“Sure,” he said, but he was instantly uneasy. He was not a great talker, I remembered. He was private and sensitive and reluctant to let a stranger see into his heart.
He smiled kindly through his beard and gave it a try. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Grayson.”
His smile faded, replaced by that shadow of distress I had seen in him that first night. “That’s a long time ago. I don’t know what I could tell you that would make any difference today.”
I waited, sensing him groping for words. Let him grope it out, I thought.
“I have a hard time with that.”
“What about Nola Jean Ryder?”
His eyes narrowed to slits. I never found out what he might have said, because at that moment the outer door slammed open and Crystal screamed, “Gaston!” and I heard her charging through the dark front room.
She threw open the door and vaulted into the back shop.
“Don’t say another word!” she yelled at Rigby.
“What’s—”
“Shut up!…Just… shut up ! Don’t tell him anything.”
She came toward me. I moved to one side.
“I told you to get out of here.”
We circled each other like gladiators. By the time I reached the door, she and Rigby were side by side.
“Don’t you come back,” Crystal said. “Don’t ever come back here.”
“I’ll be back, Crystal. You can count on it.”
I went through the shop with that chill on my neck. The chill stayed with me as I doubled back toward Snoqualmie. I thought it was probably there for the duration.
52
Headlights cut the night as Archie Moon turned out of Railroad Avenue and came to a squeaking stop on the street outside his printshop. For a time he sat there as if lost in thought: then, wearily showing his age, he pulled himself out of the truck’s cab and slowly made his way to the front of the building. A key ring dangled from his left hand: with the other hand he fished a pair of glasses out of his shirt pocket, putting them on long enough to fit the key in the lock, turn the knob, and push the door open. He took off the glasses and flipped on the inner light, stepping into the little reception room at the front of the shop. He stopped, bent down, and picked up the mail dropped through the slot by the mailman earlier in the day.
He rifled through his letters with absentminded detachment. Seeing nothing of immediate interest, he tossed the pile on the receptionist’s desk and moved on into the back shop.
I got out of the car across the street, where I’d been waiting for more than an hour. I crossed over, opened the door without a noise, and came into the office.
I could hear him moving around beyond the open door. The back shop was dark with only a single light, somewhere, reflecting off black machinery. Shadows leaped up in every direction, like the figures in an antiquarian children’s book where everything is drawn in silhouette.
I heard the beep of a telephone machine, then the whir of a tape being rewound. He was playing back his messages, just around the corner, a foot or two from where I stood.
“Archie, it’s Ginny. Don’t be such a stranger, stranger.”
Another beep, another voice. “Bobbie, sweetheart. Call me.”
And again. “Mr. Moon, this is Jewell Bledsoe. I’ve been thinking about that job we discussed. Let’s do go ahead. And, yes, I would like to have dinner sometime. Very much. So call me. Tomorrow.”
Moon gave a little laugh laced with triumph. “Ah, Jewell,” he cried out to the empty room. “Ah, yeah !”
He was a busy man with a heavy social docket. He was much like his pal Darryl Grayson that way. In great demand by the ladies.
There was another message on the tape. She didn’t identify herself, didn’t need to. It was a voice he had heard every day for twenty years.
“Oh, Archie, where are you! Everything’s gone crazy, I feel like I’m losing my mind. Call me, please…for God’s sake, call me!”
He picked up the telephone and punched in a number. Hung up, tried again, hung up, replayed the message.
“Goddammit, honey,” he said to the far wall. “How the hell am I supposed to call you if you’re over there blabbin‘ on the goddamn phone?”
He tried again and hung up.
I heard him move. I stepped back to one side, leaning against the receptionist’s desk with my left hand flat on some papers. I rolled my eyes around and looked out to the deserted street. My eyes made the full circle and ended up staring down at the desk where my hand was.
At the stack of mail he had thrown there.
At the letter Eleanor had mailed from the Hilton.
I touched the paper, felt the lump of something solid inside. A federal crime to take it: not much time to decide.
“Janeway.” He was standing right there, three feet away. “Where’d you come from? You look like you been rode hard and put away wet.”
“You got the wet part right.” I leaned back from the desk, trying not to be too obvious. “And, yeah, I been rode pretty hard, too.”
“How’d you get in here? I didn’t hear the door.”
“Just walked right in. Saw the light, came in, heard you back there on the phone…thought I’d sit on the desk and wait till you’re done.”
“Half-blind and now I can’t hear either. What’s on your mind?”
“I’ve been thinking some about that cabin of yours.”
“I guess I told you I’d give you a tour of God’s country, didn’t I? Can’t say I expected you tonight, though.”
“Just thought I’d come by and see if the offer’s still good.”
“Yeah, sure it is. Why wouldn’t it be? If you’re still around in a few days…”
“You get up there much?”
“Not anymore, not like I used to. It’s too hard to make a living these days; I gotta work Saturdays and sometimes Sundays and I’m gettin‘ too damn old and too slow. Two or three times a year is all.”
He held his hand up to his eyes. “Let’s step on back in the shop. That bright light’s playing hell with me.”
I followed him around and leaned against the doorjamb, keeping my hands in my pockets and letting my eyes work the room. It was a busy printer’s printshop, cluttered with half-finished jobs and the residue of last week’s newspaper. Long scraps of newsprint had been ripped out and thrown on the floor. Paper was piled in rolls in the corner, and in stacks on hand trucks and dollies. A fireman’s nightmare, you’d have to think. He had a Chandler and Price like Rigby’s, a Linotype, and an offset press that took a continuous feed of newsprint from a two-foot roll.
He stood in the shadows a few feet away. “Crystal said you’re still trying to find Ellie. Havin‘ any luck?”
“As a matter of fact, I’m having a helluva time just getting people to talk to me.”
“Maybe you’re asking the wrong people.”
“I don’t know, Archie, you’d think the people who’re supposed to love her would be knocking me down to help. But everybody seems more interested in pandering to the vanity of a dead man than finding that girl.”
This bristled him good. I thought it might.
“Who’s everybody? Who the hell are you talking about?”
“Crystal…and Rigby.”
“Hell, that’s easy enough to understand.”
“Then make me understand it.”
“Why do I smell an attitude here? It oughta be obvious what their problem is, if you came at them the way you just came at me.”
“Rigby’s relationship with Grayson, you mean.”
“Yeah, sure. You don’t walk in that house and say anything against Darryl…not if you want to come out with your head in one piece. And the same is true over here, by the way, so let’s back off on the rhetoric and we’ll all be a lot happier.”
“And I still don’t get my questions answered.”
“You got questions, ask ‘em. Let the sons of bitches rip.”