Reed Coleman - They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

“Here we are, sir. The section is pitifully small, but we don’t have strong demand for this sort of thing in Riversborough. Our clientele are mostly students from the college. I’m afraid they tend to be preoccupied with more scholarly works or trendy periodicals.”

“I guess I’ll have to make due.” I knelt down and gestured toward a book I picked out at random. “What do you think of this?”

Kneeling down beside me, he removed the book from the shelf and handed it to me: Crimes of the Ancient Mariner. Great! It was the recounting of the gruesome rapehomicides of several young prostitutes by a phony sea captain. It was an unfortunate choice.

“It is not this author’s best work,” Gupta explained for the benefit of a woman standing only five or six feet away. “We are out of his other book. Let me write the title down for you and maybe you can pick it up at one of the larger chain stores.”

He removed a business card from his pocket and began writing furiously on the back of it. He handed it to me, giving me only several seconds to digest what he’d scribbled. There was an address on Oneonta Place, that was clear. He had also written down: “Blue Subaru, broken windshield, Bracken Street, 2 lunchtime.” I had barely finished reading when he snapped the card out of my hand and shredded it. He shoved the pieces in his pocket.

“Excuse me,” he apologized, “I’ve gotten my authors confused. That was not the title at all.”

The woman in the aisle with us turned and moved into the next row. Gupta pulled his hand back out of his pocket and threw something down that clanged when it hit the floor.

“You’ve dropped your keys.”

“So I did.” I retrieved the lifeline he had tossed me. There was a Subaru ignition key on the ring. “Thanks.”

“No bother. Should I fetch you the title of that other book?”

“No,” I said, “that won’t be necessary. I think I’ve gotten what I need.”

“Very good, sir,” Gupta bowed slightly and moved on.

I lingered, pretending to study the dust jackets of one or two books. When I thought enough time had passed, I started for the store exit. So close to refuge, I was more nervous now than at any other point during my flight from the law. I could not force myself to focus and I paid for my sloppiness. At the end of the true crime aisle, I stumbled right into the woman who had been standing with Gupta and me during the better part of our charade. Her head hit my cheek.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she apologized, staring directly at my face. “You’re cut.”

“That’s all right, it’s nothing.”

But even as I rushed by her, I could see that her mind was working overtime to try and explain how a relatively mild impact had caused the scratches on my face. I didn’t bother to try and help her thought processes along. What would I have said? “Forgive the scratches, I was attacked by a snow leopard on my way out of the house this morning.” I’m afraid not. I simply moved on quickly, forcing myself not to bolt.

Around the corner from the store, I could no longer control the panic and ran for the Subaru. Luckily, there were only four cars parked on Bracken street. The snow had rendered the four unrecognizable. I found Gupta’s car on my second guess. I listened to the radio as I drove. I was big news in the little town and my worst fears had been confirmed. Having discovered copious amounts of tissue, blood, and some clipped hairs under the victim’s fingernails, the police were postulating that my face had been scratched deeply. Now I had to find Oneonta Place before the woman in the book store found the knob to her car radio. Although it was probably my best bet of finding Gupta’s house in a hurry, I didn’t think stopping to ask directions was a terribly prudent idea.

There were unattractive areas in Riversborough, Oneonta Place was proof of that. It was an ugly street even under a frosting of virgin snow. Snow couldn’t hide the boarded windows on every other L-shaped ranch. Snow could not hide the for-sale signs, the foreclosure notices posted on the lawns. Decay has a nasty habit of defeating the best camouflage.

Number 74 Oneonta Place was unremarkable as seen from the street. Half the slats were missing from the picket fence that surrounded the lot. The house itself was a faded gray, but it had been patched in various spots with asbestos shingles that neither matched one another nor the shingles that covered the remainder of the ranch. There were two headless lawn jockeys, half buried in snow, holding plaster lanterns on either side of the pink front door.

I pushed the button on the remote garage door opener as I pulled into the driveway and, much to my surprise, the thing actually worked. The light in the garage stayed on as the door closed behind the old Subaru. I could breathe again. The light popped off, but I stood there in the semidarkness for quite a while. Soaked with sweat, my body shaking beyond my control, I thought of Kira, the woman, not the victim, for the first time since I’d run from my room. It didn’t take any courage to cry now.

I entered the house through a door in the garage. The house was neater than I would have expected. The furnishings and carpeting were old, but clean and dusted. All the shades were drawn, so I could move about freely without having to crawl by windows and doors. There was an eat-in kitchen, a big living room, and three bedrooms with one full bath at the end of a long hall. Only the smallest of the three bedrooms seemed to function as a bedroom. The middle-sized bedroom was set up as an office. There was a writing desk with an IBM Selectric typewriter on it, diplomas on the walls-a B.S. from Cornell, a Masters degree from MIT. There was no Ph.D., but there was a rectangular spot on the wall where another diploma might once have hung-a three-year-old calendar and an oil portrait of a breathtakingly exotic woman in traditional Indian dress. The gold accents and the vibrant reds and blues in her clothing flowed in stark contrast to her deep brown skin and pitch black hair. Her lips were simultaneously shy and inviting. And the artist had given the dark beauty a sense of motion I could not accurately describe. I could not say that her hair blew in a painted breeze. I could not say that her eyes followed me or that her mouth smiled when I turned my head a certain way. It just seemed so to me.

What would have been the master bedroom served as a storage area and library. If he had read half the books in the room, he had read twice as many as I had. Apparently, he also spoke several languages. But what I liked best was that he owned both the English hardcover and Chinese paper-back editions of Coney Island Burning and They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee. It took the translators quite some time to convert the Yiddish slang into proper Mandarin.

So, I thought as I turned out of the doorway, with the exception of the woman’s portrait, the interior of Guppy’s house was as unremarkable as the exterior. Then it struck me that there was no computer in sight, not even a word processor. And I felt confident Guppy hadn’t built his legend on an old IBM Selectric. I didn’t like it, not at all. I ran to find the stairs to the basement.

No sign of a computer there, just a line of bare bulbs with pull chains and the oil burner. There was a washer and dryer, a slop sink and a small shop. My head filled with maybes. Maybe Guppy’s myth was just that, myth. Maybe he used a laptop, a notebook. Maybe he rented an office someplace. Maybe he used someone else’s equipment. Maybe I was being set up like Humpty Dumpty to take a great fall. Maybe, maybe, maybe. .

What I liked even less than the computer whiz with no computer that was down in his basement I was getting that same eerie sensation I had had twice in my hotel room, only stronger this time. There was somebody else here or there just had been. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to turn a corner and find a lit cigarette burning in an ashtray. But there were no corners I hadn’t turned. The closets upstairs were mostly filled with air and there wasn’t any spot in the cellar I couldn’t see well from where I was standing. Like I said before, alcohol didn’t work for me, but I needed a drink.