After things fell apart, p.8
After Things Fell Apart, page 8
“No, thanks.” Haley turned, ran back to where he’d parked his land car. He got in and drove the way the Lady Day girls must have gone.
Mist was dropping in on the night and the full moon was lost. Haley was passing the cemetery when its wrought iron gates swung open and a coffin on an electric cart came rolling out. The coffin came about twenty feet out of the gate and then turned around and rolled back inside the cemetery. A curly haired man with a low stomach had run the same course as the coffin, following in its wake, waving a brimless cap.
Haley swung in to the curb. He stopped his car and got quietly out. At the now shut gates he called, “Hey, in there.”
“Don’t go scaring him again.” The man, wearing the brimless cap now on his curly head, came on tiptoe to the floral patterned grille work. “I only just got him calmed down.”
“I’m a Frisco Enclave private investigator,” Haley said. “Have you seen a land car going this way? About ten minutes ago, four girls in it. Maybe a couple others.”
“Sure we did,” said the man. “That’s exactly what started him off. Gave him a fright.”
“Which way did they go?”
“That car came by so dam fast it shattered the silence. Also sideswiped my garden tool barrow. I hadn’t as yet brought the dam thing in. So all that noise scared him and he’s been either hiding among the headstones or trying to run off since.”
“Any idea the direction the car headed?”
“Sure, I can tell by the sound. It climbed at the fork up there, meaning left and inland. That’s the uphill road, away from the Pacific. Used to call that road the Camino Real, I think.”
Rattling commenced behind him. “Spooks, spooks. Let me out of here.” The electric coffin wagon was rushing at the gates again.
“There’s absolutely nothing to get upset about, you fool machine.” The gravedigger put both of his hands in a stop gesture.
“Spooks. Creepy stuff. Oh boy, let me out of here,” said a small speaker grid in the base of the cart.
“He’s on the fritz again,” the gravedigger told Haley. “Talking crazy through his elegy box.” The fore coffin handle hit him in the paunch and he fell aside.
Haley was back in his car by the time the cart came looping out of the cemetery, chased by the gravedigger.
Haley drove on, worried, following a vague trail. He was thinking of Penny.
XIV
Haley let the land car drive itself while he yawned, took his hands from the steering bar, stretched his arms up. His left shoulder made a splintering sound and his backbone ratcheted faintly. He puckered his mouth, blinked and gripped the steering bar again. It was cold early morning all around, mist rolling out of the low gray hills. Haley felt a momentary tightness across his chest. He had been driving and searching now since last night and no sign of Penny.
“Think about something else,” he said aloud.
He pushed the car radio on button and the radio said, “That’s right. Still one big hour left on the All Night Grievance Show. Sleepy Joe Bryan still right here with you. Okay, listener, you’re on. What’s your bitch?”
“Listen, you dumb bastard, this is the little old widow lady from Fresno. It seems to me you and most of your listening audience are cockeyed in your theories about these so-called Lady Day murders. Now as I see—”
Haley pushed off.
In a thin patch of fog parts of a cottage style motor lodge showed. Orange letters blinked the name G-Man Motel fuzzily. Haley left the highway and drove through the lathe arbor entranceway. He parked on damp gravel next to an apple tree. As he was sliding out of the car he frowned at the radio speaker.
“Maybe she’s got a valid theory.” He tinned the show back on.
“They live in Mount Shasta and send out little messages through rocks,” the widow was saying. “Next time you’re around a boulder, listen, pay attention. For attention must be paid. They’ll tell you about Lady Day.”
“The talking rock theory,” said Sleepy Joe Bryan. “We called Doc Robeson at Frisco Enclave University about three hours back—where were you then? Dozing?—and he assures us the talking rock theory is full of crap.”
“Oh, bullshit it is,” insisted the widow. “A rock could fall on your Doc Robeson and he wouldn’t ....."
Haley left the car. Five strides across the gravel a spotlight hit him and a voice called out, “Okay, mitts in the air. Freeze and no funny stuff.”
“What branch of the law are you with?” Haley asked the wide old man who approached him, submachine gun aimed.
“No lip. Raise those hands. March on into the registration office. We got a vacancy.”
“I expect you would,” said Haley, crossing the gravel. “I want information, not a room.”
“Button your lip and march.” The old man wore a rumpled past-style dark suit. One that required a white shirt and a wide striped tie. “Everybody who visits the G-Man Motel gets the same treatment. We respect everyone’s civil rights, regardless of race, creed, color or place of national origin. Speaking of which, you’re a Romanian, aren’t you?”
“No.”
“We’ll find out eventually. Of course, you’re perfectly within your rights to clam up. We still follow the Constitution around here. That’s the Constitution of the United States of America. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that in Romania.”
“Oh, yes, it’s one of the reasons I came over.” Haley opened a glass paned door.
The motel office was a big room with a linoleum rug on its floor. Six desks in two rows, an American flag on a standing staff next to a blue tinted water cooler.
On a wooden waiting bench a pretty blonde girl sat with her arms folded and her head cocked far to the right. At the nearest desk a freckled young man was being interviewed by a small old man in a flannel bathrobe.
“Sit down,” ordered the man who’d brought Haley.
The old man at the desk had brown hair that stood straight up. His eyes and mouth were rimmed with wrinkles and his voice came from high in his nose. “Did you frisk him?”
“Darn it,” said the wide old man with the machine gun. “No, sir. I’m sorry.”
“Skip it. I’ll handle the matter. Get back on outside, 23.”
“I’m 27.”
“Well, we’re all getting older and more forgetful. Out.”
The young man slowly moved, crouching, out of his chair. “We’ll stay at another place. That’ll be okay. Good night.”
“Nonsense,” said the wrinkle-rich old man. “The G-Man Motel is the finest in the area. Not only are our rooms spacious, they contain twenty-five servomechanisms for your comfort and pleasure. Besides, which, in each unit you’ll find there are relics of famous crimes.” He patted a card on his desk. “In your room, for instance, you’ll find John Dillinger’s death mask, Machine Gun Kelly’s overcoat and a photomural of the last hours of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”
“We only wanted a quick place to shack up,” the blonde girl told Haley. “Bunny and I are having an affair, is what it is.”
“How long have you been in this office?” asked Haley.
“Couple hours,” said the girl. “The old guy is the former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. His name is William Francis Jacovetti. Ever hear of him?”
“Yes, in school.”
“I wish we had, Bunny and I. My husband’ll be back at the auto camp in a couple more hours. The course of true love never goes too smooth, is what it is.”
“Did you notice a group of girls, dressed in black, driving a dark blue late model land car, out on the road?”
The blonde shook her head. “When I’m with Bunny I notice very little. You’re oblivious when you’re really in love, is what it is.”
Jacovetti said to Bunny, “Young man, all we need now is your footprints.”
“I don’t want to offend you, Mr. Jacovetti, really,” said Bunny. “Except we’re in sort of a hurry.” “Nonsense,” said the former FBI man. “You’ll never regret the thoroughness you meet here at the G-Man Motel. I run it exactly like the FBI.”
Sighing, Bunny asked, “Which foot?”
“Both of them.”
“That’s a big ink pad you have.”
“I can print two people at once if I need to.” “Boy,” observed the blonde. “If my husband ever gets a private detective on to us, we’re finished. I can just see that waspish lawyer of his holding up Bunny’s bare footprints in a court room.”
“We check all footprints out with Washington, D.C.,” said Jacovetti.
“Washington, D.C.?” asked Bunny. “Isn’t it still collapsed?”
“Some of the computers are still alive. We brought a lot of our own computer equipment out west when we moved. I have, I can assure you, access to millions of footprints.”
Bunny looked at the sunlight starting to show faintly at the slat blinded windows. “Could I come back and finish this some other time, Mr. Jacovetti? I honestly have to get Dia Leah back to her vacation site soon.”
“You’re acting more and more like a fugitive from justice, young man.”
“If I’m not back in the trailer in two hours we’re all going to be fugitives,” said the blonde Dia Leah.
“Mr. Jacovetti,” said Haley, standing. “I’m here on Private Inquiry Office business. Can I interrupt?”
Jacovetti’s wrinkles expanded from around his eyes and mouth. “PI? From Frisco?”
“Right,” said Haley.
“Well, it’s been some time since you boys called on the Bureau for cooperation.” He handed Bunny a brass key. “Room 23. Go away.”
“Thanks.” The blonde stroked Haley once at the small of his back. “I hope you find your lost girls.”
After Jacovetti shook hands with Haley he kept hold of him and rolled Haley’s fingers over the giant ink pad. “I sincerely hope you don’t mind my using footprint ink. It’s just as good. Clean, too. We change it once a day. I insist on a thorough record of everyone who comes into my place.”
“I’m looking for a party of four girls, all wearing black clothes, pants and pullovers. They have a fifth girl as a hostage, and the mayor of San Arturo.” Haley didn’t sit down. “They would probably avoid your particular motel.”
“Sounds like the Lady Day mob,” said the old FBI man.
“Yes. Have you seen or heard anything?”
“Sit down. I don’t get much chance to talk shop with a fellow professional anymore.”
Still upright, Haley said, “I want to keep moving.” “Nonsense, you look to have been at this most of the night. Take a break. Cup of coffee?”
“Okay.” Haley allowed himself to relax into the chair.
Jacovetti poked a button on his desk top. “Sorry to say I haven’t seen hide nor hair of your Lady Day girls. Sounds like they’re going in for kidnapping.” “Yeah.”
Agent 27 burst into the office. “Shall I drop him, sir?”
“Bring us two cups of coffee.”
Haley asked, “You have computers here?”
“I got a bunch of them,” said Jacovetti, his smile paralleled by wrinkles. “Go on, 27, get that coffee. On the double.”
“Okay, sir.”
Haley asked, “Are you hooked in with the S.F. Enclave Intelligence and Investigation Office Data Bank or the Sacramento Fact Pool?”
Jacovetti closed his eyes for a moment. “Well, yes, we are. Although I’m not sure if they’re aware of it. We, with our usual FBI knowhow, tapped into their computer lines. Why?”
Haley drew out the prescription blank he’d found at Buddy Plastino’s office. “I want to trace this. Paper, handwriting. Maybe I can do it here.”
The old FBI chief said, “Sure thing. We have a big portable computer in a trailer out next to Cabin 26. She’ll do the job. I drove all the way from Washington, D.C. with that baby. A few days after the United States went into its decline.”
“Brought some of your agents with you?”
“Yes, six of my closest associates. We’d all of us nursed a dream of some day retiring to California. Those Washington, D.C. winters can be dreadful. One morning when there were an exceptional lot of riots in the capital I said to my closest friend in the FBI, ‘Well, 22, let’s get out while the getting’s good. We’ll drive to sunny California and open that motel we’ve always dreamed about.’ 22, he’s been dead and gone four years now. You wouldn’t have found a more rugged and masculine man, yet he never married. He was a lifetime bachelor. As I am. We all of us were, who came out, except for 33. And he was most anxious to get out from under the thumb of his wife. So we loaded up six big trucks and trailers with personal belongings and FBI curiosities and equipment and we came westward. Like the pioneers of old, our rugged and masculine ancestors. We opened the G-Man Motel and have never regretted it. Everything around here is run like the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, though we don’t do a land office business, we manage to keep our heads above water. Naturally we’re not naive enough to think you can run a successful motel without having customers who are up to some kind of sexual mischief. You’d be surprised how much of that there still is, even this late in the 20th Century. I had thought it was a fad of the 1970s, but no. I allow a certain amount of sexual fooling around. That last couple are an example. I deduce they’re an adultery case. We allow it. As long as they don’t use dangerous drugs or mechanisms and don’t advocate treason or make mealy mouthed pleas for the underdog while they’re registered here, they can do as they please in bed.”
Haley and the old FBI man were outside now, walking through the brightening morning. The mobile computer was housed in a silver trailer.
Agent 27 came running up after them. “Where do you want the coffee, sir?”
“In the computer room,” said Jacovetti. “Obviously.” He climbed up the metal step ladder and worked on the locks of the flaked silver painted door. “I have a combination padlock on here, plus one set to open only for my fingerprints.”
“We used to have another lock for his footprint but he can’t bend that way anymore,” said Agent 27.
“We’re all getting along in years,” admitted Jacovetti. He took Haley inside and introduced him to the computer.
XV
The faintly brown seagull flapped up off its perch on the head of the decorative drugstore android. It swerved, flying low toward Haley, then angled away into the fog.
“Oops,” said Haley, automatically dodging the ocean bird.
“Do that again,” requested the doctor shaped android. He had Pure Food in Drug Plaza lettered in light beads on his tunic chest.
“Oops.”
“How long have you been doing that?”
“Only since the seagull flew off your head.”
“Huh,” said the android. “Sounds like whooping cough to me.” He tapped his lower chest and then his temple. “We all of us have, up here in our brain region, a whoop center which controls whooping. Sounds to me, son, like you might have trouble in your whoop mechanism.”
“Is Dr. Rebecca Stoner on duty now? I understand she owns and operates this drug store.” The computer back at the G-Man Motel had traced the prescription blank and handwriting to this drug store in the beach town of San Bonito.
“You just take yourself on inside and tell them you’re suffering with whooping cough, son, and they’ll show you the wide range of quick acting and relatively harmless remedies always in stock here at the Pure Food & Drug Plaza, largest operation of its kind in San Bonita.” He clicked off.
Haley walked ahead as a nearglass door opened in front of him. The drug store was high and square, made of panels of different colored and different shaped synthetic glass. The afternoon was as gray as the morning had been and the kaleidoscope effect was dulled. No one seemed to be inside the big store. He wandered among counters, suspended shelves. “Hello,” he called out.
An old man in seafaring clothes appeared from around a wall of vitamin packs. “Do you know which is best?”
“No,” said Haley. “Have you seen Dr. Stoner around anyplace?”
“I mean between this one and this one.” The old man held up two clear tubes of spansules. “These red and white ones or these blue and gold.”
“I’d take the blue and gold.”
“You’ve had experience with this product?”
“No, but those are my school colors.”
“Come now,” said the white whiskered old sailor. “I’m due to ship out later in the day. We’re going after mutant fish and I expect to hit many strange ports of call before my cruise is done.” His voice lowered, grew more rapid. “I’m concerned, as no doubt you will be when you reach my years, with my vitality. With my vim and vigor, if you follow my drift.
I have quite a reputation for raising cain in the remaining hellholes of the Pacific. I need a product that will assure my prowess.”
“Maybe you ought to think about retiring from the sea.” Haley noticed a fat, pleasant looking middle-aged woman standing far across the store. She was wearing a white uniform.
The old seaman said, “It’s a tossup. I can’t decide whether to buy myself Wham Bam! Or O Buoy!” “Try both.” Haley hurried off toward the medical appearing fat woman. When he was near he asked, “Dr. Rebecca Stoner?”
The woman chuckled, blushed. “Bless me, no. I wouldn’t be so high faluting as to claim to be Doc Stoner. No, I’m Nurse Thelma, and darned happy to be.” She made a sweeping, two armed gesture. “None of this drug junk for me. Contentment is the word for Nurse Thelma.”
“Is Doc Stoner here?”
“Oh, no, but I’m sure I can help you.” She reached out and rumpled Haley’s hair. “You’re too big and strong to be sick.”
“Doc Stoner and I have mutual friends. I’m anxious to have a talk with her.”
The nurse reached into a low pocket of her uniform for a pair of square rimless glasses. “I have to wear these. My only flaw, I guess, is a slight touch of vanity.” She adjusted the spectacles, studying Haley. “You’re skinnier than I thought, but still a nicely setup chap.” She poked him lightly in the ribs. “I tried contact lenses for a time. Trouble there was, being such a jolly old soul, I have too many friends.
