I crossed to one of the chairs and sat down, my tortured feet singing hallelujah.
A wastebasket beside me. Empty pack of cigarettes and crumpled tissues at the bottom along with something else. A plastic wristband like the kind you get when admitted to a hospital. I dropped my empty cup on it.
The woman came back from the door.
She held her cell phone in a tight fist. There was a ring on her left hand’s fourth finger, a diamond-shaped diamond.
“Who are you, what do you want?” she asked.
Even with her voice pitched low, it still had that gravelly quality, like she’d spent her youth shrieking to be heard above house music.
“Did the old man send you?” she asked.
“Yeh. Owl sent me.”
“Who?”
Sounded like a joke, but neither of us laughed.
“The old man,” I coughed up. “George Rowell.”
“Well?”
“He had an accident, can’t make the meeting.”
“Fuck! What’m I supposed to—fuck! He dumps me here and tells me—FUCK!”
She opened up her cell phone and stared at the screen. Maybe checking text messages, maybe considering her options.
I considered my own. Owl had said he was returning a favor for a friend. But this woman had no reaction to his name or concern for his well-being. So if not the client, who was she?
For a brief instant, I wondered if she might be a hooker. But Owl had been in his eighties… Maybe that was the secret to his longevity?
But no, she was no hooker, not if that rock on her finger was real, and it looked just gaudy enough to be genuine.
“What did he tell you?” I asked.
She stared at me with those eerie sparkling green eyes, drilling into mine, like they were unearthing something.
As they narrowed on me, the skin around them showed etched lines like dry papercuts. “What is this? Who are you?”
“Question of the day.”
I finished my other coffee and dropped the cup in the wastebasket, then stood up. I absently tossed the free newspaper I’d brought with me on the bed as I walked across the room. A small room, but she didn’t move an inch as I passed; her head was turned away, looking down at the bed.
Passing by the dresser, I looked over at the briefcase on top. Old scuffed leather with reinforced brass corners. Initials G.R. engraved in gold below the handle. One of the latches was up.
I continued on to the bathroom door, opened it, and peered in at a slant. It was empty. Toilet seat down. A lipstick-stained washcloth in the sink. No toothbrush.
I turned back.
She was fast, I was slow. The first I heard of her was from the shifting of contents in the briefcase she lifted up over her head.
And brought crashing down on mine.
It landed like a red-hot charcoal briquette. One corner hit my left temple and down I went, more from the blast of pain than the force behind her blow.
And perfect pinball that I was, the other side of my head connected with the dresser’s edge on my way down, and that’s all I knew for a while.
Time for a commercial break.
Less a dream than a rerun from a long-ago Saturday morning TV fest flitted through my reeling skull. A pencil-drawn cartoon of a shaggy-haired boy approaching the tree where an owl wearing a professor’s mortarboard is perched. The boy poses the eternal enigma, “Oh wise Mr. Owl, you know everything. How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?”
Mr. Owl grabs the lollipop in a talon more used to snatching voles in mid-flight, deftly unwraps it, and says, “Let’s see.” Lick. “Uh-one.” Lick. “Uh-two.” Lick. “Uh-three.” Crunch!
I woke staring at the carpet. The nap of the tomato paste rug. A single loose fiber broken free from the ranks rode above the fray, no longer part of the carpeting, now something that had to be vacuumed up in order for the rest to look clean and orderly. I felt sorry for that lost little fiber, little curly-cutie.
I raised my head and pain like a jagged wire suture joined my temple, left eye, and chin. Hit on head no good. Payton no like. Make go way pain.
I crawled over to the bed and climbed up onto it.
By the time I was on my feet again the woman was long gone.
The briefcase was where she’d dropped it after dropping me. Open now, some of the contents spilled out.
I walked around it to get a damp washcloth from the bathroom. I bathed my temple and drank water from the faucet. Took a piss while I was at it and noticed my front pockets were turned out. Both back pockets empty, too.
I went back into the room and found most of my stuff scattered on the floor by the open briefcase. Something missing though. My head hurt too much to sort it out. Later. I pocketed what was left.
I let out a low whistle and, with the washcloth pressed to my head, gave the room a quick once-over. Scratch pad by the phone was blank. I tilted it under the light, but no embedded impressions were revealed.
Dresser drawers empty, Owl hadn’t unpacked. I found his suitcase on the floor by the far side of the bed.
Inside were a couple days’ worth of clothing, neatly packed: three white dress shirts, one yellow sports shirt, a pair of tan khaki pants, four pairs of boxer shorts, and five pairs of socks. Only other thing, a zippered toilet bag with a denture brush in it, tooth polish, an old fashioned razor, and a can of shaving cream.
I helped myself to a pair of brown argyles before shutting it up again. Then sat on the bed, unlaced the shoes, and slid them off. The bottoms of my feet were streaked black like I’d been kicking Alice Cooper in the face. I wiped them on the bedspread before putting on the socks. My ankles were bleeding.
I put the shoes back on. It was an improvement.
I went over to the wastebasket and picked out that plastic wristband. It had been stretched apart, not cut. I turned it over looking for outpatient info, but both sides were blank. I pocketed it, I was a magpie for clues.
Back to the bathroom to splash water on my face.
I left the briefcase for last because I already saw what it contained. The contents were like the bottom left drawer of my own desk, full of red wires, black wires, white wires, and gray wires bound with rubberbands. None longer than three feet and each with a different end attachment, a phone jack, a microphone plug, an alligator clip, a suction-cup device, a USB connector—whatever a P.I. needed in the course of his work. A wafer-thin digital recorder. I switched it on, but it was blank.
I sifted through the rest: stopwatch, pocket binoculars, magnifying glass with light attachment, brown work gloves, assorted batteries, a pack of blue Bic ballpoint pens, large and small paper clasps and paperclips, a disposable camera with 24exposures (none of them used), an old mercury oral thermometer, a clear plastic ruler, a compass, and a black plastic box for a .32 automatic with an extra full clip inside and a rag and brush for cleaning, but no gun. Great.
A simple matter, he said. Soft work, he said. Nothing rough.
Sticking out of a pocket sleeve under the lid was a bus ticket folder. Inside was a round-trip ticket, New Hampshire to New York City. He’d expected to go back Sunday morning.
It was nothing I could use, though. What was I missing?
I thought back to the indisputable techniques of investigation my old boss at Metro, Matt Chadinsky, tried to drum into me during some of his loftier harangues. Most of it bullshit on how no one ever rewarded you for doing the job better, that doing the job better
