The Daily Novel

One

The funeral was longer than I had expected, and I was more drunk than I had meant to be. Afterward I slept in my car for a couple hours and then drove west through the mountains. I had run out of Idaho before it was dark. Then the sun went down, and I missed a turn somewhere and was lost in the wheat.

The town was called Garfield, a little settlement crouched like an afterthought around the grain elevators along the railroad tracks. The rolling hills of wheat and lentils lapped the place like a silent sea. I was about a mile past exhausted. There were no motels. There had probably never been any motels; it was the kind of town whose two grocery stores had atrophied to one, whose Taft-era four hotels and eight saloons had quieted to one and none. It had begun to die before motels—before, for that matter, stucco auto courts or Kozy Kabins.

The landlady’s stuffy apartment was crammed with souvenir plates, pictures of grandchildren, and pale china doggies with birthstone eyes. The receipt said she was Mabel Richardson, and she looked just right for the name and the part. She was kindly and she was accommodating. She patted me on the arm, but it might as well have been my head, and for a minute it was warm and I was about nine years old.

I went up the stairs and I was alone again. I dropped my bag by the bed in number eight and lurched to the communal shower stall. The hot water did what it could. It wasn’t much. I was weary and I was sick and I was a lot less than a third of the way back from Missoula. I fell into the bed, listened to the absolute silence for about fifteen seconds, and was gone. I was a lot less than a tenth of the way back from Susanna.

Then I was surprised to find that I was awake. There was the bang of a car door and the sudden roar of an engine with a bad muffler. I rolled out of bed and pulled back the dotted swiss curtain. Outside my window was the black bulk of the ancient and unlighted neon GARFIELD HOTEL sign. Over the guywire I could see an antique pickup squealing east into the night. The truck was near sixty years old, but the engine sounded powerful and newer. The top of the cab was a gleaming cream. The light was bad, but the rest of the truck looked to be a rich brown. I stood at the window after the pickup had fishtailed around a corner and out of sight. Nobody came out to pump .45 slugs after it. I pushed a hand up my cheek, rasping a bad day’s growth of beard. Sometimes I think I’ve been in this business too long.

Nothing happened in the street. In the window of the grocery I could see a pyramid of canned string beans. Next door was a small curtained window. The streetlight picked out gold lettering: Ross M. Shepard, Atty at Law, Tues 2-4 pm, Sat 12-3 pm. There were actually weeds growing in the cracks of the concrete street.

I fell back into the bed and swam down into sleep. The pillowcase was clean but smelled vaguely of hair oil. Management supplied an art-deco electric alarm clock, which whispered its whirr in the darkness. I dreamed of the mountains.

The scream dragged me back up into the hotel. It was no longer dark and the curtains were touched with pinkish gold. The woman screamed again, right out in the hall. My feet grabbed the rag rug and my hand clawed for the pistol in my bag. I fumbled with the door for a moment and then banged it against the plaster. Light exploded in my face.

•

The woman was backing out of the little bathroom like a zombie, her hands held out in front of her. She looked like a movie poster. She was about sixty, and her grey hair lay in a coiled braid around the top of her head. Her mouth was open, and the scream was threading from it like a thin wire. Her heavy body filled a ratty pink bathrobe like potatoes in burlap. Her feet were stuck into fuzzy pink mules.

I came across the hall in my bare feet, revolver ready. There was nothing to be ready for. The girl was hanging from the light fixture on the high ceiling. Her toes pointed down. Her face wasn’t pleasant. I reached in and felt her wrist. No warm blood could pump through that frigid, rigid flesh. The cold feel made me shiver.

The woman in pink had backed against the wall next to a big potted plant. She wasn’t screaming, but her eyes were as big as her mouth had been.
I said, “Do you know who she is?”

Her head swiveled sideways: no. Then it bobbed: yes. She swallowed once.
“You don’t have any pants on.”

I blinked against the ludicrous statement and glanced down. My shorts were plastered against my body from the heat of my dreaming. “All right,” I said. “But stay here, OK?”

She nodded and left it at that. I ducked into my room. As I was pulling on my trousers I heard the drag of feet on the stairs. Mrs Richardson arrived in the hall just as I came out. She was wearing a new blue robe with a tracing of lace around the collar and down the front.

“There’s a dead woman in the bathroom,” I said.

The heavy woman with the grey braid said, “It’s Ina Simmons.”

“You do know, then?”

She nodded while Mrs Richardson drew in her breath.

I glanced into the bathroom again. “Does she live here?”

“She’s been living over by Bruce Hubbard’s place. I haven’t seen her here. Not since before she and my grandson quit seeing each other.” This was Mrs Richardson. She leaned forward and sideways so she could see through the bathroom door. Her nostrils were pinched and white when she straightened up.

I looked from one to the other of them. Heavy feet clomped on the stairs coming down from the third floor. I didn’t want a circus. As soon as the big-bellied man rounded the corner, I snapped, “There’s been an accident here. Could you call the police, please?”

He blinked and looked at Mrs Richardson. His hair was all black, but the stubble on his fat cheeks was grey. “What’s this, Mabel?”

She said, “Walt, could you call the sheriff in Colfax? Use the phone in my place, OK?” She tossed an explanation to me: “We don’t have any police here except Bud Krueger.”

I said to Walt, “Tell them we have a dead woman here.”

He blinked again but didn’t move. He was wearing old denim overalls with one strap fastened, one dangling. The soft white flesh of his hip and leg gleamed through the gap in the faded cloth. “It’s the Simmons girl,” Mrs Richardson said. “Now, please, Walt.” He moved heavily down the stairs, his mind as ponderous as his body.

“Did either of you ladies hear anything earlier tonight? Any kind of unusual noise? Any hint of when she might have come here?”

They shook their heads like vaudeville twins.

“Why here? Why did she come here?” The dumpy lady’s voice was querulous. She hadn’t seen what I had seen. The ugly purple circles of thumbprints on the dead girl’s throat meant that she hadn’t come here at all. She had been brought. The noose was not functional—it was decoration. Gift wrapping.

“What do you know about the girl?” It was hard to tell how old she was—had been—but her twenty or so years made her a girl among our party.

“She was Les and Rosa Simmons’ girl,” Mrs Richardson said, in a steady voice. She was a grandmotherly looking woman with a fat nose and a lot of wrinkles. She had folded her arms across her stomach and let her shoulders round forward, but she was calm. “She went away for, I don’t know, a couple years. She came back after Les and Rosa were killed, two years ago Christmas. In a car wreck, down in California.”

“Can’t we take her down or something?” The pink woman’s voice was a surprising intrusion.

“The cops wouldn’t like that,” I said. “She’s dead. But we could move down the hall if you like.” We shuffled down toward the stairs while Mrs Richardson added to her sketch.

“I wouldn’t have known her much, but my grandson Mike was going out with her for a while.” The heavy woman was starting to shake inside her robe. “They broke up, oh, maybe five months ago. He never said much about it, but she was kind of wild, I think. Too wild for him. He’s a good, quiet boy.” Her lips worked against each other. “She’s been seeing my other grandson, Ron. But I don’t see much of him these days. I don’t know much about it.”

“’Scuse me.” The lumpy pink lady scuttled off down the hall with her head ducked. Her slippers quick-tempoed up the stairs.

I said, “Do you know anybody in town who might drive a shiny two-tone brown and white pickup? An old one, Chevy or Jimmy, I think, with a loud engine?”

My landlady gave me a sharp look. “You know, Mr, uh, Chapman, I don’t even know why I’m telling you all this. The sheriff’s men are going to be here in a few minutes. What makes you ask about that truck?”

Past her shoulder down the hall I could see the blank rectangle of light from the bathroom door. The hallway smelled mildly of disinfectant, and behind the door of room 9—next to mine—I heard a refrigerator click on and whirr in the silence. I said, “Mrs Richardson, I’m a private detective. I’m here just by chance; I’m on my way back from Missoula over to Seattle. That’s where I work.” I jerked my head toward the spill of light on the floor. “That girl in there didn’t hang herself. She’s got marks on her neck. I’m pretty sure she was murdered.”

She took it quietly. “My grandson Mike has a truck like what you said. Real shiny, brown on the bottom and cream on top. It’s his pride and joy. He rebuilt it most from the ground up.” I wondered fleetingly whether she had seen that truck burning rubber away from the hotel at three-thirty that morning. Upstairs the toilet flushed, and the pink lady’s slippers slapped down the stairs toward us. Walt wheezed heavily up from the landlady’s apartment.

I wanted some quick answers from her. She had the appearance of a china-dog-filled-parlor old lady with wrinkles deeper than her mind, but she wasn’t. She was no fool at all. But we were out of time. Walt topped the stairs.

“Mabel, they says there’s a patrol car up to Oakesdale now and they oughta be here pretty quick.” He drew near, pulled by the magnet of the dead girl. I could see his eyes probing curiously behind us. The oblong of light lay blankly along the wood of the hall floor, like a bright coffin.

“OK. Thanks, Walt.”

“Uh, Mabel, I got up ’cause I hearn a scream. What gives?”
“It was Ruby, Walt. The Simmons girl, she’s in the bathroom there. Ruby found her. You know?”

He chewed on that. His arms were as big around as my calves. A triangle of the overall bib dangled.. The hair on his chest was grey, sparse. I twitched, wanting to ask Mrs Richardson more about the pickup and the boy. The pickup and her grandson. Ruby joined us. My clock had said five-forty when I’d gone back for pants and shirt. If I left now I could be in Seattle long before supper. I stood in the hall and watched the people watching the bathroom door. The refrigerator in number nine clicked off.

“You had a gun,” Ruby said suddenly. My attention snapped away from the quiet little group. “You scared me with that gun at first.”

“I heard you scream,” I said. “I didn’t know what was wrong. I wanted to help if I could.” She didn’t seem simple minded, but the comments she had been making had the artless inconsequentiality of the idiot’s. “I’m sorry I startled you,” I said. I didn’t mention that the gun was still with us, stuck down the back of my pants.

Her gaze was moronic. “That’s OK.”

Walt started to say something and stopped. We all heard the heavy whoosh of a big car sliding to a stop outside the hotel. A couple of county cops in khaki came up the stairs on Mrs Richardson’s call. One of them was about my age, tall and beefy with a little scar under his chin; the other was young, short, and so slight he was almost frail, with an inchoate moustache smudging an indecisive upper lip. They wore Smokey the Bear hats and pistols with big cherrywood grips. The little one kept running two fingers along the moustache, smoothing it and reassuring himself that it was there. I hoped that Ruby wouldn’t confuse things by talking about my gun.

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