Elliot shrugged. “Nice looking broad, though, but high strung, if you get my meaning. I seen her a couple times before she came round with the gun. That was some fucking day-bombs going off all over the place. Wheelock in the conference room banging Mary Lou and this wacko broad running all around the place, screaming and waving a gun. And that was the day the Jefferson County bonds went belly up and all the customers were panicked and were calling in trying to unload the shit and the switchboard was all lit up and…”
“Yeah,” I cut in. “I can see it now. Like A Night at the Opera, right?”
Elliot stared at me. Greasy nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, yeah.”
“Where did you send Wheelock’s checks?” I said.
“Someplace in Connecticut.” Greasy replied.
“Get me the address.”
He kept nodding as he trotted off to a filing cabinet. In his hurry, he kept tossing files onto the floor. Then he found what he was looking for, sighed, and brought it back to me. The address was in Greenwich. I could still make it before dark if I left now.
I put my hand on Greasy’s arm. “You’ll see my ugly face again if I don’t find what I’m looking for.”
“Yes, sir,” Greasy said. “I’m always glad to help you any way I can.”
“I like the way you handle yourself,” I told him. “Just keep those young men on the phone and off the girls.”
CHAPTER XX
I felt like a regular commuter on I-95. First, Chisolm’s company, then his house, now Wheelock’s address. It was 5:45 PM and smack in the middle of the evening rush. At least the car wasn’t overheating, not yet anyway. There was plenty of time to ponder our fragile dependence on mechanical objects and the unchanging physical laws of the universe.
As I drove along and tried to stay out of the trajectory of those angry sixteen-wheelers, I weighed the likelihood of Alicia running around waving a gun and threatening her boyfriend’s privates. She wasn’t a violent person, but she was tough and she was capable of defending herself. She wasn’t a fragile blossom, like those old-fashioned women. Come to think of it, she could be a vixen when pushed too far. I remembered a day long ago, when we were first married. I said something, damned if I recall what it was, but it went deep into her soul and riled her beyond belief. She grabbed one of those carving knives from the kitchen stand and chased me around the apartment, her eyes flashing, half-laughing at her audacity as she threatened to raise my voice two octaves. When I finally got the knife away from her, she crumpled on the floor and we did it then, Alicia laughing hysterically as if she couldn’t believe she could have ever acted so irrationally.
The woman they described sure sounded like her. And I guess she was capable of that kind of rage. What the hell had happened to my girl since she left me to put her in such a state? What sort of pressure could make a well-brought-up woman turn into a banshee in a public place?
I pulled off 95 at exit 4 and made a wide swing beneath an underpass. Spray painted on the concrete wall were the words I WANT MY MTV! No incitement to violence, no cry for identity, no lovesick plaint. Just a teenager’s simple wish.
The sun had just scudded behind some clouds when I located the address. It was a shabby-looking house on a quiet cul-de-sac. The other houses on the street looked like Buckingham Palace by comparison. The smell of freshly-cut grass hung in the air, but the smell wasn’t coming from this house. The yard was overgrown with weeds. There was a sculpture of a Cupid that had once been painted pink, but the paint was flaking and patches of rust were showing through, like large scabs. The house was a Cape Cod with brown cedar shakes that had been worn away by a quarter century of rainstorms so you could see the insulation under the ragged edges of the shakes.
The front door was half-open, but the outer screen door was locked. I knocked a couple of times and called out and waited maybe three minutes before I heard a heavy tread coming down the stairs. She was a slow-moving hulk of a woman in her sixties and she peered at me through heavy-lidded eyes.
I held my badge up for her to see through the screen. She squinted at it for a long minute, but her vision was obviously less than perfect.
“I’m looking for Steven Wheelock,” I said.
Reluctantly she unlatched the screen door and shoved it outward. “He ain’t here,” she said with a look of sour displeasure. “He ain’t been here since last winter. Skipped out without paying the last two months rent. His room’s still empty. Ain’t been able to rent it since.” Her voice was gravelly and seemed to issue forth from her nose. Her features were puffy and her skin was too pink, almost flushed. “Lowlife son of a bitch, he was,” she muttered, more as a confirmation to herself.
“Let me see his room,” I said.
She half nodded and led me to a wooden staircase with a runner that looked as old and dirty as the hills. She led me up the stairs, each one creaking more than the one before and showed me to a room at the top of the landing. It was a pitiful room for a grown man. Worse than the one in the Van Gogh painting. The room was as dirty as the rest of the house. It had a sloping ceiling that made it feel even more cramped than it was. The one small window was coated with a film of grease that wouldn’t even allow the daylight to shine through. Poor suffering bastard.
I took a long look around and asked her, “Did he leave anything behind?”
She laughed. “Sure, he left his books and an empty bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey.”
“Let me see.”
She jerked her head toward the closet. I yanked open the door and looked in. On the floor were stacked four corrugated cartons, filled mostly with paperbacks. I slid them out into the middle of the room and put the boxes side by side. The motes of dust floated up and caught what little light entered the room. I reached out and flicked on a gooseneck lamp on a rickety wooden table next to the bed.
Well, if Wheelock was a lowlife son of a bitch, he was an intelligent one. The books were a good sampling of what a well-educated man might want to read. There were some works by the classical philosophers, standard histories of shining eras of Western civilization, and great fiction that stood the test of time. It was a collection that could have come from the circulation desk of a good liberal arts college. The only deviation was a significant number of books by Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, and their ilk, and some Victorian pornographers and earlier specimens like Fanny Hill. There was nothing else in the boxes. I put the books back in the boxes and shoved them back into the closet.
“He leave anything else?” I asked her.
She thought for a while before she answered. “Left a note, is all.”
“Do you still have it?”
She grunted, “Yeap.”
“Let me see it.”
She padded out of the room and back down the stairs. I was alone in the room-me and Wheelock’s ghost. The mattress was stripped bare and rolled up at the foot of the bed. That’s how thin it was.
“Why did you take her away from me, you bastard?” I said out loud.
The response came back silently. “Because you let me.”
The landlady’s steps sounded on the stairs and the landing like the soft strokes of a brush. She walked into the room and handed me the note. It was scrawled on a legal- size lined yellow sheet. The handwriting was jagged and uneven.
Dear Mrs. Lenkowsky,
I’m sorry I had to leave without paying the rent. As soon as I have the money, I’ll send it to you. For security,
I’m leaving you my books. I know you don’t think they’re worth two months rent, but to me they’re worth a lot more.
Again, my apologies.
Sincerely,
Steven Wheelock
I looked up at the old woman.
“He never sent the rent?”
She shook her head vigorously, like she wanted to shake his memory out of her head.