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“Let me stop you right there, Ms. Dahl—”
“Penny. Call me Penny.”
“Okay, Penny. We’ll get into it tomorrow. Our rates are four hundred dollars a day, three-day minimum, plus expenses. Which I will itemize. I can take Master or Visa or your personal check. No Amex, they’re—” Poopy is the word that comes naturally to Holly’s mind. “They’re difficult to deal with. Are you willing to proceed on that basis?”
“Yes, absolutely.” No hesitation at all. “The Jaynes woman asked if Bonnie was feeling depressed, I know what she was thinking about, suicide is what she was thinking about, but Bonnie is a cheerful soul, even after her breakup with that dope she was so crazy about she got back on the sunny side after the first two or three weeks, well, maybe it was more like a month, but—”
“We’ll talk tomorrow,” Holly repeats. “You can tell me all about it. Fifth floor. And Penny?”
“Yes?”
“Wear a mask. An N95, if you have one. I can’t help you if I get sick.”
“I will, I absolutely will. May I call you Holly?”
Holly tells Penny that would be fine and finally extracts herself from the call.
4
Mindful of Pete’s suggestion, Holly tries a Netflix movie called Blood Red Sky, but when the scary stuff starts she turns it off. She has followed all the bloody exploits of Jason and Michael and Freddy, she can tell you the names of every movie in which Christopher Lee played the sanguinary Count, but after Brady Hartsfield and Chet Ondowsky—especially Ondowsky—she thinks she may have lost her taste for horror films.
She goes to the window and stands there looking out at the latening day, ashtray in one hand, cigarette in the other. What a nasty habit it is! She’s already thinking about how much she’ll want one during her meeting with Penny Dahl, because meeting new clients is always stressful for her. She’s a good detective, has decided it’s what she was born to do, her calling, but she leaves the initial meet-and-greets to Pete whenever possible. No way she can do that tomorrow. She thinks about asking Jerome Robinson to be there, but he’s working on the editor’s draft of a book about his great-grandfather, who was quite a character. Jerome would come if she asked, but she won’t interrupt him. Time to suck it up.
No smoking in the building, either. I’ll have to go out to the alley on the side once the Dahl woman’s gone.
Holly knows this is how addicts think and behave: they rearrange the furniture of their lives to make room for their bad habits. Smoking is rotten and dangerous… but there’s nothing more comforting than one of these deadly little tubes of paper and tobacco.
If the girl took the train, there’ll be a record even if she paid cash. Same with Greyhound, Peter Pan, Magic Carpet, and Lux. But there are two fly-by-nighters on the next block that specialize in transient travel. Tri-State, and what’s the other one?
She can’t remember and she doesn’t want to do an Internet search tonight. Plus who’s to say that Bonnie Dahl left on a bus or Amtrak? She could have hitchhiked. Holly thinks of It Happened One Night, and how Claudette Colbert gets a ride for her and Clark Gable by hiking up her skirt and adjusting a stocking. Things don’t change that much… only Bonnie Dahl didn’t have a big strong man to protect her. Unless, of course, she’d reconnected with the old boyfriend her mom had mentioned.
No point picking at this now. There will probably be plenty to pick at tomorrow. She hopes so, anyway. Penny Dahl’s problem will give her something to think about besides her mother’s pointless, politics-driven death.
I have Holly hope, she thinks, and goes into the bedroom to put on her pajamas and say her prayers.
September 10, 2015
Cary Dressler is young, unattached, not bad-looking, cheerful, rarely prone to worrying about the future. He’s currently sitting on a rocky outcrop covered with initials, high on good grass and sipping a P-Co’ while he watches Raiders of the Lost Ark. On a weekend, this outcrop—known as Drive-In Rock—would be crowded with kids drinking beer, smoking weed, and grab-assing around, but this is a Thursday night and he has it all to himself. Which is how he likes it.
The Rock is on the west side of Deerfield Park, near the edge of the Thickets. This area is a tangle of trees and undergrowth. From most locations therein it would be impossible to see Red Bank Avenue, let alone the Magic City Drive-In screen, but here a ragged cut runs down to the street, maybe caused by flooding or a long-ago rockslide.
Magic City is barely hanging on these days, nobody wants to swat bugs and listen to the soundtrack on AM radio when there are three cineplexes spotted around the city, all with Dolby sound and one even with IMAX, which is kickin’. But you can’t smoke weed in a cineplex. On Drive-In Rock, you can smoke all you want. And after an eight-hour shift at Strike Em Out Lanes, Cary wants. There’s no sound, of course, but Cary doesn’t need it. Magic City shows strictly second-, third-, and fourth-run movies these days, and he’s seen Raiders at least ten times. He knows the dialogue and murmurs a snatch now, between tokes.
“Snakes! Why did it have to be snakes?”
Raiders will be followed by Last Crusade, which Cary has also seen many times—not as many as Raiders, but at least four. He won’t stay for that one. He’ll finish his P-Co’, get on his moped (now stashed in the bushes near the park entrance closest to Drive-In Rock), and ride home. Very carefully.
His current joint is down to a nubbin. He butts it on the outcrop between BD+GL and MANDY SUCKS. He stores the roach, inspects the contents of his fanny pack, and debates between a skinny jay and a fatty. He decides on the jay. He’ll smoke half of it, eat the Kit Kat bar also stashed in his fanny pack, then putt-putt his way back to his apartment.
He gets lost in the bright images playing out a quarter of a mile away and ends up smoking almost all of it. He hears the John Williams music in his head and vocalizes, keeping it on the down-low in case anyone else is nearby—unlikely at ten PM on a Thursday night, but not impossible.
“Zum-de-dum-dum, zum-de-DAH, zum-de-bum-zum, zum de—”
Cary stops abruptly. He just heard a voice… didn’t he? He cocks his head to one side, listening. Maybe it was his imagination. Dope doesn’t ordinarily make him paranoid, only mellow, but on occasion…
He’s about decided it was nothing when the voice speaks up again. Not close, but not all that far away, either. “It’s the battery, hon. I think it’s dead.”
There’s nothing wrong with Cary’s eyesight, and from his vantage point he quickly spots the location of that voice. Red Bank Avenue will never be in the running as one of the nicest streets in the city. There are the Thickets on one side, crowding the few paths and pushing through the wrought-iron fence. On the other are warehouses, a U-Store-It outfit, a defunct auto repair shop, and a couple of vacant lots. One of those was home to a bedraggled little carnival that picked up stakes after Labor Day. In the other, next to a long-deserted convenience store, is a van with the side door open and a ramp sticking out. There’s a wheelchair next to the ramp with someone in it.
