Ed Gorman: Rough Cut

"Police came three months ago," she said. "I called 'em after he didn't show up for a week. That wasn't like him at all. He's a man who likes three meals a day and a quart of beer in the evening and an hour or two of television before he goes to bed. He's not a drifter." She used the word as if it described the worst kind of degenerate imaginable. In her business, it probably did.

While she spoke, more to herself, really, than to us, I glanced at Cindy.

She looked alternately moved and put off by this woman. When I nudged her, and she angled her head toward me, I saw that there were the beginnings of tears in her eyes.

Suddenly the cubicle-office got oppressive to me. I wanted to be outdoors again in the relatively fresh, cold air-away from the numbing sense of loss in the room and the stench of greasy food.

"Could I see his room?" I asked.

For the first time Mrs. Kubek seemed suspicious. "I still don't understand why you called. You're not with the police?"

I shook my head.

"And you ain't with that other fellow?"

"What other fellow?"

She made a face. "Guy with real thick glasses. Always wears a black topcoat."

My good friend Stokes-the-creep. "When was he out here?" I asked. She smiled. "Oh, several times."

The smile was odd, made me curious. I had to wait for her to explain.

"First time he was out here," she said, "I kinda surprised him." Dramatically, she leaned behind the registration counter. In moments she produced an impressive-looking revolver. "With this."

"He was breaking in?"

She nodded. "Yeah. He'd helped himself to Kenneth's room. Let himself in. I happened to be taking something down the hall to one of the other rooms. I went back and got my gun here and surprised him. He was scared, let me tell you." The smile was back on her face. I realized then that there was at least the possibility that Mrs. Kubek was not quite right. What I'd put down to grief might well be insanity of some kind.

"Could I see the room?" I said.

"You never answered my question, mister."

I shrugged. "Some terrible things have been happening to people I know lately."

"Like what?"

"Two of them have been murdered."

If the subject of murder made much impression on Mrs. Kubek, she didn't show it.

"So why do you want to see Kenneth's room?"

"Because he might have known something about the killer."

"Why would you think that?"

I stared at her. "Believe it or not, we're trying to help you." She seemed to think this over, that we could be friends. "Wait outside."

"What?"

"Wait outside." I shrugged.

When the door swung shut behind us, the hard cold night air began seeping into my bones. It felt great. I watched my breath plume against the night sky and listened to the rumble of semis in the distance and stared briefly at the brilliant stars.

"Thinking about anything special?" Cindy asked, leaning into me, smelling wonderfully of perfume, liquor, and her own body warmth.

I hugged her to me.

"Just sometimes, looking up at the stars…"I didn't want to finish it.

She snuggled up to me. "I know. It makes you think about God, doesn't it?"

"That's the weird thing. I'm not religious in the formal church way. All the man-made wrangling gets me down." I stared up at the stars, recalling from my boyhood Edgar Rice Burroughs's John Carter novels and the fateful sense Burroughs gave the winking stars. In his way, Burroughs had been a very religious writer, and in a far more persuasive way than many church-approved ones. "But sometimes…" I laughed. "Maybe hanging around Lutherans is good for me."

Cindy hugged me again. Invitingly. I wanted to be in bed with her, warm and floating on the cadences of her soft voice.

Behind us, the door opened.

Mrs. Kubek shuffled into the night beneath a worn gray topcoat. Men's buckle boots covered her legs halfway up to her knees. A faded scarf covered her head. A fistful of keys dangled from her fingers. She didn't say anything, she didn't even nod any acknowledgment. We followed her.

Half an hour later I sank down on a mattress that was not much thicker than a slice of bread.

Kenneth Martin's room had the feel of a man who spends his time existing rather than living. From the pinup-style calendar (the girls busty but clothed) to the plastic statue of Jesus on the dresser to the neat stack of 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."

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."