So I used the basement key and went on into darkness and, remembering the layout across the street, made my way fairly easily to the stairs. I slipped out of my boots and went up in my stocking feet. At the top I turned the knob as slowly as I could, creating only the faintest click, and pushed the door open onto a darkened kitchen.
My night vision was good. Nobody was in the kitchen, unless you counted me. No lights seemed to be on in the house, which had been the case across the street, as well. But as I moved cautiously toward the expansive living room beyond the kitchen, I heard a soft, faint voice and froze.
Despite the low volume, the voice was sonorous, commanding and familiar.
It should be: it belonged to Ben Cartwright, or that is, Lorne Greene. The “Bonanza” TV theme kicked in as a television, in the living room, went to commercial-a little portable on the floor over by the window that faced Country Vista, with a view on a certain cobblestone cottage. The lighthouse beam of the tiny television illuminated the living room somewhat, creating light and shadow, and told me there were indeed some differences between my quarters and the late Charlie’s.
First of all, no plastic covered the carpeted floor. Second, and most surprising, the place was furnished; no one was living here yet, no one was living in any of these split-levels except me (and the late Charlie), and yet new furniture smell joined the paint and plaster and antiseptic odors, the blocky shapes of undistinguished contemporary furnishings, right out of a Sears catalog, revealed by the TV’s cathode rays.
The furnishing was fairly sparse, however, and I had little trouble maneuvering. No sign of Charlie’s partner, who was starting to feel nonexistent to me. Near that floor-positioned TV, where Ben and Little Joe and Hoss were currently having an intense if barely audible conversation on horseback, Charlie had a fucking La-Z-Boy pulled over to where in my parallel world I’d been leaning against a sleeping bag. An open package of Ruffles Potato Chips was propped against the chair, and Budweiser cans were littered on the floor. The new house smells were tainted by cigarette smoke and an ashtray with eight or ten butts was on an end table he’d pulled around on the right side of the recliner.
Room by room, level by level, I searched the house. I entered doorways low, 38 in my right hand, flash in my left, sweeping the rooms with frantic slashes of light, like Zorro making one Z after another, and revealing nothing except a fully, blandly furnished house that showed no signs of humans living here.
No humans, that is, except Charlie, who had actually been sleeping on the premises. The master bedroom had a queen-size with quilt and blankets and sheets, and Charlie had tucked himself in for the nights he’d been here, really making himself at home.
And yet nobody lived here, that was for sure. No family pictures, no clothing in closets, none of the signs of life except for Charlie’s food in the refrigerator, which ran to beer and cold sandwiches. A house in this price range wouldn’t be sold furnished, would it?
Then it came to me: Charlie, the lucky stiff, had selected the development’s model home! This struck me as foolish and even dangerous, since people might eventually come around. But maybe Charlie had known that the model home wouldn’t be open for inspection for a time, making his squatting feasible. The Broker had known that I could safely camp out across the way, hadn’t he? And obviously Charlie had his own reliable intel.
I spent quite a while in that house, maybe an hour. I found Charlie’s camera, a high-end Nikon with a tele- photo zoom attachment, and half a dozen rolls of undeveloped film, which was a nice catch. No other weapons presented themselves, not even a box of shells. I looked for a notebook and didn’t find one. That was a disappointment.
I thought about wiping the house down of Charlie’s fingerprints, but I couldn’t convince myself it was necessary. What would the owners of the model home find? Signs that some asshole had moved in for a few days. I did take a few things with me, the kind of things an ambitious homeless guy taking advantage of an empty house wouldn’t leave behind: Charlie’s personal items, toiletries, changes of clothes, and skin mags, all stuffed in a little duffel bag, and that portable TV, which I thought might be nice to have.
You could access the garage through the basement, which I did (after I got my boots back on), and I put Charlie’s duffel bag in his car’s trunk, where I had a nice piece of luck: I found a fresh roll of electrical tape among some tools of the road. I dropped this in the same pocket as my flashlight. The little TV I rested on the rider’s side seat. On an otherwise empty workbench, I found a garage door opener that made my life easier and soon I’d moved Charlie’s car-a light-green Chevelle-over into the driveway of the split-level (right behind mine) whose garage was where I parked the rental Ford while on stakeout.
Back in my own digs again, I got out of my corduroy coat because I was working up a sweat, despite the cold, and tossed it onto my side of the breakfast nook. The splash of gore on the wall behind where Charlie slumped needed cleaning up, but I’d have to stop and buy paper towels and spray bottles and so on, and that just wasn’t a priority. Right now I wasn’t even sure I’d be in this house again, once I’d left to dispose of Charlie. That would be up to the Broker.
I did have a pocket knife on me, and that allowed me to cut just the right size sheet of plastic from the floor to roll Charlie up in. Some blood and stuff got on the kitchen linoleum, but if I did come back, that would spruce up easy enough. Charlie was awkward and heavy and he smelled bad-and I don’t just mean the cigarette smoke on him and his clothes, that would have been a relief compared to the stink of shit from the bastard evacuating himself when he died. Shouldn’t be critical-he couldn’t help it.
He made a nice fat plastic cocoon when I was done, and I used the entire spool of electrical tape to make it happen. The fucker was literal dead weight, though, and back in my cord jacket again, I had to drag him out of there like a dog pulling a sled. The plastic mummy slid over the top of the frozen snow, and the slope down to the driveway next door was steep enough that Charlie almost got away from me. That might sound funny to you, me chasing a corpse across a bunch of snowy yards in the moonlight, but the idea of it sure didn’t make me smile.
I managed to maintain control over my plastic-wrapped charge, and before long I was down in that driveway, popping the trunk and hauling him up and in. It took some doing, but rigor hadn’t set in yet and Charlie was pretty pliable.
The interior of the Chevelle needed fumigation, but that was a luxury I couldn’t afford; but let me tell you, chain-smoker Charlie was lucky he hadn’t died of cancer. Plus, he was a slob-the front and back seat floors littered with crushed sacks and drink cups from McDonald’s and Dairy Queen, with the back seat a kind of reading room, and not the Christian Science Monitor variety, either: boxing magazines, the National Enquirer and the Globe, men’s magazines like Stag and Male, with guys fighting wild animals on some covers and sexy female Gestapo agents torturing bare-chested he-men on others. Also a few more skin books, notably Dapper and Follies, where the cover models looked like the mothers of your high school pals only in pasties and not aprons.
My karma had caught up with me-I’d killed the fucker, and now was condemned to drive his car. I backed out, drove the fraction of a block to the stop sign at Country Vista and turned left, going past the cobblestone cottage, whose resident seemed suddenly very low on my “to do” list, and made my way to the nearest pay phone, which was at a Standard Station on Dubuque Street.
I called the emergency number and, to his credit, the Broker himself answered it, on the second ring.
“We have a problem,” I said.
“Oh dear.”
“We need to meet.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Right now?”
“Right now.”
“That would be most inconvenient.”
“I’m already driving a car that has something inconvenient in its trunk.”
“Well, good heavens.”
“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”
“Do I need to bring someone with me?”
“Let’s put it this way-I’ll be driving a car that I’ll have to leave behind. And I’ll need a ride somewhere.”
“Somewhere?”
“Where that somewhere is will be up to you.”
“Oh. So this is a serious wrinkle.”
“It’s fucking pruney.”
“All right. Understood. I have someone who can help us.”
