Meter Maids Eat Their Young (14 page)

The rain began again in earnest as I pulled into the driveway. I tucked my notebook, empty space a couple of days ago and now down to one blank page, beneath my shirt to keep it dry. My scrawl was hard enough to read. Soaking wet, it would be impossible.

As I raced from the car to the house, thoughts tumbled around in my head as if driven by the fierce wind which was whipping the lilac bushes bordering my front door into a frenzy. A hundred and twenty million dollars. Maybe more. Two deaths. Were they connected? What did it mean? And where did the Meter Mangler fit into all this?

Questions, questions, questions. I had more questions now than when I started. Always the case, though. A good story was like a box of jigsaw puzzle pieces into which half a box of another puzzle had been tossed. It was all a matter of picking through the pieces, keeping the ones you needed, discarding the rest. The hard part, and the part I enjoyed the most, was determining which was which.

Once in the house, I grabbed a fresh notebook and began poring over Philo's information. His comment about not being able to get the figures from the DPE's website stopped me. What had he meant by that?

Setting down the notebook, I called the pawn shop, hoping he might still be there. The voice on the answering machine wasn't Philo's, but it sounded familiar. I called back to listen again and recognition clicked in. It was my friend Pauline, using one of her stage voices. She did voice-overs as a kind of side business: Radio, some TV, though never on camera and, it would appear, answering machines.

Pauline runs the Stonehenge Bar, a smoky little underground place that isn't listed in the phonebook or in the trendy little places-to-visit brochure published by the city for tourists. There is no sign outside marking the place, just a dingy expanse of moss-covered stone leading down into darkness. The Stonehenge was one of those ‘back-room' places where clandestine deals go down over expensive cigars and twenty-year-old single malt scotch.

Pauline owns the Stonehenge, though few people know that. What even fewer people know is that Pauline was once known as Paul. I've known it for years. He and I went to grade school together. An effeminate, androgynously beautiful young boy, with glistening dark hair and smooth, cocoa-colored skin, he was always being harassed by the other kids.

Marion, Harrison and I had come upon three of the local bullies beating up on Paul out behind the schoolyard one day. Paul was doing a fair enough job of not getting killed but he was grossly outnumbered and trapped by the buildings to his rear and on both sides. Marion had stepped into the fray first. Even back then he had delusions of Super Hero greatness. And, I suppose, Harrison and I had delusions of our own. We'd followed a step behind.

We'd made pretty quick work of the bullies and Paul had started hanging with us after that. Well, with me and Harrison, anyway. Marion was indifferent to him, as he was with anyone under the age of adulthood. Kids couldn't get him to where he wanted to be. Adults could.

Paul was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the tender age of fifteen. Over the next ten years, he obtained a PhD in computer science and a half dozen patents that would keep him in beer and cigarette money forever. It also gave him the only thing he'd ever really wanted.

He'd returned as Pauline when he was twenty-five, bought the Stonehenge and started single-handedly running the place. Astute, aggressive young journalist that I was back then, it hadn't taken me long to figure out who she was. Or had been. Before the change of wardrobe.

I called the pawnshop a third time, listened to the voice on the machine again. It was definitely Pauline's. Did she really do answering machine voices? Or did Philo and Pauline know each other?

You're paranoid, Teller, the nag in my head nagged. Paranoid? Philo and Pauline. The smell of Jaz's perfume in the pawn shop. The voice synthesizer in the display case. The doubts about the gender of the Mangler. Harrison's murder. Jim Gjerde's ‘accidental death'. I knew I could get the straight scoop on Gjerde through the paper or, if I had to, through Marion.

If I wanted something unofficial and possibly more enlightening, I knew where I had to go. The thought made me shudder, though. I hadn't been in Jilly's once since I got back.

If there was a vortex of memory swirling about this town, Jilly's would be at its center.

I stood inside the back door of Jilly's, breathing hard, trying to make my heart slow down. It was dark, the dining area closed, the chairs stacked neatly on the tables. A string of neon dots ringed the old Wurlitzer. I could hear a couple of post-lunch drinkers at the bar, the sound of glass clinking on glass, the tinkle of ice cubes. The air smelled of cigarette smoke, Pine Sol, and booze. I'd been frozen in place for five minutes or more, unable to move forward or back.

A hand brushed my neck. I nearly jumped through the roof.

“It's just fear, Teller.”

Felice stepped from behind me, her hand still brushing my neck. Where she had come from, I had no idea. I hadn't heard the door open, nor seen the light from the outside and yet she was there.

“Remember what's said about fear.” She was whispering, her face close to mine. Her hair smelled of lavender. “‘False Evidence Appearing Real'. Fear. You're not here to drink. You needn't fear that you will, because you won't. In your heart you know you don't want to. It's your head that's confused. You're here to see Albert. So come along.”

She took my hand, led me into the bar. I kept my eyes averted from the bottles lined up along the back wall.

“They're only glass,” she whispered. “Inanimate objects that can't hurt you anymore. Look at them. By looking at them, you remove their power.”

I turned my head and stared at the line of domestic and foreign beers that lined the top shelf. My heart didn't stop as I expected it would. And I didn't vault the bar and start grabbing them one by one, pouring them down my throat. They weren't even tempting, which surprised me. Surprised my fear, maybe. Disappointed Buster Booze. They were just bottles. Different shapes. Different sizes. Different colors. But just bottles. Not dragons. I turned back to Felice. She was gone.

There was a light burning in the far corner. I moved toward it. Albert was sitting at his usual table, his usual hand of solitaire laid out in front of him.

“How's it going, Albert?” I said, surprised that my voice wasn't shaky. I looked around as I pulled out a chair.

“Looking for something?” Albert said.

“Felice,” I said. “She was just with me and now she's gone.”

His eyebrows arched. “Felice? She's upstairs. Hasn't been down yet this morning.”

“But …”

He held up his hand. “Scared you a little, coming in here,” he said. “First time since you got back.”

I looked down, feeling sheepish. “Yeah, well. I guess.”

“There you are,” he said, as if that explained everything. “So what do you need?”

I gave him the Reader's Digest condensed version of what I'd learned from Philo on Tuesday, ending with Jim Gjerde.

“Tom Philo,” Albert said. “Single malt. Gjerde was a bourbon man, Wild Turkey, straight up, never more than two shots.”

“You know him? Knew him, I mean?” I said. “And Philo, too?”

“Tom? Sure. Plays poker here Sunday afternoons. Gjerde? He'd come in once in a while. Never ate here. He was a vegetarian. Not much here for an herbivore.”

“He's dead, you know,” I said. “Gjerde, I mean.”

“Duh!” Albert said. “You're the one who just got back to town, remember? I never left. Of course I know he's dead. Insulin overdose. Simple enough. Some people think too simple. Or too complicated. Depends on your point of view.”

“Some people?” I was thinking of Philo's odd behavior while talking about him. “Would ‘some people' include the cops?”

“Nah.” Albert laughed. “Half of ‘em wouldn't recognize a crime if it bit them more than once. One cop, though. Chambers. He didn't like the feel of it. Sniffed around a bit longer than anyone thought was necessary. But he has a show to run, not like the old days when he was just another detective. So he dropped it. I think it still nags him from time to time.”

“Why do you think that?” I said.

“He's been in here once or twice. Asking questions. And you know how much he loves to come in here. Ask me anything. And I've heard he's been out to Gjerde's house a few times. Tied up in an estate battle, I hear. What he hopes to find there now is anybody's guess.”

“Feeling it,” I said.

Albert gave me a strange look.

“Marion doesn't like to admit it,” I said in answer to that look, “but he suffers from an acute case of intuition.”

“Hmmm, well, that explains it then,” said Albert. “Intuitive hits would be about all he'd get from that scene, then or now. It was clean. Too clean.”

“What do you mean ‘too clean'?” I said.

“Gjerde had a top-of-the-line insulin pump. Those things do not malfunction as a rule, so why was he shooting himself up? His Medic Alert bracelet and his candy supply were in a drawer. I've heard suicide bantered about, so maybe that was the reason. I didn't know the guy that well, so who knows?  But, from what I heard, there were no fingerprints where you would expect at least his fingerprints to be.”

“Which means someone wiped down the place.”

“You got it.”

“Philo mentioned the bracelet and the candy,” I said.

“He would know. They were tight, those two.”

“So you think he was murdered?”

“I think it's a good possibility.”

“Can you think of any reason why someone might want him killed?” I said.

“Well,” he said. “He was a politician. And a lawyer. Right there you have two strikes.”

“Two strikes aren't enough to take him out of the game,” I said.

“True enough.” He picked up his cards and began idly shuffling them. “There's been some talk, whispers really. I haven't paid much attention. I tend to choose my battles closer to home these days. But, for you, I suppose I could pay a little more attention.”

“Don't do anything that'll get you messed up, Albert,” I said.

He gave me an incredulous look. “Give me a break, Teller. I was swimming in dangerous waters long before you were a gleam in your daddy's eye.”

“Right,” I said. “What was I thinking?”

He laid out a spread of cards, looking past me into some dark part of the bar.

“You know, that reminds me of another much too clean death. And, come to think of it, another one Chambers was overly interested in.”

“Oh? Who?”

“Give me a minute to pull it all in,” he said. “This was a couple of years back, three, maybe four.”

He started sliding three cards at a time off the deck and turning them over. About half way through, he stopped.

“Forest Forrester … that was his name. Didn't know him well. He never came in here. Nice enough guy if you ran into him on the street. Older fellow, early sixties.”

“What happened to him?”

“He was one of those pre-dawn power walkers; lived out by the springs and exercised by walking up and down some of those back roads out there. He was hit by a car; hit and run, or so the story goes.”

“So what made it too clean?” I said.

“Accidents are messy, Teller,” he said. “Not this one. Just one dead body, lying in the street. There were no skid marks, no glass or paint chips or bits of chrome on the body or anywhere around it, nothing. Do you have any idea of how unusual that is? You really have to wonder what went down out there.”

“So you think he was murdered?”

“I think it's a good possibility.”

“What did the cops think?”

“Ruled it a hit and run accident. But I don't think Chambers bought that. As with Gjerde, he kept going out to the scene, checking it over. The interesting thing is it wasn't just where the body was found that he was checking out.”

“What do you mean?”

“This isn't in any report that I know of, except maybe the one in Chambers' head, but about a mile down the road, there was a spot where the ground was all torn up as if a car had swerved onto the shoulder.”

“And maybe ran over some old man in the process?”

“Maybe.”

“And moved the body to disconnect the scene from the evidence?”

“Maybe, again.”

“But why? Why move it? Why run that risk? Why not just leave it where it fell?”

“Don't have an answer to that one. Maybe the guy used his own car, saw the opportunity and took it without thinking it through. It's a mystery. But here's another thing you might find interesting. Like Gjerde, like de Whitt, Forrester worked for the city.”

“Really? In what capacity?”