Readers Digests next to the frayed armchair, here were the remnants of a man who had imposed a kind of civilization on an otherwise dreary life. His pride would be that he was clean, punctual, dependable. He would not worry about other people's opinions of him but rather his own opinion of himself. When I looked around the room, I saw what had probably attracted Mrs. Kubek to him. In her world of drifters, winos, and grinning traveling salesmen, there was a real working-class dignity to Martin.
The trouble was, while his room suggested many things about his personality, it told me nothing about his possible involvement in the robbery of Mrs. Bradford Amis, and what he might know about the murders that followed.
I opened the drawer in the nightstand next to the bed. Inside was a prayerbook, a pack of stale gum, and a western paperback. I thumbed through the book. A black-and-white photograph fell out. I judged the picture to be maybe fifteen years old. The two men in the photo wore the flowered shirts of the mid-sixties and their sideburns were long and wide. They stood in front of a tiny frame house on the side of which sat two rusting-out cars. There might have been a white-trash sense of the men and the place except for the scrupulous order and cleanliness of them, the house, and even the rusted cars. On the steps of the house, almost out of focus, sat a small boy and a woman.
I held the photo up to Mrs. Kubek. 'Are either of these men Kenneth Martin?'
She took the photo. Examined it. 'The one on the right. That's Kenneth.'
Tears were in her eyes.
'You know who the other man is?'
'His brother, Don.'
'You know how I could contact him?' She shook her head. 'Can't.'
'Why not?'
'Dead. Him and his wife. That's her in the back, the wife. Traffic accident. Sometimes when Kenneth drank…' She shook her head. 'Well, sometimes he'd talk about the accident and he'd get real depressed. Then he wouldn't talk at all. A family like that-wiped out. It don't make no sense, does it?'
I put the photo back into the book and the book back into the drawer. I was beginning to feel that I was violating a living, breathing entity by being here.
I glanced over at Cindy. She was fingering a doily on the bureau, looking as blue as I was starting to feel.
'What about Stokes, Mrs. Kubek?' I asked. 'Did he say why he was here?'
'Not really. Just said he was working on a case and he thought maybe Kenneth could help him clear it up.'
'He didn't have any idea where Kenneth was?'
She shrugged. 'He said he'd never even met Kenneth. Just working on a case.'
'He didn't say what case?'
'Uh-uh.'
Stokes. The bastard was everywhere, seemed to know everything. I had no doubt that he knew why both Denny and Gettig had been killed. I was even sure-now that he'd been here-that he knew why Kenneth Martin had disappeared. I checked my watch. In less than two hours I would meet Stokes in his office. I didn't plan to leave without a lot of answers.
I stood up.
'I'm sorry if this has been painful for you, Mrs. Kubek.' The tears were back. 'I just wish they'd find him, is all.'
'Maybe they will,' I said.
With a deadness that startled me, she said, 'That ain't how things turn out for me, mister.'
TWENTY-TWO
On the way back downtown, Cindy said, 'You're pretty quiet for a compulsive talker.'
Under other circumstances, that line would have struck me as very funny. At the moment it did nothing for me at all. 'I'm having one of my great moments of doubt. I can see the possibility that Kenneth Martin had something to do with the Amis robbery. But I don't know what that would have to do with the deaths of Denny and Gettig. And I sure can't figure out how your husband would come into possession of Martin's bag.'
'Maybe when we talk to Stokes tonight-'
I looked at her. 'We?'
'Sure. We. I mean, I hope you're not planning to dump me now. It's kind of late in the game.' She was joking but there was an anxiety in her voice. 'I mean, that's something Clay would do. Not take me along.'
What could I say? That I was going to be just like the husband who'd mistreated her over the years?
We spent the hour and a half waiting to go to Stokes's in a tiny bar meant to be intimate but that succeeded only in being oppressive. Peanut shells crunched underfoot like broken glass and the jukebox threatened to deafen you. Photos of NFL players looked down at us with the reverence of saints.
'May I ask you a question?' Cindy said after our second drink.
'Sure.'
'Maybe you won't want to answer it.'
'That bad, huh?'
'It's about your first wife.'
'Oh-oh.'
'Why she left you, I mean.'
I smiled. 'It was probably for all the right reasons.' I shrugged. 'I'm not exactly a prize, you know.'
'You're a prize to me.'
'You don't know me well enough yet.'
'What a great self-image.'
'Just what I love. Pop-psychology jargon.'
'Some of it's true.'
'Some of it.'
'How about one more question?'
'What?'
'When I asked you about wanting to get married again, were you serious?'
'Very.'
She smiled again. 'Good.'
I glanced at my watch and thought of Hauser, my accountant. He had been supposed to call me back. Tough to do when I'd left the office early. I wondered if what he had to say would have any bearing on my meeting with Stokes.
I explained all this to Cindy, then got up and worked my way back to the phone. It would have helped if I'd been a lineman for the Packers.
Then it was a ten-minute wait while a slickie in a toupee pleaded with his secretary to let him come over to her apartment. He sounded horny and lonely and pathetic all at the same time. I had begun to feel sorry for him until-getting me off the hook-he glanced up at me in the middle of a plaintive sentence and winked at me. Mr. Sincerity.
Finally, he took his lies and his middle-aged lust and his toupee back to the bar.
My accountant, Hauser, did well enough to live in the second most prestigious section of the city. His wife had the right kind of voice for the address, too, a cultured tone with just a hint of proper sexuality.
Hauser, when he came on the phone, struggled to sound happy to hear from me. 'Hey,' he said, 'good to hear from you.'
'Hey, yourself,' I said. 'I wondered if you'd figured out anything yet.'
'Matter of fact, I have.'
