asshole!” I hissed as we walked out into a snow shower. “What was it, you think; the difference in our ages or your being Japanese?”

“Neither.” She winked. “I don’t think he likes Jews.”

“That’s it!”

I chased her down the street and threw her into a snow drift. With a lusty smile, she beckoned me closer. When I brought my face nearer to hers, she rubbed a handful of snow in my mouth. I kissed her anyway, but as I came up for air, I noticed a blue minivan parked not twenty feet away at the curb. I had no appetite for performance. I picked her up and we went on to breakfast.

“I don’t mean to pry,” she said, squirming in her seat, “but did that fax on your desk have anything to do with Zak?”

“No, not directly. It’s just some research I’m doing for my next book,” I lied for no good reason. I was better at it in daylight. “And you’re not prying. I’m glad someone in this goddamned place is genuinely interested in Zak.”

“Any word on him?”

I waved to the waitress for more coffee. “No, but I think there’s a connection between Zak’s disappearance and the Valencia Jones trial.”

“What makes you think that?”

I hesitated until the waitress had refilled our cups and gone. I told Kira about Detective Caliparri’s murder and the newspaper clippings in his deposit box.

“So there’s no direct link?” She asked the obvious question.

“None so far, but I haven’t had a chance to establish one. And now with Dean Dallenbach’s restrictions. .” I looked out the front window at my shadows in the minivan. “Do you know if my nephew and Valencia Jones were acquainted?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t.”

“Don’t sweat it. It’s just a hunch anyway. But the fact that everyone in Riversborough is so uptight about Valencia Jones, makes me think I’ve got something.”

“Maybe you do.” She tried to sound encouraging, but the turned-down corners of her mouth betrayed her.

“If there’s a connection, I’ll find it in spite of this town.”

We finished our breakfasts in relative silence. But our waitress was the type of person who couldn’t stand silence and decided to strike up a conversation.

“Terrible thing about that boy up at Cyclone Ridge, eh?”

“What’s Cyclone Ridge?” I wondered.

“A ski resort just north of town,” Kira said.

“Well anyhow,” the waitress plowed on, “this boy gets tanked real good at the bar and goes solo night skiing on Twister Run. That’s the steepest trail they got up there, honey,” she wanted me to know.

“Did he get hurt badly?” Kira asked.

“No, honey, he got dead. Neck was broken, in three places, but the pine tree was barely scratched.” The waitress chuckled. “Here’s your check. And don’t forget to have a nice day.”

“I guess you’re not going to want to go skiing now,” Kira feigned disappointment.

“Ski! Jewish boys from Brooklyn don’t ski. The closest thing we had to mountains were the road bumps on Flatlands Avenue. And they paved those over when I was eight. Anyway, I’ve got a few errands to run.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“These kinds of things are better done alone,” I said, leaning to kiss her cheek. “Don’t hate me.”

“I couldn’t.”

“Tonight?”

“We’ll see,” she said. “We’ll see.”

She snapped up the bill and was gone. I watched out the window to see if the boys in the minivan were interested in Kira. Nope, they didn’t move. They only had eyes for me.

The cop at the front desk was doing the crossword puzzle. I didn’t recognize him from either of my previous two trips to the Riversborough Station and if he recognized me, he wasn’t letting on. When he got around to asking me what I wanted, I said I’d like to visit one of the prisoners.

“Sorry,” he said, “fresh out.”

He went on to say that they hadn’t had a prisoner for two weeks. He was unimpressed when I explained that I had been a prisoner just the day before.

“Who brought you in?” he asked.

“Campus security.”

“Were you officially charged?”

“No.”

“Then,” the cop said, “you don’t count, do you?”

I told him it was up to him as to whether I counted or not, but at the moment, I wasn’t interested in me. There was another guy in the holding cage, I explained, and he was tripping out somewhere beyond the moons of Saturn. Grudgingly, the cop punched in a few keys on the computer.

“Prisoner’s name?”

I said I didn’t know. That went over like termites at a toothpick convention.

“Look, mister, you better stop wasting my time or you sure as hell will be a prisoner in this jail.”

Disregarding his own words, the desk cop continued punching at his keyboard. I guess before he got really mad at me, he wanted to make sure I was wrong. He turned his monitor around so I could see it. He brought up two weeks worth of booking sheets and arrests. Only one screen had a name on it. That name was mine. And in bold letters beneath my name, it read:

“RELEASED TO DEAN DALLENCBACH. NO CHARGES TO BE FILED”

“But I’m telling you,” I pushed my luck, “there was another guy in the cell with me: blond, long hair, earring, twenty, maybe twenty-one.”

“Well, I wasn’t here yesterday and this screen’s the only thing I got to go by.”

When I asked to see the fat cop who was on duty when I was being held, the guy at the desk answered: “No can do. Sergeant Wick left last night for an ice-fishing tournament up in northern Ontario.”

The other cops I had met when I’d first come into town were similarly indisposed. How convenient, I thought, for everybody but me. All I had wanted to do was to ask my cagemate where he’d gotten hold of his Isotope. Now, it seemed, I was the one who was hallucinating. Unfortunately, it was a wee bit late in the game for me to be having flash backs. I was getting jerked around something fierce. But there was an upside to getting jerked around. It meant there were people in Riversborough with things to hide. Maybe one of those things was my nephew. It was time for me to get MacClough up here.

“Thank you, officer.”

“That’s it?” he sounded sad to see me go.

“See that flat spot?” I pointed to my forehead. “I got that from pounding my head into the wall. I’ve learned when to stop.”

Now that Kira wasn’t with me, I was prepared to tear into the desk clerk at the Old Watermill. He wasn’t in. Probably gone ice fishing. I picked up my messages. MacClough and Jeff had called. Neither one requested an urgent callback. I swiped a copy of the local paper from the lounge and went up to my room to catch a few hours of real sleep. Passion is great, but it does tend to get in the way of normal sleeping patterns.

I stretched out on the big down comforter and began wading through the local paper. I got as far as the picture on page three. It was an enlargement of the driver’s license photo of the skier killed at Cyclone Ridge. His name was Steven Markum, an unemployed chair-lift mechanic from Plattsburgh, New York. But I knew him better as Captain Acid.