“I’m sure it’s fine, Miriam. There’ll be some perfectly logical explanation.
You’ll see.”
“I just keep thinking maybe she’s been in an accident or something-”
Then the words from her previous call came back to me. How Mary’d had something important to tell me. Something about Susan’s murder?
“You just relax, Miriam. You’ll be seeing her very soon.”
“Thanks, Sam. You’re such a good boy.”
I smiled fondly. Miriam Travers had been telling me that most of my life.
I tried the 312 number. Eighteen times I let it ring. No answer.
Eleven
I stopped seven different places, looking for Mary. In the course of my travels, I played two games of pinball, bought a copy of the new Cavalier magazine with a Mickey Spillane story in it, caught up on some gossip with three or four old high school classmates, had an ice-cream cone at one of our favorite places, and walked around in a ladies’ dress shop feeling very self-conscious.
No Mary.
In Chicago-or even Des Moines-a person can easily lose herself. So many places to go. But in Black River Falls, if she was out tonight, I should’ve run into her.
No Mary.
This left two possibilities. That she was visiting somebody, tucked inside a private house or apartment, or something had happened to her.
The former seemed unlikely. Because if she were visiting somebody, she’d have called her mom and told her so.
Leaving accident or foul play.
I wouldn’t have been so concerned if she hadn’t told her mother that she had something important to tell me. Mary wasn’t much for drama. If she said something was important, it was.
I was wheeling around downtown when I saw Chip O’Donlon swaggering down the street, glancing at his reflection in store windows. He was an Adonis, he was; just ask him. I’d inherited Chip as a client from his older brother, who was currently serving two-to-five for setting fire to a rival’s garage, said rival having had the temerity to start dating the girl the brother had dumped six months earlier. I hadn’t been all that sorry to see him go. He was Adonis senior and real hard to take.
Chip. Maybe it was the sunglasses at night. Maybe it was his always calling me Dads or Daddy-O. Maybe it was because the cheap bastard never paid me. Chip liked telling people he had “a lawyer” and they’d been “in court” that morning and maybe he’d get “sent up” and maybe he wouldn’t. His offenses ran to speeding, drag racing, giving beer to minors, and using profane language on a public street: nothing that would get him sent to prison, nothing that would mess up his pretty face. But he enjoyed the bad-boy image.
I whipped up to the curb and said, “Get in.”
“Hey, Daddy-O.” And he gave me a jaunty little salute.
“You hear what I said? Get in.”
He got in. He was wearing enough aftershave to make a stadium tear up. “You got a hot poker up your butt or something?”
“No, but you will if you don’t pay me the money you owe me.”
The girls say he looks like Tab Hunter.
He dresses like him anyway, all the California cool clothes you can buy between here and “Chi-town,” as he frequently refers to Chicago. “Hey, man, you know I’ll pay you.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
“How soon is soon?”
“Real soon.”
I sighed. Actually, I didn’t expect ever to get my money from this dimwit. But I had an idea of how to resolve the trouble Jeff Cronin and Linda Granger were having. To do that, I had to talk him into something. “When’re you going to get a job, Chip?”
“As soon as my unemployment runs out.”
I sighed again for effect and said, “I’ve got an idea.”
“I hope it’s a short one, Dad. I’ve got to meet a chick in five minutes.” He gave me the wink. “I screwed her right on her car hood last night. Right out in the park. How about that action, Jack?”
God only knew what he was saying about poor Linda. He was a bullshit artist, as I said.
If he slept with even 30 percent of the girls he bragged about, I’d be surprised. “I’ve got this equipment in my office I need to try out.”
“What kind of equipment?”
“Why don’t we say you’ll find out when you get there?”
“When would this be, Dad?”
He was lucky I wasn’t his dad. “I’ll have to call you to set it up.”
“Will it hurt?”
“No.”
“Can I tell people?”
“Tell people?”
“You know. Like what I’m doing and everything.”
“Oh, sure.” By the time he got done telling the story, he’d be a guinea pig involved in atomic radiation tests.
“And why would I do this?”
“Because you’re such a nice kid, Chip.”
He giggled. He had a high, annoying giggle. “Sure, Dad. Sure.”
“And because I’ll wipe out your bill.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“The whole thing?”
“The whole thing.”
“Cool,” he said.
“Now get your ass out of my car.”
“The whole thing,” he said, as he was opening the door. “Wow.”
I tried the pizza place out on the highway.
Our little town had just discovered pizza last year, a few years after we discovered television, the reception here being lousy until Cedar Rapids stations went on the air in 1953. There’d been resistance to pizza at first. To a town in the middle of the farm belt, it seemed awfully exotic, even slightly suspicious. The first month, Luigi’s Famous Genuine Italian Pizza hadn’t done so well. “Luigi” was a classmate of mine named Don Henderson, and how genuine his pizza was could only be determined by his genuine Italian chef, Jeff
O’Keefe, all freckled, pug-nosed, red-haired sixteen years of him.
Then our local basketball team made it to the state finals. They lost after two games but still, for a town our size, just going was a serious achievement, especially considering that our starting center had lost two fingers in his dad’s combine a week before basketball season started. On the way back, fighting a blizzard, their bus broke down near Luigi’s and the kids had no choice but to try that most exotic and suspicious of foods. They stuffed themselves, gorged themselves, made themselves sick. Never had they tasted better food. And over the next few days, anchovy missionaries, they spread the word throughout town.
Don Henderson was in business at last.
No Mary.
