Nobody Bats a Thousand (15 page)

“So we’ve been sitting here freezing for nothing?” MJ had barely asked the question when a woman from the house they were watching stepped out on the porch to retrieve the morning newspaper. She picked up the paper then stopped and stared harshly in the direction of the black Buick for fifteen or twenty seconds before she went back inside.

“I think she saw us.”

“I think you are right. But maybe that’s good,” Bill said. He took his wallet and laid it on the front seat next to him. “Don’t touch that. Let me see what I can work out.”

He got out of the car, walked across the street, and knocked on Teresa’s door.  Mary Jean, frantically wiping at the condensation on the inside of the windshield, could see Bill talking to someone through the screen door. After a few minutes, he started back toward the car, pulling on a pair of black gloves as he crossed the street. He pulled his car door open. Still standing in the street, he reached for his wallet.

“Is she watching me?”

Mary Jean strained to look through the foggy windshield.  “Yeah, in fact she’s out on the porch now.”

“Good, good.
” Bill pulled back a flap and pulled a crisp one hundred dollar bill from a segregated part of his wallet. He crumpled the bill in his left hand while he returned his wallet to the inside of his jacket, and then smiled. “When old Ben Franklin asks, people seem to want to answer.”

He returned to Teresa’s porch where he talked and listened for several minutes before they shook hands, and he returned to his car.

He started the Buick, pushed the defroster fan to high, and waited for the windshield to clear.

“So?”

“Good news and bad news. Bad news is Patty left town without telling anyone which direction she was heading. Good news is she sold everything she could so she could travel light, so chances are, if she did have your clock she probably unloaded it before she left.”

“Great, that should narrow it down to about a hundred square miles. What should we do, start going door to door?  And how do you know this woman is telling the truth?”

“I’m a pretty good lie detector, and I believe her. She wanted that hundred pretty bad.”

“I can’t believe you paid her a hundred dollars to tell you something that might be a big fat lie. A hundred bucks just like that, whatever favor you owe Maggie must be something.”

“Let’s just say I owe Maggie a whole bunch of small favors, or one very, very big one. Time will tell just
how big this one gets.” H
e put the Buick in gear and pull
ed away from the curb. “But
all
that
bill will buy her is a lot of free meals in county
jail if she’s caught passing it.
” Bill turned to smile at Mary Jean.
“Counterfeit, damn good reproduction but phony nonetheless.
I’ve been carrying them around for months, waiting for the right time to use them. I’ve only got two left.”

“She’ll get busted and point right to you.”

“My fingerprints aren’t on that bill, and she tells people she flies to Jupiter in a round spaceship once a month. Who’s going to believe her about anything?”

They slowly cruised along the empty damp streets until Bill stopped his car in front of Maggie’s driveway.

“So what now?
Do you think you can find Patty?”

“Finding a transient is not an easy thing to do. Plus, I don’t think we need her anyway. She either
threw
your clock away or unloaded it. The fact that she paid twenty bucks for it tells me it’s still around town. I’ll check some secondhand stores, and I’ve got a couple of other things I might look in to.”

“So what you are telling me is we have nothing. That we are basically
back
to where we started.”

“No, that isn’t what I’m saying, but if I come up with something I’ll call and let you know. And if you hear something useful, or if you come up with another idea you call me first, okay?  I told you before you did it that putting up posters was a lousy idea. For more reasons than you could imagine.”

“You know about those, huh?”

“Of course I know. I’m a trained detective. Did you really think something like that would slip past me?”

Maggie caught MJ as the latter was halfway up the stairs to the little garage apartment. 
“So what’s up,
dearie
?
  I saw Bill’s car, any good news?”

“Not as far as I’m concerned.
” Mary Jean thought for a few seconds before she continued. “You know,
Maggie, I don’t want to seem ungrateful, and I hate to rag on your friends, but you kept telling me how smart Bill is, and to be brutally honest, he doesn’t seem to be the brightest light.”

“Don’t let his gruff appearance fool you, sweetie. Sometimes people are so complicated that they just
seem
simple.”

Mary Jean carried that thought with her as she entered the apartment where Nadine was intently focused on The
Price is Right
.

“Did I hear you talking to Maggie?”

“Yeah, and if what she told me is true, you should go apply to help design the next Space Shuttle.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind.
I’m going to bed. If someone calls about my clock wake me, otherwise don’t.”

Monday and Tuesday night, work for Mary Jean was almost pleasurable, at least the regimented chaos of cocktailing kept her mind off other things. During the day she did laundry, cleaned the apartment, shopped for food and cooked, basically trying to force her life into a normal stable pattern. But while she went through the motions with these errands she wasn’t totally there. Part of her was still obsessing, searching for a solution, a new clue, a new angle, something,
anything
that would help with the seemingly futile search for her wayward timepiece.

By Wednesday afternoon, with no new news, she had just about had it. She was deciding whether to go out and get pathetically drunk or just throw in the towel on her clock search, or both, when the phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Mary Jean?”

“Yes.”

“This is Dick
Hartoonian
from Uncle
Tom’s,
you were in here a couple of weeks ago looking for Red Hat Patty. I called to tell you she left town.”

“Yes, I heard that, Dick.
” Mary Jean’s suddenly charged hopes were now quickly oozing away like the air in a punctured tire. “Thanks for calling though.”

“Well, that’s not all. You see I matched up your number to the one on these posters I seen all over the neighborhood.
You the one looking for that ugly pyramid-shaped clock?”

“Yes, I mean
no it’s not ugly, well
actually it is kind of ugly but…. Dick you wouldn’t know where it is would you? I mean I can’t pay a big reward or anything but…”

“Well, actually no, but I thought about you looking for Patty, and you looking for that clock, and well, I put two and two together with something I overheard Patty saying to somebody in here Sunday morning.”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know if it will help ya, but she said she couldn’t leave town until ‘she unloaded the pyramid on the ‘Pyramid Guy’.”

“That’s it?”

“My eavesdropping is not as good as it use to be. But if it can help you I’m not really looking for a reward, but
if

”

“Good, thanks.
” MJ slammed down the receiver, jumped up, and began to frantically search around the room for Bill’s business card. She found it and tried his number. He answered on the second ring, and she filled him in on her recent conversation.

“Pyramid Guy?
  Does that tell you anything?” MJ asked.

“It just might. In fact it gives me some ideas. Let me follow this up, and I’ll get back to you.”

“No, no, no. If this lead leads to a lead I want to go with you, please, please, I’m going nuts sitting around here.”

Bill paused, and MJ could hear him expelling a large breath.  “Okay, I’ll be by there in fifteen or twenty
minutes. Be out in front of your place or I’m not stopping.  Now get off the line I’ve got a couple of calls to make.”

MJ was at her post in ten minutes patiently waiting for her ride. When Bill pulled up she opened the door and jumped into the Buick.

“See, I told you my posters would pay off.”

“Don’t count your chickens yet,
Queenie
. This lead might lead to something, but it’s still just a shot in the dark.”

“So where to?”

“I’ve got an appointment to talk to a guy at Channel 37.”

“Great, first we take care of your business, and then we’ll get around
to mine
.  Well, that’s okay. I guess when you are working for
nothing

”

“This is
all
about your business,
Queenie
.
” Bill gl
anced at MJ for just a second.
“Think about it, ‘Pyramid Guy’. Now who around these parts is so queer for pyramids he puts one on the letterhead of his newspaper, radio and TV stations, and who bought an overpriced dilapidated theater just because it had a pyramid on top, and who shucked his marriage and whole business so he can move to the foothills where he can sit under a pyramid meditating all the livelong day?”

“Hoyt Bringham? He moved to the foothills?”

“That’s what I hear.”

“And he owns Channel 37. So you’ve got an appointment with him?
All right.”

“Not exactly.
His son runs the station. Hoyt turned everything over to his kids about a year ago so he could become a recluse. His son is going to call him to see if he’ll meet with us.”

“Yeah, it all makes sense. Pyramid Man, who else could that seedy little bitch have been talking about? I think we’re really on to something, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know. Think about it, I’ve got to scramble to get hold of him and I know the guy. How could Patty get hold of him? It’s a long shot, but if that’s all you got, you got to go with it.”

“You know him? You’re like friends?”

“Not really friends. I did some work for him several years back. I got some really nice photos of his wife getting it on with the neighbor from down the street. They saved Hoyt a ton of money in the divorce.”

“But his wife got the theater?”

“That was his third wife. The pictures I got were of his second wife. The kid we are on the way to met is from his first. Old Hoyt is quite a piece of work.”

“Tell me about it. I’ve waited on him dozens of times
at different restaurants
over the years. He’s usually drunk and is always
arrogant, demanding and cruel.” She paused, “B
ut he did tip well.”

“Like I was saying, even if Patty somehow found out where he lived, how could she peddle her ass all the way up to the foothills to see him?” Bill looked over at MJ beginning to frown and slump. “Oh, don’t give up yet,
Queenie
, these street people seem to find a way to get things done if they have a mind to. I just didn’t want you getting your hopes too high until we see what’s what.”

Fifteen minutes later MJ and Bill were seated in a small room watching Jeffery Bringham watching a videotape of a woman seated behind a desk reading a news report about a broken sewer line in Indio. “Isn’t she great?  She starts here in two weeks. I locked her up to a five-year deal. Look at that complexion, that hair, those cheekbones. Is this woman made for journalism or what?” Smiling, Jeffery stared at the screen for another full thirty seconds before he forced himself to turn off the tape. He rolled his chair back until he was facing Bill and Mary Jean.  “My dad said to come up anytime this afternoon, which was real surprising. He doe
sn’t see too many people.
” Bringham took a piece of paper from his desk, and handed it to Bill.  “He’s about twenty-five miles outside town. It’s not hard to find. This map will show you how to get there.”

“I’m a little leery about what to expect. I mean a workaholic like him retiring so suddenly. Is it really true?”

Jeffery nodded his head. “Yep, he turned the station over to me. My older sister got the newspaper, and my younger brother the radio station. The little bitch he just divorced got the theater, but she can have it. It’s always been more of a burden than anything else.”

“With most people his age retirement is a good thing, but rumor has it that Hoyt’s gone a bit off the deep end, that he’s secluded himself up in the foothills, drinking carrot juice and sitting around meditating inside a wooden pyramid. I mean, just between you and
me
, Jeff, did he take this last divorce hard or what?”

Jeffery laughed. “He’s changed since his heart attack. You’ll see that, but he’s not nuts. He’s still real intense. I just suppose he’s channeled his energy and time more fully into the whole Egyptology thing. You know the great Pyramids are still quite a mystery, how they were built and why, and he’s always been fascinated by it all I suppose. Like that damn theater, I remember I was about ten when he bought it. We’d drive down there and just sit in his Cadillac for what seemed like hours while he’d stare at that big ugly thing, obsessed, like Richard Dreyfus and the mashed potatoes in
Close Encounters
.  But instead of getting it out of his system, his interest in the whole pyramid power stuff just gradually grew over the years, I guess. I don’t know all that’s going on with him. Hey, he’s always done whatever he’s wanted, and believe me nobody is going
to change him. We’re
on good terms, and he leaves me alone to run the station. That’s all I care about.”