Lemons Never Lie

'No. Don't you?'

'They looked all right,' Dan said. 'They looked like pros. Somebody'll know them, in the business.'

'They weren't in on it,' Grofield said. 'That was strictly Myers and his fat friend, I'm sure of it.'

'I know, I know. But one of the others might know where I can get in touch with him.'

'Ask your wife's brother.'

'I will, don't you worry. I'll ask him a lot of things.'

They were going-through the casino. Grofield nodded at the crap tables: 'You want to get it back again?'

But Dan shook his head. 'My luck is gone for tonight,' he said. 'I can feel it.'

They went on outside. Cabdrivers looked alert at their exit. Dan said, 'You want to come with me?'

'To find Myers?'

'Sure.'

'For what?'

Dan shrugged. 'Half.'

'Six grand?' Grofield considered it, then shook his head. 'Too much like work,' he said. 'You don't know how long it'll take, you don't know if you'll ever find him at all.'

'Still, I got to try.'

'Good luck,' Grofield said.

'Thanks.'

'And if you hear of anything in my line, let me know.'

'I will.'

They took separate cabs again, and when he got to his room Grofield found his luggage gone. Naturally; it had been possible to close the door, but not lock it.

'Lemons don't lie,' Grofield said bitterly, and went away to the motel office to report the theft. Not that he expected the cops to find the stolen luggage; a resort town like this was always full of crooks. But at least he'd get the tax deduction.

PART TWO

1

Grofield put his shoulder against the door and pushed, and slowly it rolled back, and early April sunlight angled through to shine on the dusty wood floor of the stage. The door was wood, with X framing on both sides, and was eight feet high and eight feet wide. It was suspended from a track over the doorway by nine greasy little wheels, most of which squeaked as Grofield kept pushing, leaning his shoulder into the old wood and plodding steadily forward, opening the door against its sullen will.

It was three weeks now since he'd come back from Las Vegas, and the phone hadn't rung once with a job offer. He was really sorry Myers and the factory payroll had turned out to be no good; Mary was down in town now, working at the supermarket for eating money. They were supposed to open this damn theater for the summer season in two and a half months, and where the money was coming from Grofield had no idea.

It was a long eight feet, with the door resisting every inch of the way, but at last the eight-foot- square opening was completely cleared. Grofield kicked the wooden wedge under the end of the door to keep it from rolling closed again, and turned to look at his theater in sunlight.

It wasn't very much. The building had been a barn originally, for the first seventy years of its life or so, and at some point in the first decade after World War II someone had converted it into a summer theater, putting the stage in at this end, and raising the floor out there where the audience sat by putting in a series of platforms, so that the first four rows of seats were down on the original barn floor, the next four rows were on a platform two steps up from that, the next four rows two more steps up, and so on. There were twenty-four rows in all, ten seats across, with a center aisle. Two hundred forty seats. Three or four times, Grofield had actually seen them all full.

This was a hell of a part of the world for a summer theater, that was the problem. The only thing in Indiana big enough to find blindfolded is Indianapolis, and once you've found that there's nothing to do with it. And even if there were, Mead Grove was too far away from it to matter. There were no tourist areas nearby, no major cities, no university towns. The only potential customers were the residents of Mead Grove and the other half-dozen small towns in the area, and the farmers in between. Most of them weren't quite sure what a live theater was for, and doubted it was anything they wanted to know any more about. If it weren't for schoolteachers and doctors' wives, there wouldn't have been any audience at all.

The upshot was that the forgotten nut who'd converted the barn to a summer theater twenty years ago had promptly lost his shirt – and the barn. It had changed hands several times in the last two decades; had briefly been a barn again for a while; had been a movie theater even more briefly; had been a warehouse for a bicycle parts manufacturer, who had gone broke for reasons other than his ownership of this building; and had several times been a financially disastrous summer theater. And finally, three years ago, Alan Grofield had bought the building and twelve acres of land around it, including two small farmhouses, with most of the money he'd brought back from an island casino heist he'd worked with a guy named Parker. He'd bought the place outright, no mortgage, and told himself that from now on he'd have roots, he'd have a place where he belonged and where he could always come home to. He'd known in front that the summer theater would lose money, but it hadn't bothered him; summer theaters always lose money, particularly when run by actors, and most particularly when not placed along one of the coasts of the United States. But the theater wasn't supposed to be a living, it was supposed to be a way of life, and that was different. His living was working with men like Parker – and Dan Leach.