All I could do was wait for Leo’s examination, so I drove to the Rivertown Health Center. I fight to keep my weight at the plumpness of an overinjected Thanksgiving turkey, but it’s a battle I lose. Still, I go to the health center to keep the dream alive. And to take hot showers. A water heater is on my list for the turret, but it’s halfway down.
The parking lot was nearly empty, except for the usual dozen abandoned cars rusting on their axles. I crept along the rutted, weed-spotted asphalt to my regular space next to the doorless ’73 Buick by the entrance. I got out, checked my doors twice to make sure they were unlocked, and went in. My Jeep has a vinyl top and plastic side windows, and I don’t need anyone slitting them to verify I don’t have anything worth stealing.
The Rivertown Health Center had once been a showplace Y.M.C.A., with a big exercise room, an indoor pool, and five floors of temporary rooms for good Christians new to town. That was in the 1950s, when there’d been manufacturing jobs in Rivertown. Now the sheet metal on the roof streaked tiger stripes of brown rust down the yellow bricks, the last of the paint had flaked off the gray, sun-rotted wood windows, and the good Christians had fled, leaving the upstairs rooms to trembling winos hanging on for the salvation of fresh pints at the first of the month, when the disability and public aid checks arrived.
Downstairs, the pipes leaked, the running track was a greasy, crumbling obstacle course of silver-taped rips, and the locker doors had all been beaten in by punks hunting for watches and wallets. But it was cheap, the water was hot, and so long as I got out of there before the punks came to hang out in the late afternoon, it was safe enough for a workout and a shower.
I changed into my blue Cubs T-shirt and red shorts and went upstairs. Barney, Dusty, Nick, and the rest were there, roosting on the rusted fitness machines like crows on fence posts. Old men, retired from the tool cribs and stamping rooms of the factories thatused to be in Rivertown, they came early every afternoon to reassure themselves that they were all still alive. Nick told me a joke, the same joke he told every Tuesday. I laughed. He smiled, proud of his wit. It was ritual.
I left them to their talk and ran laps and did maybes. Maybe the Bohemian was too practiced at telling his clients money could make their problems go away, maybe the threat in the letter was real, maybe there would be another bomb, maybe somebody would get killed. Maybe I should not let myself be used, insist instead that the Bohemian take the note to the cops. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about Amanda’s house. After six laps I staggered off to hug the wall, sucking air. There was no maybe about me carrying too much weight.
I hit the showers and thought about the only thing that wasn’t a maybe.
The Bohemian was holding something back.
Three
Leo called at 9:00 A.M., two days later.
“Can you come over?”
I could hear something tapping, his heel maybe, or a pencil.
“You don’t want to extort another gourmet meal?”
“I don’t want to waste any time.”
I told him I’d be right over.
Leo’s mother’s place was seven blocks away, a narrow dark brown brick bungalow in the middle of a block crowded with narrow dark brown brick bungalows. They had been built in the late 1920s, when Rivertown had Florida bungalow fever. And hope.
Blue television light flickered behind the lace curtains as I went up the cement stairs to the porch and rang the bell.
Leo opened the door almost instantly, as if he’d been waiting with his hand on the knob. Ma didn’t look up as I stepped into the living room. On the big-screen television, a woman was interviewing a man sitting on a couch next to a chimpanzee. The chimp looked life-sized on the forty-five inch screen. “So nice Leo has friends,” Ma murmured, her eyes fixed on the television. “Yes,ma’am,” I said. The chimpanzee smiled. Leo and I walked through to the kitchen.
I followed Leo down the stairs and through the basement, past the broken Exercycle, the train set on plywood I’d helped him put together in seventh grade, and the decorated three-foot artificial Christmas tree they shook off and put on the T.V. every December. We went into the space Leo had walled off under the living room for an office.
There was no door, and he’d never gotten around to priming the drywall or putting tile or carpet on the bare concrete floor. Equipment-magnifiers, three tall gray file cabinets, a light table-took up every available inch. Nothing was out of place. It was all pure Leo: functional and without a nod to aesthetics. Just like his shiny Hawaiian shirts.
He went behind the scarred, beat-up wood desk he’d found in the alley, sat backward on the listing chair, and wrapped his thin arms around its slatted back like he was hugging it for warmth. I dropped into the sprung green overstuffed chair that must have felt fine under Leo’s bony one hundred and forty pounds but always made me feel like I was bungee jumping.
On the wall above the light table, shiny photographic enlargements of the Gateville envelope and letter were clipped to a metal holder next to an old poster of a wet but excited Bo Derek.
“Sorry about taking two days, but I wanted a friend of mine at the I.R.S. forensic lab downtown to take a look.” Leo’s heels started beating a light riff on the cement floor. When Leo is on to something, his feet tap, and his fingers stretch and curl, probing for anything they can pick up. Today he twirled a yellow wood pencil between his fingers.
He pointed the eraser end at the blowup of the white envelope. “There’s nothing remarkable about that; millions like it are sold in stationery stores and discount places. It’s got a self-adhesive flap, soI doubt there’s potential for saliva D.N.A. It’s postmarked at the main Chicago post office, and so it has plenty of fingerprints, none of which will help us. It was addressed recently with an ink-jet printer, probably a Canon, the kind that’s in every public library.”
“No typewriter with a raised, cracked e?” I said, doing my growl of Humphrey Bogart doing his growl of Philip Marlowe.
Leo’s eyebrows crawled up into a tired black arch. “Must I suffer your mimicry?”
“Forgive me, schweetheart. What about the note?”
“Much more interesting. Pencil lettering, done with a ruler to disguise the writer’s hand as you suspected. And of course, the paper is from a kid’s tablet, old stock.”
“Old stock?”
“The manufacturer discontinued this particular paper twenty years ago.”
“You’re saying the note was written a long time ago?”
“That I can’t tell.” He opened a desk drawer, rummaged inside, and pulled out a spiral-bound notepad with a school crest. He fanned the pages to a blank sheet in back. “This paper is old, too. I’ve had it since college. Means nothing; lots of people have old paper lying around. As for the lettering…” He shook his head. “I can’t tell its age. Pencil lead doesn’t change much with time.”
I pointed at the enlargement of the note on the wall. “Fingerprints?”
“None.”
“So nothing can be learned.”
“Not so fast, Holmes.” His wide lips split into a grin. “To begin with, the lettering is precise, but also the color is consistent on every character. A ruler can help that, but the pencil pressure still had to be controlled throughout.” He stood up, went to the blowup, and used the pencil eraser to draw an imaginary line under the words. “See the evenness of color? Nice and consistent. No urgency, no anxiety. If this had been written by some nut as aquick scam, one might expect evidence of agitation: uneven color, a trailing line, a missed connection between two lines, or any of a number of other things that would suggest haste. But this is precise and controlled. Your letter writer is serious.”