“About what?”
“You’re nowhere near as dumb as you look. It’s just the cheap haircut, after all.”
7
Earl Bliss had once taken a locksmith course during the dead time while he was waiting for his next job to find him. Everybody in his graduating class had been a deep-bottom loser, with no serious hope of finding work fixing locks, but every one of them had learned to handle a pick and a tension wrench. Earl had gotten a great deal of use out of his set, and tonight he held them in his teeth until he and Linda reached the row of mailboxes in the lobby of Pete Hatcher’s apartment building. He quickly slipped behind Linda while she watched the hallway, then set the tension wrench in the lock, pulled the pick out of his teeth, and opened the little door that said #6 HATCHER.
He handed the mail to Linda and walked on toward Hatcher’s apartment door. Linda had always loved Las Vegas hotels, but the idea that the people who dealt cards and waited on her actually lived in Las Vegas had always depressed her. It reminded her of the summer when she was seven and her mother had gotten two days of work in a bikini movie. Linda had been allowed to believe that she was being permitted a rare glimpse at glamour. She knew now that her mother just had not had a place to leave her while school was out.
Linda had been dragged along and had watched a whole group of them waiting in line for a turn to climb into a dusty trailer on the hot, black road above the beach and wriggle into swimsuits handed out off a rack, all of them women like her mother—pretty, but at twenty-five already looking worn and a little bovine.
They were just supposed to play volleyball behind two men who got into a fistfight, but they knew even less about volleyball than the two men did about fighting, so as the sun rose higher and began to sear eyeballs and heat the sand enough to burn their feet, they got breathless and fell and bumped into one another, a couple of them crying. And then—she never was told how her mother had managed it—they had gone to live with Dwayne.
She recognized him as one of the men who had been up at the trailer that day. He was in charge of something or other—could it possibly have been lighting, on a beach? She remembered the long, dull, hot days of the summer living in that apartment on Winnetka Avenue, the doors of the apartments all open on the blindingly bright, lying promise of the empty pool, trying to catch a breeze that could never come because the building itself blocked it from entering the courtyard. Her mother had thrown Dwayne out in a rage one day and had to be reminded the apartment was in his name.
Linda followed Earl and watched him open the door lock with as little effort as he had needed with the mailbox. When she joined him he was already blocking off the bathroom window with towels and duct tape to keep the light from shining through it.
When Earl had finished, she closed the bathroom door, turned on the light, and took out the mail. They sat on the rim of the bathtub together and opened it. Before she even got to the bills, she could see they had something. It was a thick monthly bank statement with a stack of canceled checks inside. She curbed her eagerness and handed it to Earl, then opened the bills, one by one. There was the power bill, which was worth nothing. There was the phone bill, which was worth a lot because it would have the numbers he had called and the cities. There was a bill for rent on this apartment. When she saw the envelope with the Visa logo on it she felt hopeful, but then she saw it wasn’t a bill at all but an offer for a new card. Earl stuffed the mail into Linda’s purse and stood up.
They put on the latex medical gloves and began to search the apartment. She could tell that Hatcher had not been given much time to prepare before he left. There were objects here that were worth money and could have been sold or pawned—gold cufflinks and rings, even a good watch with a couple of small diamonds on the dial. But the same objects told her that somebody had given him a lesson or two about disappearing. Distinctive jewelry was as good as a scar or bright red hair. There were a couple of empty frames on the mantel, but not one photograph was left anywhere.
Earl came and shone his Maglite into the fireplace and carefully examined a pile of ashes. Whatever had been burned in there, it wasn’t done for heat in Las Vegas in June. Linda could see that Earl wasn’t going to be able to tell what it had been, so she left the room.
She found Hatcher’s bedroom and systematically worked her way through it. From his pillow and the sheets under it, she gathered a dozen hairs and put them in a plastic bag. In the bathroom she made a list of all of the brand names she could find—toothpaste, shaving cream, razors, soap, shampoo, hairbrushes. She took the razors in case there was blood from a nick and gathered more hair from the brushes. They were more likely than the others to have been pulled out with the follicles. She searched hard for prescription bottles, so she could find the names of the doctors and pharmacies, but found none, so she moved to the kitchen.
She studied his eating habits. He didn’t own anything even mildly interesting—a crepe pan or a wok or a can of jalapenos or a jar of saffron. She dutifully noted the brand names in the cupboards and refrigerator, but they were all just the ones advertised on national television, and he had kept little food in the house. He probably had worked late at night and eaten in the hotel restaurants. She lingered at the refrigerator, opening bottles and unwrapping packages of food in the freezer because amateurs sometimes left valuables there, and he had left in a hurry.
Linda returned to the living room and found Earl busy unzipping each cushion from the couch to check inside the cover. The couch itself had been tipped over so Earl could look up among the springs. He had also tipped over the coffee table, chairs, and lamps. Earl heard her enter and said, “You get started on the bookcase.”
Pete Hatcher had not been much of a reader. Linda wrote down the title, the author, and a description of each book, removed it from the shelf, looked behind it, held it up, and flipped through the pages with her thumb to see if anything fell out or had been taped inside, but found nothing.
At three in the morning Earl began to tip the furniture back onto the depressions in the rug where they had stood before, so Linda went from room to room making sure she had left no signs of her presence.
It was after five when they reached their motel. As soon as they were in the room Linda lay down on the bed and closed her eyes, but Earl was restless. After ten minutes, the sound of him shifting in the squeaky chair by the table and scribbling things on paper made her open her eyes. “Aren’t you tired?”
“Nope,” said Earl. “I’ll sleep later.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to get a picture of how to do this.” He frowned and let his eyebrows bounce up once for emphasis. Linda hated that.
“How’s it going?”
“According to Seaver, he had lots of friends. He was one of those guys who had everything. Everybody loved Pete Hatcher. Especially women.” The contempt and envy in Earl’s voice made Linda feel almost sorry for him. “He may have changed his name, but that isn’t going to change. He’s not the sort that’s going to be lying low for long. He’ll need company. He’ll be out shaking hands and telling lies about himself.” He looked at Linda and she seemed to remind him of something. “He’ll be looking for women. According to Seaver, he’s a regular old snatch- hound.”
“That doesn’t exactly limit his movements,” said Linda. “Sex he can find anyplace. It would be better if there was one woman he couldn’t live without. Her we could find.”
“No sense thinking about what we don’t have. What we do have has got to be enough to get us there.” He consulted his notes. “He used a pro to get out of here. She had him drive out in a car instead of getting on a plane in Las Vegas. It wasn’t a rented car, because then he’d turn it in wherever he ends up. So she bought it for him. If she’s any good at all, she wouldn’t let him stay in Nevada, right? It’s too small.”
“Right.”
“So he’s out of state, with the car. He’s got to do something with it. If he sells it, keeps it, or abandons it, then it gets new plates and the old plates get returned to the Nevada D.M.V. There are only a million, two hundred thousand people in the whole state. How many cars? About half that many. How many of them are going to have their plates turned in this month?”
“I have no idea, do you?”
“No, but not many.”
