Джон Макдональд - Pale Gray for Guilt

“I certainly appreciate your cooperation, Sheriff. We’ll be in touch. Yes sir, we’ll stay in close touch with developments.”

I went back to the counter. Puss was sitting on the stool sipping her cola drink, eyes a bit narrow, and on her lips a dangerous little smile. A plump man with a vulgar shirt and a hairline mustache sat two stools away, blushing furiously. He tried to sip his coffee with trembling hand and spilled a dollop of it into his saucer.

“Darling!” she cried, turning toward me, her voice of such a penetrating clarity it reached all the way back to the remedies for iron-poor blood. “This dear little fat fellow wanted to show me all the sights. What’s your name, dear little fat fellow?”

He clapped two bits onto the counter top. “Geee-ZUSS!” he muttered. He fled out of the cool into the midafternoon sunlight.

She gazed somberly toward the door. “Seems to have turned chicken. Have you noticed the progressive emasculation of the American male, Travis? Present company excluded, of course.”

She finished the soft drink with a rattling slupp amid the cracked ice, cheeks sucked hollow, and stood up in her sky-blue linen boat shorts, and her basque shirt, shook her hair back and smiled benignly up at me. “I counted myself in,” she said in a low voice.

“How’s that?”

“Since we left the river, I’ve felt like a bulky package you were tired of carrying around, and you were looking for a coin locker. I never knew Tush. I never met Janine. But I have a very hard nose, dear, and I don’t scare, and I want to share.”

“I’ll give it some thought.”

“You do that.”

I had to give a lot of thought right then and there to getting a good quick line on Connie. Janine’s parents didn’t know her. But somebody who had been close to the Bannons would know who she might be. I had to dig through the fragments of old memories and piece something together. I tried walking and thinking, Puss quietly, patiently trudging along beside me.

I found a dark little cocktail lounge, and a dark table in a corner. They had one cocktail waitress, and the small percentage of her that was not bare was cruelly bound and laced into the compulsory bunnyfication of tiny waist, improbable uplift and separation of breast, revelation of cleavages front and rear. She had a tired, pretty, sour little face, a listless manner. When she left with the order, Puss clamped her hand on my arm and stared after her, saying, “Santa Claus is coming to town.”

They had their Christmas decoration up. It was a lush plastic spray of mistletoe, affixed exactly where the nubile legions of the Heffner Empire affix their fluffy white bunny tails. It expressed such a perfect comment on commercialized Christmas, it gave Puss a case of gasping chuckles that turned into hiccups, which were soon quelled by her big swallows from the steinkrug of dark beer on draft.

I shoved my memory back to the drinks at Tush and Janine’s breakfast bar two months earlier, when we had played what happened to who. And I finally came up with Kip Schroeder, the quarterback who, after seven years of high school ball, New Jersey All-State, and five years of college ball, a couple of All-American mentions, had been held together with wire, tape and rivets. He had been obsoleted by giant strides in nutrition. He was structured like a fireplug, and every year the line he had to see over was higher and wider. But where the hell was he? He and his wife, whose name I couldn’t remember, had been best man and matron of honor at the wedding of Tush and Jan. I had to have a football buff, one of those nuts who know every statistic and what happened to everybody.

I tried the bald bartender, breaking up his murmured conversation with the mistletoe lass. His frown wrinkled the naked skull almost all the way up to the crown of his head.

“I think maybe Bernie Cohn. He does the sports on WBRO-TV. It ought to be a good time to catch him there at the station. Janie, look up the number for the gennaman, and plug the phone in over there, huh?”

It was a little pink phone with a lighted dial. She had to use a lighter to find the baseboard phone connection. She started to tell me the number, then shrugged and dialed it herself and handed me the phone.

I got the switchboard and then I got Bernie, who said, “Yes, yes, yes?” with irritable impatience until I told him my question. Then he sounded pleased. “Let me see now. Schroeder. Schroeder. I’m not drawing a blank, buddy. You can put odds on that. I’m running through the career, up to the last thing I heard. Okay. Here it is. Two years ago Kip was athletic director, Oak Valley School, and that’s in... just a minute... Nutley, New Jersey. Right?”

“Sure appreciate it.”

“Did I win you a bet, fella? Express your appreciation by telling all your friends to watch the Bernie Cohn show at six fifteen every weekday on your Big Voice of the Big Bay, WBRO-TV. Right?”

Listless Janie came over when I signaled her, and I ordered two more draft and asked her if I could make a credit card call on the phone. When she came back with the beers, she said, “He says okay if I stand here while you make the call. You know. On account of any long distance comes in on the bill, it’s a deduct on him.”

Puss reached out with a foot, hooked a chair over from the nearby table and said, “Rest your mistletoe, honey.”

With her first smile, the waitress sat down, saying, “My feet are like sore teeth, honest to God. I worked waitress three years and no trouble, but in this costume the owner says high heels, and now after three months I hurt all over, honest to God.”

I got through to area information on my station to station call for anyone at the phone listed in Nutley for Kip Schroeder. They didn’t have one. They had a K. D. Schroeder. I tried that and got a Mrs. Schroeder, and she said yes, she was Kip’s wife, Alice. Kip was out.

I said I had met her once, and she pretended politely that she remembered me perfectly. I was glad she sounded so bright. I said I was trying to locate a very good friend of Jan Bannon, named Connie.

“Connie. Connie. Can you hold a minute while I get my Christmas card list? It’s laid out even, but we haven’t gotten started on it yet.”

She came back and said, “I think this is who you want. Connie Alvarez. It used to be Tom and Connie, and he died. I think she was one of Jan’s teachers in school. Here’s the address I’ve got for her. To-Co Groves. That’s capital To, capital Co, with a hyphen. Route Two, Frostproof, Florida. Frostproof! And you should see the sleet coming down here today. It’s worth your life to drive.”

I thanked her and told her to give Kip my best, asked her how he was doing. She said he’d had two good seasons in a row and he was happy as a clam. So she asked how Tush and Jan were. What can you say? I said that the last time I’d seen the two of them, they were fine. It wasn’t a lie. She said that if I saw them soon again, to tell Janine she owed her a letter and she’d write right after the holidays for sure.

I didn’t want to make the next call from there, not with tired Janie listening. So I paid her, and added on top of the tip a little balm for sore feet.

Back toward the city marina, toward the drugstore, and I briefed Puss en route. “She didn’t need much travel money to get there. Less than two hundred miles, I’d guess.”

In the drugstore booth, on the off chance that Jan might answer, I made the call person to person to Mrs. Alvarez. I heard a maid answer the operator and say she would get Mrs. Alvarez. It was at least two minutes before Connie Alvarez answered, sounding out of breath.

“Yes?”

“Is Jan staying there with you?”