The Daily Novel

Fourteen

It was Tuesday, but gravity was ahead on points. Something clonked, and I started to crawl up out of sleep. Clonk. What the hell?

It clonked again. And rattled. And it was in my room.

Jesus. I rolled out and hit the floor, scrabbling for my gun. Damfool! I thought. Make yourself a target and then sleep behind a cardboard door with a tinfoil lock. . . .

My fingers found the grip. I didn’t know which way he would lead me, but I really had only one way to go. My bare feet shoved against the linoleum and I flew sideways, twisting in the air, bringing the pistol up, hoping for one shot, just one, at least one.

My ribs hit the edge of the old chair, and together we hit the wall. Another empty beer can dropped through the transom and clonked on the floor.

“Chapman?” Perkins’ voice grinned through the door. My ribs hurt.

“Perkins?”

“Rise ’n’ shine, boy. You left a wake-up call?”

“Perkins,” I said, pretty steadily, “there’s an eighty year old man in the next room. He’s a nice guy. He used to run a paint store. I’d hate to wake him up. Otherwise I’d go ahead and shoot you.”

He laughed and tossed another empty through the transom. Clonk. They were Rainier cans.

I put up my bright sword and opened the door. Perkins came in and perched a jaunty thigh against the table. “I thought you said you had butterflies on your undies,” he said. He was in uniform. The big cherrywood grip of his revolver was dark and oiled-looking. His uniform was neat but not crisp: he was a man who had spent the night in a patrol car.

Management’s alarm clock whirred softly and said it wasn’t quite seven. “You’re still on duty, officer?”

“Yeah,” he said, “but I heard you couldn’t resist a guy in uniform.”

“You goddam sailors are all alike.” I pulled on a t-shirt and thought about Tammy in her cougar.

“You got coffee?” he said.

“Sure,” I said, “but the waitress is down in the can. You got to get your own.”

He showed me his teeth politely and went to the door. He bent out into the hall and straightened back with a tall white styrofoam cup in each hand. When he thumbed the plastic lid off one, the coffee filled the room. I began to think I might live. I also began to think it might not be too bad an idea.

It wasn’t too hot to drink. “Compliments of the Wagon Wheel in Steptoe,” he said, “but not of the honest citizens of Whitman County. You owe me fifty-two cents.”

“Take it out in trade,” I said. “If you ever get in a jam and need some professional investigative work, give me a call.”

“Shit,” he said, and looked disgusted. “What the hell kind of problem could I have that would take you fifty-two cents’ worth to investigate? No way I could ever need more than two, three days’ work from you.”

The coffee was wonderful. “It’s a special half-weekly rate,” I said. “For half-weak clients. You got ham and eggs out there too?” I looked hopefully toward the door, but he shook a grave head.

“Got hijacked outside of Oakesdale. Malaysians. They got everything except the coffee.”

I took another sip. “Where’s your partner?”

He looked to all corners of the room. “You pay taxes in this county?”

“Christ no,” I said. “I don’t even piss here. I’m saving it till I get west of the mountains.”

“Well, all right. Deputy Barnes is engaged at this moment, some two city blocks to the north of this location, in slamming the pork to a young lady of Swedish extraction. The young lady in question shall, of course, remain nameless. A gentleman and an officer does not bandy the name of Sandy Christiaansen.”

“He’d better not,” I said. “Nor you neither.”

I finished the coffee with real regret. Perkins ran a blunt hand through his short hair and said, “Actually, this is damn near business. I got some dope from Spokane.”

I had been leaning against the bed’s chipped metal headboard. I sat forward and looked interested. I was interested.

Perkins shook his head heavily. “Don’t get excited. It’s nothing good.”

I pursed my face. Every time I talked to Perkins, he had some kind of damn-Mike information. “They found Mike Miller’s fingerprints on her throat,” I said, “and he carved his name in her belly with his scout knife and we didn’t notice when we found the body.”

“Could be,” he said. “Can’t anybody say you’re wrong, at least. They can’t find any records of Ina Simmons.”

“What?” I groped for the styrofoam and tipped it up, but it was still empty.

“Yeah. Some kind of screwup in the Medical Examiner’s office up there. The body is there, but nobody can find her file, the pathology reports, nothing.”

“Oh, for—”

“Yeah,” he said again. “I knew you’d like that. Maybe we should have left it to our own homegrown carpenter, huh?”

I thought about Mike Miller sitting in his little grey-painted urinal in Colfax. This case was an odd one. It had a life of its own, a dreary vitality which made Mike sometimes almost irrelevant, almost an abstraction. But at times he would come back alive. He would be real, a quiet boy, an inoffensive boy. He would be the quiet and respectful young man who had spoken quietly and respectfully to me. He would be the placid young man who blinked in wonder as the sudden wrench tore him from his shabby but neat little house and twisted him into a shabby but foul little cell. And set Larry to doing his work for him.

“Aw hell,” I said. Gravity had gone over the ropes when I hit it with the coffee. I hadn’t realized that this was a tag team match. Grey had slipped into the ring. It was fresher than I was.

“I got the scoop when I came on last night,” Perkins said. “I stopped and gave Spokaloo a call a couple of times, but they’re all shut down.” He shook his big ugly head. “You don’t get that fancy big city twenty-four hour stuff around here. Hell, maybe that’s all just TV anyway.”

I told him everything I had done and learned since I had seen him last. He squiggled his face through all the appropriate moves: amazement at the mausoleum, interest at the dope, dislike at Manchester and his posing, appalledness at the ambush, suspicion at Ron Miller.

“Look,” he said, “what do you figure the chances are that Ina’s supplier from Oregon knew about that tomb. No chance, right?”

It was a helpful and attractive proposition. But it wasn’t certain. “Well, that depends on how intimate they were, doesn’t it? If he was just a vending machine to her, sure. But if they were personal as well as professional associates—” I shrugged. There was plenty of possibility that Ina’s involvement with drugs had come through a boyfriend in the first place; this supplier could have been an old lover from college, or even a current now-and-then lover.

“But we don’t have any reason to suspect personal involvement,” he persisted.

“No,” I admitted. “But we’d be damn fools to assume anything and then operate as though the assumption were fact.”

We sat in the clean, shabby room in the morning, and we were friends the way we had been on Saturday night. It made the room and the morning nicer. But it wasn’t helping Mike in any way that I could see. Perkins was real, but Mike was real too. Sometimes they were pushing against each other.

After a while, Perkins leaned over and looked at the alarm clock. “That’s about it, fans,” he said. He grinned at me. “Believe it or not, Barnes is a hell of a conscientious young officer of the law and public servant. He never does his humping on the public’s time.”

I took my own look at the clock. “You guys are still on duty, aren’t you?”

“Yeah, but get this. Barnes skips his coffee break time, skips his lunch time. Lunch comes along at two ayem and there is Deputy Perkins sitting in the Wagon Wheel or wherever, but by golly Deputy Barnes is off patrolling the roads of Whitman County, keeping the populace safe. Then when he’s got all his time in a lump we swing by Garfield and he bounces on old nameless Sandy Christiaansen.”

We laughed. I said, “I hope old nameless SC isn’t too slow. I’d hate to have stern duty rip her man out of her loving arms at the wrong moment.”

Perkins was almost serious. “I’ll give Barnes full credit,” he said. “If she needed thirty more seconds and his break time was up, he’d be off and buttoning his trousers.

“But he’s a gentleman. He’d be apologizing graciously while he did it.”

He straightened from the table and tossed his coffee cup toward the wastebasket. “I dunno how late I’ll be staying up after I get off,” he said. “I’m beat to hell. But I’ll let you know if anything comes in from Spokane.” He squashed his thick lips together and looked grim. “It’s a lousy screw-up. It figures.” He flickered his stubby fingers in a sketchy wave and turned. Then he turned back and grinned. “You wanna keep the beer cans? Cash em in at the recycling center under the scenic Space Needle?”

“Naw,” I said. “They’re Whitman County property. I’d probably get extradited. I’d wind up sharing a cell with Mike Miller and Officer Barnes.”

“No problem,” he said. “Some citizen left them in a neat assortment not far from Christiaan Sandysen’s place.”

“We’ll send them back to that distinguished citizen on the occasion of his seventeenth birthday,” I said. Perkins kicked a Rainier can across the floor, laughed, and clomped away. He and his coffee had made the morning nearly bearable.

I listened to his car whirr into life and swoosh away. I filled the wastebasket with the beer cans and the styrofoam cups. The coffee was leaking out of the room and the morning. I scouted an old Buckhorn cap and added it to the collection.

Perkins and the coffee were fading fast. I fished another bottle cap out from under the bed and tossed it into the wastebasket. It went clink. It wasn’t eight o’clock, and I had done everything I could think of to fill the time.

It looked like being a long day. After Monday I wasn’t sure I could take it. Especially without some more coffee.

The woman was an angel. She knocked lightly, and I said Yeah? She said Good morning, Mr. Chapman, and I hopped for my pants. The coffee smell raced her lavender smell across the room, won by a nose, and then Mrs. Richardson turned around from backing the door open and I didn’t even finish buttoning my fly. Even all-seeing big city dicks who take it in stride when there’s no dope in the pusher’s house can’t always be plussed.

Or ept, I suppose, but that’s another matter. And the coffee was making me feel damned gruntled.

“I have some errands to run and some people to see,” Mrs. Richardson said, “or I’d ask you to eat with me. But I figured you must be tired of whatever you’ve been eating for breakfast.” She bore a tray before her like a salver. On it were eggs and bacon and toast and jam and coffee and salvation, redemption, and resurrection.

It looked like being a wonderful day.

She went her way, and I got outside of the life on her magic platter. I didn’t hurry. There was still going to be plenty of day left when I finished.

I was at a stall, a dead end, and I knew it. I wished I still had Perkins there to bounce things off. I bounced them off the wall instead. Old off-the-wall Chapman.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by some complete outsider, someone we had never seen or heard of or thought of. The proverbial tramp or traveling salesman.

But if the killer were an outsider, it didn’t make sense for him to have used the truck, to have framed Mike elaborately and deliberately. Motive and likelihood didn’t even enter into this one.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by Mike Miller, who did an incompetent job with the murder but a consummate job of looking surprised when the cops grabbed him.

I wasn’t even bothering to consider that one. Besides, if Mike had killed her, everything would be taken care of in good order.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by Ron Miller. I liked that one. It explained Mike’s truck (brotherly love) and the apparent disappearance of Ina’s stash (since Ron had been involved with both Ina and Ina’s drug dealing). It accounted for the disappearance of the dope from the mausoleum (since I had mentioned the cemetery over the phone, myself, in one of those exhibitions of strategy that might well be filed under a special heading in the LaSalle Instruction Manual index). It could even account for the ambush and—hell yes—the timing of the ambush.

Motive? Who could tell, yet. Lovers’ quarrel. Disagreement over some aspect of peddling dope in Garfield. Conflict over what TV show to watch, how much salt to put on the popcorn. Sudden passion, calculated scheme—whatever? It didn’t matter—plenty of room for motive.

Likelihood? It was hard to say. If Ron had killed her, then it wasn’t a particularly intelligent murder. But then, nobody had ever said that Ron Miller was a particularly intelligent young man. If he had done it, the Nobel Prize in Homicide was going to have to go to someone else. Maybe some Libyan up-and-comer, or an Old Favorite from Stalin’s crew, passed over out of political jealousy until now, the twilight of his long and illustrious career. You never could tell.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by her mysterious supplier from Oregon. That one wasn’t too bad. It could account for the truck (an intimacy with Ina going back quite a while) and the non-presence of the stash (the killer’s business in the first place). The cemetery, too, could be accounted for by that killer. A lot of the plausibility of this villain depended on how personal his relations with Ina had been. And there was no way we could know about that without finding him: If she had been banging the guy, she was not likely to have told any of her in-town boyfriends, past or present. Besides, Tammy and others had made it clear that Ina was a model of cautious discretion when it came to mentioning her drug contacts. Not that it had saved her life.

Motive? Dope, in whatever permutations and combinations. Always a good reason to kill. Sudden or planned, it didn’t matter: Same circumstances as with Ron Miller.

Likelihood? Depended on the motive. By Tammy’s account, the guy had been through early in the week, presumably for the only time that month. But if he had had reason to kill Ina, coming back wouldn’t have been particularly unlikely. Especially if his visits to this part of the country were part of a route, a loop that could bring him easily back past Garfield.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by Randy Scheidt. I didn’t like that one: I bought the kid’s Christianity all the way down the line. As the straight dope, too—as something lived, not thrown up as mask either hypocritical or self-deceived. That’s one you can sometimes get a pretty good feel for, and it’s the feeling I had. But Randy could explain the truck (a mechanic’s knowledge, an old timer who would know, and perhaps have reason to hate or resent Mike). Depending on his intimacy with Ina—before or after his conversion—it could explain a lot of things.

Motive and likelihood? They were hard to dredge up, at least from a mind that accepted Scheidt’s innocence as a kind of precondition. Desire to root out evil?— to extirpate the wickedness from his own past? I supposed it could be. True Believers can be odd sorts of people. But I was going to put a lot of folks on the list ahead of Randy Scheidt. Including Perkins and Mrs. Richardson. Well, Perkins.

Ina Simmons could have been killed by Skip Kirby. I didn’t like that one much. It could help account for the clumsiness apparent at every turn. Skip was dumb enough to kill like this.

Motive? Jealousy and secret passion for Ina. Not much trouble there. A mind—such as it was—like Skip Kirby’s didn’t need a lot of motive.

Likelihood? Not large, but there. Skip was big and strong; strangling would be his style. If only because he would forget that he had a weapon at hand. Not much else fit: it didn’t seem likely that he would know about her business, about the cemetery, unless Skip had been Ina’s lover. I didn’t like much of what I knew about Ina, but I hesitated to damn a dead woman with that kind of speculation. . . .

Somehow Skip Kirby in the role of rifle-wielding ambusher was unlikely. He knew my car and could have seen me leaving town, yes. He could even have waited around till I came back. In fact, his was just the kind of stolid stupid who would do that with great patience. For that matter, who could tell how many times Skip might have hung around the wrong road, waiting in vain for me to drive past his rifle? Maybe he had spent the last three days waiting in Farmington for me.

I liked that idea for fun, but I still didn’t like Skip much for the job. When I bounced him off the wall, the wall bounced him back, and he hit the floor and bounced about as well as a sweaty t-shirt.

The wall and I blinked at each other. That ambush. . . .

I poured myself coffee. Mrs. Richardson, of course, had not been content with one cup; she had left me a thermos of the stuff. When that was gone, I expected that I would find that she had arranged for my sink’s hot-water tap to run hot coffee. . . .

A mouthful of coffee and a pair of squinty eyes. I didn’t really need Perkins or a wall for bouncing, now. It all made sense. It really did wrap up neatly.

Ron Miller was with Ina the night she was killed.

One way or another—dope, personal, or both—Ron was likely to have had motive.

Ron—and almost Ron alone—had reason to try to frame Mike for the murder. (In all fairness, though, the supplier could, if he had the knowledge, have wanted to toss Mike into the pit to give the cops an easy answer to the murder.)

Ron would know about the truck, about Mike’s sleeping habits, perhaps even about Mike’s having used the hotel for a rendezvous with Ina.

Ron would know all about Ina’s arrangements for selling dope. He might well even know the supplier, the details of supply.

Ron would have known that I had discovered the cache in the mausoleum. “Would have known” indeed—he knew. I had told him.

Ron knew that I would be going north out of town Sunday afternoon—I was going to keep an appointment with him. An appointment he didn’t keep. An appointment which I was certain to return from by the main road.

Ron drove a VW, as did the ambusher.

Ron was the same build as the gunman. He wore an orange cap, but that meant less than the fact that the gunman was male. Half the population of Whitman County was male, but well over half the population of Whitman County seemed to wear orange caps.

Ron was a lousy sonofabitch.

I liked that one almost as much as all the rest.

I rooted my notebook out from under my last shirt. Between crawling around tombs and having people trying to put me into them, I was making a lot of spare space in my bag. I tore a page from the middle and made a list so I wouldn’t forget anything when I talked to Perkins. The list looked like this:

Does (did) RM own 8mm rifle? any good?                            what information connection RM & drug sales?:
aide? partner? asst? what?
Physical links RM & mrdr?—rope? flesh Ina nails?
(what abt scratches &c? need Spok lab rept)
RM prints mausoleum?
Note: where RM new stash?
RM’s place searched?—maybe Tammy warrant?                          (plowing
a lot of poss. places)
witnesses VW sun pm?

After I ran out of things to put on the list, and after I got tired of looking the list over and feeling pleased, I went over to the booth by the post office. Perkins didn’t answer his home phone. I figured he wasn’t in from his big night out yet. I didn’t want to talk to the official-type cops yet.

That’s OK. Once in a while I do something right.

I wanted to talk to Ron Miller. In fact, I wanted to lean on Ron Miller. I wanted to run away from home, but I wasn’t allowed to cross the street: Mrs Richardson was off running errands and seeing people, and my car was having both cosmetic and coronary surgery. I had about as much chance of leaning on Ron Miller as I had of leaning over the big desk in the Oval Office. I made the classy exit from the booth: the door didn’t stick, bump my foot, or hit my head. Also, though, the phone didn’t ring; the President figured he could get through another day without my help. Oh, well.

The kid with the purple bicycle was practicing spinning out in a patch of gravel by the post office. I wondered how much he would charge me to let me use his bike to ride out into the country to brace a brother-framing murderer. I stood and watched him for a while. He was pretty good. He’d crouch and peer through the harp of his handlebars, pumping like crazy. He’d hit the gravel, lean, turn the bike, and jam on the brakes. The result was loud and dusty and sidewinding and satisfactory. He did it over and over: speed, out of control, fight it.

And win it. He never wiped out. Nice work, if you etc.

I was hoping the old guy would come out of the post office so I could cross the street and pace myself by him. But he never showed up. Maybe he was in the lobby trying to find the penny-postcard slot on the vending machine. I tried Perkins again. If he had had a canary or a dog I might have disturbed the neighbors by setting his pet to chittering or barking. But he didn’t have a canary or a dog, and the nearest neighbor was too far away to hear the phone anyway. Or the canary, I supposed.

I walked over to Castle Mar ak. I wondered if they had even started on my car. I wondered if they even had the parts yet. A short kid with no chin was cinching up the screws along the underside of the dashboard. The windshield glittered. It didn’t have a mar, a ding, or a scratch.

“Jeez,” I said. “That was quick work.”

He snaked out and gave me a grin. “You’re lucky,” he said. “Old Mrs. Taplinger, she bashed hell out of John Kilgore’s Toyota. Hit him right upside the passenger door. Never touched the engine, never even broke the windshield. But the insurance guy, he said it was totaled.” He patted the top of my car. “So, bingo, you got replacement parts. No hassles with the Toy folks in Moscow or Spokane, no jacking around with faraway junkyards. Nossir, Mr. Chapman, you picked yourself a good car to get shot up in.” He patted the car again. He was soaring. He had glasses with thick black plastic rims, but they didn’t make you forget to notice that he didn’t have any chin.

“Carburetor too?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. It was better than a marked trail through the wheat.

“Yeah. Here—look at this.” He popped my trunk, reached in, and handed me the top of my old carburetor and the bullet. It was copper jacketed—military ammo. That might or might not be odd. Probably not. The main part of the carburetor hadn’t been damaged. I told the kid they were Mar ak miracle workers and paid up. They didn’t charge me extra for taking the busted carburetor and the slug. I didn’t ask for the shot windshield. Maybe they figured that made us even. Randy Scheidt didn’t seem to be around. I wondered whether he spent his free time hammering brakes.

I drove the three blocks to the hotel and pulled into my old spot. Comforting continuity. Mrs. Richardson’s old Valiant was still gone. Maybe she was delivering trays full of hot breakfasts to young people all over the county. Meals on valiant wheels. Valiant meals on Richardson wheels.

I had a car again. So I walked over to the booth by the post office and called Perkins. If his nonexistent canary were getting better and better at phone imitations he was pretty good by now.

Maybe Perkins couldn’t answer the phone because Mrs. Richardson had him pinned in bed with a tray full of nourishing breakfast.

Maybe he had had his wisdom teeth out today and had shot himself when his painkillers didn’t do the trick.

Maybe he wasn’t off duty yet.

I went back to my room.

•

For a while I thought about calling Bowles, or whoever was on duty now, and having the county send any old car along. I could probably talk them into putting the nab on Ron Miller, and I could lay it out for Perkins later. But Perkins was a friend, now, and he would want to be in on it. He felt the way I did about Mike, and about framing people for murder. About framing your brother for murder.

Like I said, now and again I do something right. There’s no need to insist that I ought to do it all the time. Heck, I was east of the mountains; I hadn’t functioned on that side of the state for years.

I lay on my bed for a while and turned it over. It still looked good. That ambush would have been a hell of a thing for anyone except Ron Miller to pull off. For him, it would have been like money from home: me setting up an appointment at his place, him skipping it, me coming almost without option in along the road from his direction.

I could be charitable and say that it wasn’t his fault that he didn’t have the good sense or the patience or whatever to wait till I was inside eighty yards, but it was his fault. If he had had the sense to wait till I got inside sure range, he wouldn’t be doing whatever he was doing now with me nemesising his cat tracks.

I thought it over for a long time. But it was no good.

There really wasn’t any excuse for pretending that you could make a verb out of “nemesis.”