What Happened to Lisa?

Chapter II

I phoned in a story to my paper from the lobby of the Princess Anne hotel, where I’d registered. I didn’t feel like eating, but gulped enough food to convince myself that I’d had dinner. Then I went up to my room.

I had company.

He was a string bean of a man with a face like wilted, yellow lettuce. He was sitting at the knee-hole desk. The ashtray on the desk was overflowing. He was lighting a fresh cigarette, and I noticed that his hands were as yellow as old tallow.

“You’re Holloway?” he asked.

“Yeah. Everybody seems to want to know Holloway. But I don’t know you.”

To remedy that he handed me a calling card. It was inscribed:

I handed the card back. He was standing now, a full two inches taller than I, which put him well up toward the clouds. His suit was freshly pressed, but still hung in loose gray folds.

“Jones retained me,” he said. “I used a passkey on your door because we shouldn’t be seen together. Jones don’t like your horning in.”

“But you do?”

“Hell, yes! I’ll take help wherever I can get it while I’m earning a fee. There are only a few hotels in Clearview. When Jones told me you were in town I figured you’d be registered at one of them if you decided to stay. I hit it on the fourth phone call.” He lighted a fresh cigarette from his old one. “I got a hunch you know Lisa better than Jones or Gardiner do.”

“Maybe. But I can’t tell you a thing.” He laughed softly. “Now what kind of way is that to talk? Say that I’m a bright young guy on a paper and a beautiful dame shows up in my town. She doesn’t want anybody to know where she is, see, and I’m willing to string along with that. So what do I do? I run like crazy to her home town and act very much upset and make a show of finding out where she is — and all the time my fingers are on the pulse of the entire investigation.”

I looked at him, and his yellow eyes washed a coldness over me. Without being able to put my finger squarely on the reason, I was afraid, more afraid than I’d been in a long time.

“They sell cigarettes in the lobby,” I said, when he asked me for one.

He smiled again, that mirthless twisting of his yellow lips. “Okay, son. I’m going. But don’t rush me. I’m not afraid of you.”

He meant that. And he didn’t believe what I had told him. The door slammed behind him. But I knew I wasn’t through with Pickens yet.

I hit the sack, but couldn’t seem to get to sleep. I was plagued by the gnawing feeling that under my nose was the very thing. I needed to get a line on where Lisa had gone. But I couldn’t put my finger on it.

When I finally drifted off, she walked in my dreams, tall, slender, a smile on her face and that questing look in her eyes. She held out her arms and I called out to her, “Don’t pity me!”

Her black hair brushed her shoulders as she shook her head. “You don’t need pity. You are a soldier — and a man.”

I moved toward her, and a fog sprang up between us, colder than a shroud, impossible to fight. And she was gone.

Then I awoke and it was broad daylight outside.

I had a touch of a headache, and the sleep hadn’t rested me. I felt better after I’d showered. I knotted my tie, slipped into my coat, and in a gesture so automatic it surprised me, I took out her letters and slipped one of them to the top. The one from Rogersville. From out of the envelope I pulled the snapshot the street photographer had taken. I studied it a moment, the sign that said, “The Dive.” And from the way her body was turned, the angle from which the camera had caught her, I guessed suddenly that she had been snapped as she had stepped from the place.

This was what had troubled my mind last night — this postmark, Rogersville, this restaurant, saloon, nightclub, or whatever it might be, called The Dive. Was she in the habit of going to Rogersville, frequenting The Dive? It was a thin, thin lead, I knew. But in the utter blank darkness that surrounded her disappearance, this was the only thread of light.

My headache went away and I rode the elevator downstairs, entered the coffee shop, and ate a hearty breakfast.

Rogersville was a good-sized industrial town in the eastern part of the state. Factories strung along a river. Blocks of grimy houses struggling for breath in the smog. Shops and bustling traffic downtown. A town swollen with workingman’s money when the wheels turned and the engines roared. A town that would starve if the wheels ever — swung to a stop.

I got off the train in early afternoon, jostled through a gate, handed my bag, to a redcap. Voices, hurrying footsteps, the chuffing of an engine in the distance, the sepulchral intonation of an announcer on a loud-speaking system made a rolling babel of sound about me.

Then for just an instant the crowd broke, parted, and I saw them. Pickens, Jones, and Gardiner. Two fat pumpkins and a string bean.

The break was quickly closed by an eddy of people, and I knew that only a freak stroke of luck, a chance glance at the moment a trough appeared in the waves of people had permitted me to spot Pickens’s tall form with Jones and Gardiner like shadows behind him.

I knew then that Pickens was good. He knew his business. I’d taken great care in leaving Clearview, yet he had successfully shadowed me, doubtless phoning Gardiner and Jones while I was at the station getting ready to board my train.

The redcap guided me down a long, sloping corridor. We angled right toward the domed waiting room. Around the ell, I touched his arm. As he paused, I said, “Keep walking, but take this.”

I handed him the letter with the Rogersville postmark. The shot of her coming out of The Dive was still inside the envelope.

“Mail this to Steve Holloway, care of General Delivery, City. Got it?”

He got it when I slid, the five spot in his hand. For a moment I’d considered tearing the photograph in bits, dropping them as I walked, but I wanted the picture in case I hit a dead end and needed to go to the police. Too, the picture was numbered. The number would tie it to the photographer who worked for the action-shot outfit. If the area near The Dive was his regular beat, he might have seen her again. He might remember Lisa.

I took the bag from the porter’s hand, slid it into a ten-cent locker, dropped a coin in the slot, turned the key, and put the key in my pocket.

There was a bank of glass doors leading out of the station. Beyond the doors people hurried up and down the gentle slope of broad concrete. There was a winding stairway to my right, leading up to the mezzanine.

I climbed the stairs, stood well back from the smoke-begrimed marble balustrade and saw the trio burst into the waiting room. They paused momentarily, eyes sweeping the waiting room. Jones stood like an unyielding pile of steel; Gardiner hovered beside him, as if seeking protection. Like a loose, gray shadow, Pickens lighted a fresh cigarette from his old one and gave a short, clipped order. Jones moved toward the broad exit, passing beyond my view beneath the mezzanine. Gardiner hesitated, then headed toward the men’s lounge. Pickens faded into the crowd and began a circuit of the waiting room.

I was pretty much alone in the mezzaine passage. A young couple passed, coming from the mezzanine level coffee shop. An old man strolled by reading a paper.

Below, I saw Gardiner emerge from the men’s lounge. He stood in indecision until he spotted someone under the balustrade. I guessed that it was Jones. I was right. Gardiner and Jones made rendezvous at one end of the long benches below. They stood with their heads together, throwing glances about the waiting room. Jones’s face was bleak; Gardiner was plainly nervous, his features as white and soft as dough.

Then I smelled the pungent sweetness of cigarette smoke behind me. I was turned just far enough to glimpse Pickens’s chill smile when he slapped me on the temple with the palm of his hand. There was something hard and cold in his palm, a small gun. Stars pinwheeled and my knees went rubbery. I felt him helping me toward one of the benches against the far wall, away from the balustrade.

He chuckled, deep in his throat. It was a more fearful sound than any curse could have been.

I tried to get my eyes in focus, to force my lips to work. I was still conscious in a vague way, but paralyzed from the skull downward. Then Pickens patted my temple again with his palm and the lights went completely out...

When I came out of it, I was sick, deep down, as if my guts were trying to crawl out of my throat and spill over the floor. I felt as if I would vomit all over my bib and tucker if I moved a muscle.

I heard Pickens tell Gardiner to keep his shirt on. I heard footsteps, sharp, hard, heavy, and guessed they belonged to Jones as he paced about the bed on which I lay.

I wanted to lay there for an indefinite time without their knowing that I was conscious. I wanted them to say nothing to me. I didn’t want to move. But I couldn’t help myself. Like a boil erupting, the sickness came to a head and I rolled over on my side, thrust my head over the edge of the bed and messed up the floor.

When my gagging and groaning heaves had subsided, Pickens reached across the bed, caught me by the hair, and pulled me over on my back. He scratched his cheek with his yellow talons and smiled at me.

“That mezzanine play was bright, Holloway. But not quite bright enough. When I didn’t find you in the waiting room, I guessed you’d spotted us and ducked upstairs. I came up through the coffee shop, and there you were. A couple of redcaps were most solicitous as they helped us ease our drunken friend down a back stairs and into a taxi.”

I lay looking at him, too weak at the moment to move, spittle and stuff that tasted like bitter slime oozing from the side of my mouth down my chin.

I rolled my head a little and saw that I had been wrong about one thing. The footsteps had not belonged to Jones. He was not in the room. Only Gardiner and Pickens were there. It must have been Gardiner walking about the bed.

It was plain that Gardiner found as much distaste in the situation as Pickens found delight. Gardiner looked as if he felt ill himself. He walked around the bed, pushed the window up. A breath of hot air from the city stirred the even hotter, stifling, syruplike air in the room.

Pickens ground a cigarette beneath his heel, lighted a fresh one, and said, “Close it!”

Gardiner closed the window, walked across the room so that he didn’t have to look at me. His fat shoulders were shaking.

Pickens smiled at me. “Let’s not be unpleasant about this, Holloway. Where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I’ll repeat myself,” Pickens said with sadistic patience. “Let’s not make a Victorian melodrama out of this. Where is she? Where were you to meet her?”

I looked at him and shook my head. I had strength enough now to wipe my mouth and sit up. The room spun for a second, then settled on an even keel. I discovered in that moment that I was still young; I still had bounce. I had endured nothing violent since the war, but the years hadn’t made a middle-aged man of me yet. Except for the throbbing pain in my temple, I was feeling better.

The room, I saw, was a cheap one, probably in a flophouse or grubby hotel in a slum section. A nice spot to question a man when you wanted absolute privacy.