They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

Ids

He left a note for me. He had to get back downstate to take care of some personal business and to check on the Rusty Scupper. I did not pretend to myself that I wasn’t relieved. He wrote that he had stayed up all night doing the reading I had suggested. He had nothing to say on the subject of my brother or of their mutual involvement with Boatswain-Hernandez. Parroting my review in Publishers Weekly, however, MacClough commented that he found Coney Island Burning a captivating character study featuring crisp, staccato dialogue, but that the plot was rather too arcane and my attempt to bridge the gap between the hard-boiled genre and today’s suspense thriller was only sporadically successful. I marveled at the man. I marveled at his ability to remember that review and how it had seemed to hurt him more than me. I marveled at his ability to hang onto his sense of humor. I was not at all certain that I would be able to.

I had met killers before; some on my own, some with Johnny’s help. I had shared food and drinks with, told dirty jokes to, and played poker with murderers. I had even listened to some describe with cold precision every detail of their crimes. Had it bothered me? Yeah, I guess, a little, but their crimes were as remote to me as the crimes I wrote about in my fiction. The killers themselves were two-dimensional cartoon characters; evil somehow, but unreal.

Well, I was a hypocrite, because it was different with MacClough. None of those other men were my best friend. John was. None had risked his life to save mine. John had. I barely remembered those mens’ faces. I knew John’s face better than my own. He was as close to me as a brother. No, closer. We understood one another better than brothers do. I used to think so. I wasn’t quite as sure now. Maybe it was a measure of the world’s unending barrage of cruelty that murder only mattered when it hit close to home. More likely, it was a measure of my own weakness. If what I thought was true, that John had killed Hernandez in cold blood, I knew I would never be able to look at him in the same way again. And I would have two men to mourn after this mess was over.

It was with this black heart that I set out for breakfast.

The coffee shop was crowded with students and I had to wait about ten minutes to be seated. I used the down time to thumb through the Gazette. Steven Markum was already old news. Mention of his “accidental” death was nowhere to be found. The Valencia Jones trial, on the other hand, remained a hot topic. The headline at the top of the third page let me know that Ms. Jones and her lawyer had taken our advice to heart:

JONES FALLS ILL-TRIAL ON HOLD

The article went on to explain that the judge agreed to interrupt the trial to allow Ms. Jones sufficient time to recover from what a leery prosecutor, Robert W. Smart termed: “Her sudden and convenient ailment.” The trial judge also noted that the time off would allow him to deal with the flurry of motions Ms. Jones’ attorney had filed in recent days. It was clear from the story that neither judge nor prosecutor was very pleased with these obvious delaying tactics. And, though neither stated it for the record, it was equally clear that Valencia Jones would pay a price for stalling. I hoped we would be able to make it worth the gamble.

By the time I had finished off a pot of coffee and one cholesterol special-two scrambled eggs, cheese and bacon on a buttered roll-the place had cleared out. My waitress was the chatty woman who had gossiped about the death up at Cyclone Ridge to Kira and me. She hadn’t been so talkative this morning; not enough blood in the morning paper to suit her purposes. But I was as wrong about her as I was about most everything else.

“Where’s your girlfriend, honey?” she asked me right out. And when I hesitated, she prompted: “You know, that cute oriental number you was in with the other morning?”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” was the best I could manage.

“Too bad.”

“How’s that?”

“Well, she’s in here a lot, usually solo.” The gossip shook her head in dismay. “And the few times I seen her in here with a fella, it’s most a the time some dorky college kid. It’s a pity, a cute girl like that.”

“She’s a regular?” I wondered.

“Twice a week since her freshman year.”

Freshman year, my ass. I bit my lip not to say it. Kira probably came into the coffee shop after hard nights turning tricks on campus for a little mad money. And for an extra twenty bucks, she’d let you take her to breakfast. I felt the corners of my mouth curl into a nasty smile.

When my eyes refocused on the waitress, she was staring hard at me.

“Something the matter?”

Wagging her finger at me: “You look real familiar to me. I thought so the other day, too, but I couldn’t place you. Where the hell do I know you from?”

“Read any detective novels?”

“Never. I’m a Harlequin romance gal myself.”

“Go to Brooklyn College?”

“Honey, the closest I ever want to get to Brooklyn is watching reruns of Welcome Back Kotter on TV.”

“You ever get down to Long-”

“That’s it!” she snapped her fingers. “You look just like one of the boys that oriental girl used to come in here with. You his father?”

I shut the busybody out before she finished her question. What she said about the boy who looked like me didn’t make any sense, if that boy was Zak. Even if Kira really did turn tricks on campus, her new employers would never have risked using her to get close to me; too many variables. They could never be sure Zak hadn’t discussed her with me over a beer or in the locker room. A kid might not talk to his father about going to a hooker, but you couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t tell a favorite uncle. And if they were willing to wager Zak hadn’t told me, they couldn’t take the chance of some other customer recognizing her as she walked around Riversborough at my side.

“This the boy?” I showed her my wallet photo of Zak.

“That’s him. Sorry about that dorky college boy crack.”

“It’s forgotten. Listen, this girl we’re talking about, you ever catch her name?”

She was staring at me again. Why would I have to ask the name of someone I obviously knew?

“I know it’s a weird question, but humor me, please?”

“Well, mister, I ain’t the nosy type,” she said with a straight face.

“Oh, believe me, I know you’re not. It’s just that I worked as a waiter myself for a while and I overheard things I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop on. Come on. . Sandra,” I read her name tag. “As a favor to an old waiter, try and remember.”

Sandra screwed up her face for dramatic effect, but I don’t imagine she had to search her memory for more than a nanosecond. “Kiwi, Keela, I don’t know, foreign sounding like that.”

“Kira?”

“Sounds about right,” she nodded. “Can I get you anything else?”

I waved a fifty-dollar bill under her nose. “Is there a way out of this place other than the front door?”

“Through the kitchen, into an alley that leads to Beethoven Street.”

I handed Sandra the fifty. “Think you can arrange a tour of the kitchen for me?”

“For a handsome man like yourself,” Sandra purred, leering at me in a way she must have thought sexy, “I could arrange almost anything.”

“I might just take you up on that.” I kissed the back of her hand. “But for now, let’s see about the back door.”

With the fifty bucks worth of consolation, Sandra disappeared into the kitchen. She reappeared at my table within two minutes. Everything was arranged. I left a five on the table to cover breakfast.

“Listen,” I whispered to her as I stood up, “make like you’re pointing the way to the bathroom.” She did. “Great. Some men are going to come in asking about me in a few minutes. Whatever you do, swear to me that you won’t tell them I’m going back downstate for a few days.”

“I swear.”

As I trotted down the alleyway towards Beethoven Street, my legs were fueled by hope. Hope wasn’t something I was terribly familiar with, but it felt pretty damned fine. Now I needed some time, sans chaperones, to make certain my newfound hope wasn’t of the false variety. My exit through the kitchen was a start. And since I figured Sandra the waitress would confess as to my fraudulent travel plans within five minutes, I thought I could count on at least a few hours of unfettered activity.

My first stop was a ski shop. I grabbed a new parka, gloves, a turtleneck, pants, and a pair of hiking shoes off the shelf. I bought a wool ski hat-I hated hats-and a pair of those orange reflector sunglasses that make you look like an alien with no fashion sense. I hardly recognized myself. I doubted if anyone else would, not at first glance. When the salesman offered to put my peacoat out of its misery, I snapped at him. I had him box the clothes I’d come in with and paid for them to be shipped back to Sound Hill.

I strolled over to the campus under a bright sun. It was relatively warm and, for the first time since I’d arrived, snow wasn’t part of the forecast. That would help. Fewer students would be inclined to take the subterranean passageways between buildings. Now all I had to do was spot Kira and follow her without her noticing me. I took the high ground atop the library steps, watching.

Surveillance, boredom is thy name. I detested it. Hurry up and wait and wait and wait. It was the endless, often fruitless hours of loneliness that had helped push me out of insurance investigations. It was all about cold nights in cold cars drinking cold coffee. I used to think that Eliot had gotten it all wrong, life wasn’t about coffee spoons, but about coffee containers: I have known the ins, outs, downs and ups, I have measured out my nights with coffee cups.

But like MacClough used to say, “If you could quote T.S. fuckin’ Eliot, you were in the wrong job anyway.” He was right, of course.

I didn’t have to look at my watch to know an hour had passed. After doing enough surveillance, you gain intimate knowledge of the passage of time, the deathly slow march of it. Only in retrospect does time ever pass quickly. Besides, I was standing under the clock tower and the chimes were kind of hard to ignore.

By the second round of chimes, my more usual sense of pessimism had set in. I would never find Kira this way. For all I knew, she didn’t have class today. And I knew nothing for sure. For chrissakes, maybe she was an expensive hooker. I couldn’t recall the last time I felt so unsure of myself. I had forfeited control of my emotional life to desk clerks and chatty waitresses. I was so far removed from my original purpose that I doubted the value of getting involved. These things, I thought, were better left to hard men, men not so easily distracted.

I was on the downward spiral of negativity followed by self-recrimination. The anger and explosion would not be far behind. “Thanks Dad!” I said, wishing he could hear me. Noticing I was cold, I deserted my spot on the granite steps of the library.

The cafeteria wasn’t too difficult to find without a map. I poured myself the biggest container of coffee I could find. The fat, unsmiling woman at the register shook her head no at me.

“What’s the matter?” I gritted my teeth.

“That’s a soda container you got there. Can’t take coffee out of here in a soda container.”

“Charge me for it.”

“Can’t do that,” she explained. “Gotta get a coffee container.”

“Here’s five bucks, charge me whatever you want.”

“Can’t do-

“-that. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

I left the coffee at the register and started for Dean Dallenbach’s office. I hadn’t wanted to go through him to find out about Kira, but now I didn’t see that I had a choice. I was wrong.

There she was, fifty feet in front of me, a distressed leather book bag strapped to her back. I slowed my pace and fell in behind a crowd of students arguing the merits of the Categorical Imperative. Wasn’t liberal arts grand? I hoped none of these kids planned on working for a living. As she moved, I moved. She came to rest in the third row, third seat from the front of room 203 of Snodgras Hall.

I couldn’t hear the lecture through the closed door, but figured it was an English class of some form or another. The professor’s salt-and-pepper hair was too long, falling on the shoulders of his green corduroy jacket. He strutted about, waving his arms like a hackneyed Hamlet, his eyes never straying too far from the prettiest women in class. I’d taken enough English courses to know that most literature professors were just frustrated actors with ids the size of Chicago. Okay, maybe some were frustrated writers. Id size remained constant.

At the end of the lecture I ducked into a nearby doorway and picked up on my shadowing routine. It went on like that until late in the afternoon. It wasn’t all bad, though. I did rather enjoy the live models in Kira’s sketching class. When the instructor shooed them out of the art room, I watched Kira disappear around a bend in the hallway. I failed to see the point in following her any longer. What would watching her sit through one more class prove? Yet, my doubts lingered. I was afraid to trust the obvious, that Kira was a student at Riversborough. I needed a little independent confirmation.

“Excuse me,” I called to Kira’s art instructor. “Can I have a word with you?”

“Sure.” She waved me up to the front of the class. She was a smallish woman with close-cropped brown hair and copper brown eyes. She had hollow cheeks smudged with charcoal and a friendly smile.

“Hi,” I put out my hand for a shake, but she showed me her blackened palms and we agreed that my gesture would suffice. “My name’s Dylan Klein.”

“Jane Courteau. What can I do for you, Mr. Klein?”

“I write books, detective novels.”

“I’ve never heard of you.”

“You’re in good company. Want to see my Authors Guild card?”

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said. “I’m supposed to be a talented artist and no one’s ever heard of me. And we don’t even get cards!”

“To tell you the truth, mine’s expired. Anyway, I have some say over what the cover design of my next book will be and someone suggested one of your students as a potential artist,” I lied. “I wanted to get your opinion first before I approached the student.”

“Which student?”

“Kira Wantanabe.”

Jane Courteau had trouble concealing her dismay. It wasn’t exactly horror I saw flashing across her face, but it was more than a frown.

I played coy. “No good, huh?”

“She’s not terrible.”

“I admire a woman who rejects faint praise as an option.”

“Look, Mr. Klein, what I mean to say is that Kira is competent. I’ve had her for three terms now and she’s improved immensely, but she doesn’t have her heart in it. I don’t mean to insult her.”

“It’s our secret. No one’s been hurt. Thank you,” I gushed, barely able to contain myself.

“I have several other students I might suggest.”

“That’s okay,” I assured her as I turned to leave. “If I go to anyone, it will be directly to you. I won’t forget you.”

Walking away, I realized I must’ve seemed quite the fool to Ms. Jane Courteau. I was a fool, a very happy and relieved fool. I stopped in the student lounge and called the lab from a pay phone. Although I couldn’t vouch for Kira’s activity before she met me, let’s just say that much of the suspense had been taken out of the call. In a thoroughly disinterested voice, the attendant confirmed I was HIV negative. You always tell yourself that you’ll deal with whatever happens, no matter how bad. But I’ll confess to feeling such a high at that moment I could have kissed the pepper-spray boy right on the lips, Rush Limbaugh and Joe McCarthy not with standing.

I bought two bottles of champagne at the liquor store. I intended to share the painted-flower bottle of Perrier-Jouet with Kira. I was undecided about the second, far less expensive bottle of Korbel. I was either going to send it to Jane Courteau without a note or use it as a fleet enema for the desk clerk at the Old Watermill Inn. I was thinking I’d been an idiot for listening to him. People get other people’s faces mixed up all the time. He had probably been drunk out of his mind when he was across the border at his buddy’s bachelor party. Then, like a kick in the groin I wasn’t expecting, it hit me; maybe the desk clerk hadn’t gotten it wrong at all. Maybe he was lying to me. I wondered about why he would do that. I’d have to have a chat with him on the subject when MacClough got back into town. I lacked John’s wherewithal when it came to interviews.

Walking up the street, I noticed the blue minivan parked across the way from the inn. I approached from the rear and rapped hard on the passenger side window. The campus security guy nearly coughed up his glazed doughnut.

“Just checking in,” I screamed through the rolled-up window. “Got back from downstate sooner than I thought.”

He tried, and failed, to look unfazed by my abrupt return. It’s tough to act cool with a chewed doughnut hanging out of your mouth. His partner in the driver’s seat was considerably less worried about my opinion of things and gave me the finger. I respected that. He and doughnut-boy had more than likely gotten reamed for losing me. As a gesture of goodwill, I showed them the bottle of Korbel and left it on the sidewalk.

Once inside the Old Watermill, I continued acting like a smug jerk. I found my pal at the front desk. He put down his spy novel and gave me a knowing smile. But what did he know, I wondered? There were no messages for me.

“Listen, buddy,” I whispered, “she’s coming over tonight. Do me a favor and send her right up when she gets here, okay?”

“Sure thing, Mr. Klein.”

“Anybody come in here today looking for me?”

“Nobody,” he said, giving the boy scout salute.

I handed him the champagne. “You think you can have this chilled for me and have it sent up when my date gets here?”

“No problem.”

I didn’t give him a tip. He’d made all the money off me he was going to make.

The room was different somehow. I can’t explain it. Hotel rooms aren’t like your own place. I couldn’t vouch for where I had put my dirty socks or what page the paper was turned to when I put it down before sleep. I didn’t know what bugs hung out in the corners of the ceiling. I didn’t know the smells or the sounds. And there was a cleaning service that came in every day to pick up after me, to make the bed, to fold the end of the toilet paper into a point. Even so, I could not shake the feeling that someone who did not belong had been in my room. But I also thought we’d have a colony on the moon by now.