“Fix him?”
“Just his car. Don’t touch him. But if you get the chance, you could do a job on the car.”
“What for, Ronnie?”
“Just to give him something to think about.”
“Oh, yeah, I get it. You know that hatchet you took away from Abe Tompkins when he was going to brain his missus?”
“I remember.”
“The hatchet’s still in the trunk. If I get the chance, maybe I can chop down that Grand Prix.”
“Thanks, Fred. I won’t forget it.”
“You’d do the same for me—right?”
“Right.”
I figured it went something like that. But solving the Mystery of the Slashed Tires gave me no satisfaction. Small mystery; small solution. It had nothing to do with the Thorndecker investigation.
I thought.
I sat there, trying to make the vodka last, glowering at nothing. In any inquiry there is an initial period during which the investigator asks, listens, observes, collects, accumulates, and generally lets things happen to him, with no control.
Then, when certain networks are established, relationships glimpsed, the investigator must start flexing his biceps and make things happen. This is the Opening Phase, when all those sealed cans get their lids peeled off, you lean close to peer in—and usually turn away when the stench flops your stomach.
It was time, I decided, to get started. One thing at a time. I chose the first puzzle of the Thorndecker inquiry. It turned out to be ridiculously easy.
But the simple ones sometimes take the most time to unravel. I remember working a pilferage case in a two-story Saigon warehouse. This place stored drugs for front-line medical units and base hospitals. An inventory turned up horrendous shortages.
The warehouse had three entrances. I had two of them sealed up; all military and civilian personnel had to enter and exit from one door. I doubled the guards, and everyone leaving the place had to undergo a complete body search. The thefts continued. I checked for secret interior caches, for tunnels. I even had a metal detector set up, the kind airports use, in case someone was swallowing the drugs in small metal containers, or getting them out in capsules up the rectum.
Nothing worked. We were still losing drugs in hefty amounts, and I was going nuts trying to figure how they were getting the stuff out of the place.
Know how I solved it? One day I was sitting at my desk in the security office. I took the last cigarette out of a pack. I crumpled the empty pack in my fist and tossed it negligently out an open window. I then leapt to my feet and shouted something a little stronger than “Eureka!”
That’s how they were doing it, all right. A bad guy was dropping the stuff out a second-story window, right into the arms of a pal standing in an alley below. Simple? Sure it was. All the good scams are. Took me three weeks to break it.
But finding the author of the note, “Thorndecker kills,” wasn’t going to take me that long. I hoped.
I grabbed up my hat and trenchcoat, and went back down to the lobby, using the stairs. Twice as fast, I had learned, as waiting for Sam Livingston’s rheumatic elevator.
I glanced toward the cigar counter, but Millie Goodfellow had a customer, one of the antediluvian permanent residents. He was leaning over the counter, practically falling, trying to read the sign on the front of her tight T-shirt.
“What?” I heard his querulous voice. “What does it say? I left my reading glasses upstairs.”
I went to the desk, and the baldy on duty looked up, irritated at being interrupted in his contemplation of the
Playboy
centerfold.
“Yes?” he said testily.
“I need a new typewriter ribbon,” I said. “You got any place in town that sells office supplies?”
“Of course we do,” he said in an aggrieved tone, angry because he thought I doubted Coburn could provide such an amenity.
He told me how to find Coburn Office Supplies, a store located one block north of the post office.
“I’m sure they’ll have everything you need,” he said stiffly.
I thanked him, and started away. Then my eyes were caught by the right shoulder of his blue serge suit. He saw me staring, and twisted his head and looked down, trying to see what I was looking at. I reached out and brushed his shoulder twice with the edge of my hand.
“There,” I said. “That looks much better.”
“Thank you, Mr. Todd,” he said, humble and abashed.
There was nothing on his shoulder, of course. God, I can be a nasty son of a bitch.
I found Coburn Office Supplies, a hole-in-the-wall with a dusty window and a sad display of pencils, erasers, faded stationery, and office gadgets already beginning to rust. The opening door hit a suspended bell that jangled in the quiet of the deserted store. I looked around. The place was a natural for a Going-Out-of-Business Sale.
And the little guy who came dragging out of the back room was perfectly suited to be custodian of this mausoleum. All I remember about him was that he wore shredded carpet slippers and had six long strands of hair (I counted them) brushed sideways across his pale, freckled skull.
“Yes, sir,” he sighed. “Can I help?”
That last word came out “hep.” In fact, he said, “Kin ah hep?” Southern, I thought, but I couldn’t place it exactly. Hardscrabble land somewhere.
I had intended to waltz him around, but he was so beaten, so defeated, I had no desire to make a fool of him. Life had anticipated me. So I just said:
“I want to bribe you.”
The pale, watery eyes blinked.
“Bribe me?”
I took out my wallet, extracted a ten-dollar bill. I dangled it, flipping it with my fingers.
“This is the only office supply store in town?”
“Wull … sure,” he said, eyeing that sawbuck like it was a passport to Heaven, or at least out of Coburn.
“Good,” I said. “The ten is yours for a simple answer to a simple question.”
“I don’ know …” he said, anxious and cautious at the same time.
“You can always deny you talked to me,” I told him. “No one here but us chickens. Your word against mine.”
“Yeah,” he said slowly, brightening, “thass right, ain’t it? Whut’s the question?”
“Anyone in town buy ribbons for an Olympia Standard typewriter?”
“Olympia Standard?” he said, licking his dry lips. “Only one machine like that in town as I know of.”
“Who?”
“Mary Thorndecker. She comes in ever’ so often to buy—”
I handed him the ten.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Mebbe ever’ two months or so,” he droned on, staring down at the bill in his hand. “She always asks—”
The bell over the door jangled as I went out.
I strutted back to the Coburn Inn, so pleased with myself it was sickening As a reward for my triumph, I stopped off at Sandy’s and bought another quart of Popov, a fine Russian-sounding vodka distilled in Hartford, Conn. But by the time I entered Room 3-F, my euphoria had evaporated; I didn’t even open the bottle.
I lowered myself gingerly into one of those grasping armchairs and sat sprawled, staring at nothing. All the big problems were still there. Mary Thorndecker may have written the note, and Ronnie Goodfellow may have tried to recover it. An interesting combo. Tinker to Evers to Chance. But who was Chance?
How’s this?
Mary Thorndecker types out a note, “Thorndecker kills,” and leaves it for me. What’s her motive? Well, maybe she’s driven by something as innocent as outrage at the vivisection being practiced at the Crittenden Research Laboratory. If she’s a deeply religious woman, a fundamentalist, as everyone claims, she could be goaded to write, “Thorndecker kills.” Anyway, she writes the note, for whatever reason.
Now, who might Mary tell what she had done? She could tell Dr. Kenneth Draper. But I doubted that; he was deeply involved in the activities of the research lab. She might tell her half-brother, Edward Thorndecker. That made more sense to me. She wants to protect Edward from what she conceives to be an evil existing in Crittenden.
Let’s say she does tell Edward, and hints to him that she intends to end what she sees as wickedness pervading the tiled corridors of Crittenden. But Edward, smitten by Julie’s beauty and sexuality—I had observed this; it was more than a crush—tells his stepmother what Mary is up to. Especially the note left in my box at the Coburn Inn.
Julie, wanting to protect her husband, the “great man,” before the letter can be used as evidence to deny Thorndecker’s application for a grant, asks Constable Ronnie Goodfellow to recover the damned, and damning thing. For all Julie knows, it could be a long bill of particulars signed by Thorndecker’s stepdaughter.
And because he is so pussy-whipped, Goodfellow gives it the old college try (using his wife’s passkey), and strikes out. Only because I had already mailed the note to Donner & Stern for typewriter analysis.
All right, I admit it: the whole thing was smoke. A scenario based on what I knew of the people involved and how they might react if their self-interest was threatened. But it all made sense to me. As a matter of fact, it turned out to be about 80 percent accurate.
But it was that incorrect 20 percent that almost got me killed.
I had something to eat that evening. I think it was a tunafish salad and a glass of milk; the size of my gut was beginning to embarrass me. Anyway, I dined lightly and had only two vodka gimlets for dessert at the Coburn Inn bar before I climbed into Betty Hanrahan’s pickup truck, drove happily out of Coburn, and rattled south on the river road. I was heading for Mary Thorndecker’s church. It wasn’t that I was looking for salvation, although I could have used a small dollop. I just wanted to touch all bases. I wanted to find out why a young, intelligent woman seemed intent on destroying a man she reportedly loved.
I’ve attended revival meetings in various parts of the country, including a snake-handling session in a tent pitched on the outskirts of Macon, Georgia. I’ve heard members of fundamentalist churches speak in tongues, and I’ve seen apparent cripples throw away their crutches or rise from wheelchairs to dance a jig. I’m familiar with the oratorical style of backwoods evangelists and the fervor of their congregations. This kind of down-home religion is not my cup of vodka, but I can’t see where they’re hurting anyone—except possibly themselves, and you won’t find anything in the Constitution denying a citizen the right to make a fool of himself.
So I thought I knew what to expect: a mob of farmers, rednecks, and assorted blue-collar types shouting up a storm, clapping their hands, and stomping their feet as they confessed their piddling sins and came forward to be saved. All this orchestrated by a leather-lunged preacher man who knew all the buzzwords and phrases to lash his audience to a religious frenzy.
I was in for a surprise.
The First Fundamentalist Church of Lord Jesus was housed not in a tent or ramshackle barn, but in a neat, white clapboard building with well-kept grounds, a lighted parking area, and a general appearance of modest prosperity. The windows were washed, there were bright boxes of ivy, and the cross atop the small steeple was gilded and illuminated with a spotlight.
I had expected a junkyard collection of battered sedans, pickup trucks, rusted vans, and maybe a few motorcycles. But the cars I saw gave added evidence of the economic well-being of the congregation: plenty of Fords, Chevys, VW’s, and Toyotas, but also a goodly sprinkling of imported sports cars, Cadillacs, Mercedes-Benzes, and one magnificent maroon Bentley. I parked Betty Hanrahan’s heap amongst all that polished splendor, feeling like a poor relation.
They were singing “Jesus, Lover of My Soul” when I entered. I slid into an empty rear pew, opened a hymnal, and looked around. A simple interior painted an off-white, polished walnut pews, a handsome altar covered with a richly brocaded cloth, an enormous painting of the crucifixion on the wall behind the altar. It was no better and no worse than the usual church painting. Lots of blood. The seated congregation was singing along with music from an electronic organ up front against the left wall. There was a door set into the opposite wall. I assumed it led to the vestry.
There wasn’t any one thing about the place that I could label as definitely fake or phony. But I began to get the damndest feeling that I had wandered into a movie or TV set, put together for a big climactic scene like a wedding or funeral, or maybe the church into which the bullet-riddled hero staggers to cough his last on the altar, reaching for the cross.
Trying to analyze this odd impression, I decided that maybe the
newness
of the place had something to do with it. Churches usually look used, worn, comfortably shabby. This one looked like it had been put up that morning; there wasn’t a nick, stain, or scratch that I could see. It even smelled of paint and fresh plaster.
Maybe the congregation had something to do with my itchy feeling that the whole thing was a scam. There were a few blacks, but most of them were whites in their twenties and thirties. The men favored beards, the women either pigtails or hair combed loosely to their waist. Both sexes sported chain necklaces and medallions. Most of them, men and women, wore jeans. But they were French jeans, tailored jeans, or jeans with silver studs, appliques, or designs traced with bugle beads and seed pearls.
All I could do was guess, but I guessed there was a good assortment of academics, writers, artists, musicians, poets, and owners of antique shops. They looked to be the kind of people who had worked their way through Freudian analysis, high colonics, est, Yoga, TM, primal scream, communal tub bathing, and cocaine. Not because they particularly needed any of these things, but because they had been the
in
things to do. I’d make book that the First Fundamentalist Church of Lord Jesus was only the latest brief enthusiasm in their fad-filled lives, and as soon as they all got “born again,” the whole crowd would decamp for the nearest disco, with shouts of loud laughter and a great blaring of horns.
The hymn came to an end. The congregation put their hymnals in the racks on the pew backs in front of them. A young man in the front pew stood up and faced us. “Faced” is an exaggeration; he had so much hair, beard, and mustache, all I could see were two blinking eyes.