We chatted for a while longer, just kicking things back and forth, and then I told him why I had called.
He laughed. “What the fuck, Denny? You goin into business for yourself?”
“You might say so.” I thought of Christine. “For a limited time only.”
“Don’t want to talk about it?”
“Well, not just yet. Do you know someone who might have an item like that for rent?”
“I’ll tell you, Dennis. There’s only one guy I know who might do business with you on anything like that. Johnny Pomberton. Lives out on the Ridge Road. He’s got more rolling stock than Carter’s got liver pills.”
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks, Brad.”
“How’s Arnie?”
“All right, I guess. I don’t see as much of him as I used to.”
“Funny guy, Dennis. I never in my wildest dreams thought he’d last out the summer the first time I set eyes on him. But he had one hell of a lot of determination.”
“Yeah,” I said. “All of that and then some.”
“Say hi to him when you see him.”
“I’ll do it, Brad. Stay loose.”
“Can’t live if you do anything else, Denny. Come an over some night and peel a few cans with me.”
“I will. Good night.”
“Night.”
I hung up and then hesitated over the phone for a minute or two, not really wanting to make this next call. But it had to be done; it was central to the whole sorry, stupid business. I picked the telephone up and dialled the Cunninghams’ number from memory. If Arnie answered, I would simply hang up without speaking. But my luck was in; it was Michael who answered.
“Hello?” His voice sounded tired and a bit slurred.
“Michael, this is Dennis.”
“Hey, hi!” He sounded genuinely pleased.
“Is Arnie there?”
“Upstairs. He came home from somewhere and went right to his room. He looked pretty thundery, but that’s far from unusual these days. Want me to call him?”
“No,” I said. “That’s okay. It was really you I wanted to talk to, anyhow. I need a favour.”
“Well, sure. Name it.” I realized what that slur in his voice was—Michael Cunningham was at least halfway snookered. “You did us a helluva favour, talking some sense to him about college.”
“Michael, I don’t think he listened to a thing I said.”
“Well, something sure happened. He’s applied to three schools just this month. Regina thinks you walk on water, Dennis. And just between me and thee, she’s pretty ashamed of the way she treated you when Arnie first told us about his car. But you know Regina. She’s never been able to say “I’m sorry”.”
I knew that, all right. And what Regina would think, I wondered, if she knew that Arnie—or whatever controlled Arnie—didn’t have any more interest in college than a hog has in mutual funds? That he was simply following Leigh’s tracks, hounding her, fixated on her? It was perversion on perversion—LeBay, Leigh, and Christine in some hideous ménage à trois.
“Listen, Michael,” I said. “I’d like you to call me if Arnie decides to go out of town for some reason. Especially in the next day or two, or over the weekend. Day or night. I have to know if Arnie’s going to leave Libertyville. And I have to know before he leaves. It’s very important.”
“Why?”
“I’d just as soon not go into that. It’s complicated, and it would… well, it would sound crazy.”
There was a long, long silence, and when Arnie’s dad spoke again, his voice was a near-whisper. “It’s that goddam car of his, isn’t it?”
How much did he suspect? How much did he know? If he was like most people I knew, he probably suspected a little more drunk than sober. How much? Even now I don’t know for sure. But what I believe is that he suspected more than anyone—except maybe Will Darnell.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s the car.”
“I knew it,” he said dully. “I knew. What’s happening, Dennis? How is he doing it? Do you know?”
“Michael, I can’t say any more. Will you tell me if he plans a trip tomorrow or the next day?”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, all right.”
“Thanks.”
“Dennis,” he said. “Do you think I’ll ever have my son back?”
He deserved the truth. That poor, devilled man deserved the truth. “I don’t know,” I said, and bit at my lower lip until it hurt. “I think… that it may have gone too far for that.”
“Dennis,” he almost wailed, “what is it? Drugs? Some kind of drugs?”
“I’ll tell you when I can,” I said. “That’s all I can promise you. I’m sorry. I’ll tell you when I can.”
Johnny Pomberton was easier to talk to.
He was a lively, garrulous man, and any fears I’d had that he wouldn’t do business with a kid soon went by the board. I got the feeling that Johnny Pomberton would have done business with Satan freshly risen from hell with the smell of brimstone still on him, if he had good old legal tender.
“Sure,” he kept saying. “Sure, sure.” You’d no more than started some proposition before Johnny Pomberton was agreeing with you. It was a little unnerving. I had a cover story, but I don’t think he even listened to it. He simply quoted me a price—a very reasonable one, as it turned out.
“That sounds fine,” I said.
“Sure,” he agreed. “What time, you coming by?”
“Well, how would nine-thirty tomorrow m—”
“Sure,” he said. “See you then.”
“One other question, Mr Pomberton…”
“Sure. And make it Johnny.”
“Okay, Johnny, then. What about automatic transmission?”
Johnny Pemberton laughed heartily—so heartily that I held the phone away from my ear a bit, feeling glum. That laugh was answer enough.
“On one of these babies? You got to be kidding. Why? Can’t you run a manual shift?”
“Yes, that’s what I learned on,” I said.
“Sure! So you got no problems, right?”
“I guess not,” I said, thinking of my left leg, which would be running the clutch—or trying to. Simply shifting it around a little tonight had made it ache like hell, I hoped that Arnie would wait a few days before taking his trip out of town, but somehow I didn’t think that was on the cards. It would be tomorrow, over the weekend at the latest, and my left leg would simply have to bear up as best it could. “Well, good night, Mr Pomberton. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sure. Thanks for calling, kid. I got one all picked out in my mind for you. You’ll like her, see if you don’t. And if you don’t start calling me Johnny, I’m gonna double the price.”
“Sure,” I said, and hung up on his laughter.
You’ll like her. See if you don’t.
Her again—I was becoming morbidly aware of that casual form of referral… and getting damned sick of it.
Then I made my last preparatory call. There were four Sykeses in the phone book. I got the one I wanted on my second try; Jimmy himself answered the phone. I introduced myself as Arnie Cunningham’s friend, and Jimmy’s voice brightened. He liked Arnie, who hardly ever teased him and never “punched on him” as Buddy Repperton had done when Buddy worked for Will. He wanted to know how Arnie was, and, lying again, I told him Arnie was fine.
“Jeez, that’s good,” he said. “He really had his butt in a sling there for a while. I knew them fireworks and cigarettes was no good for him.”
“It’s Arnie I’m calling for,” I said. “You remember when Will got arrested and they shut down the garage, Jimmy?”
“Sure do.” Jimmy sighed. “Now poor old Will’s dead and I’m out of a job. My ma keeps sayin I got to go to the vocational-technical school, but I wouldn’t be no good at that. I guess I’ll go for bein a janitor, or somethin like that. My Uncle Fred’s a janitor up at the college, and he says there’s an op-nin, because this other Janitor, he disappeared, just took off or somethin, and—”
“Arnie says when they closed down the garage, he lost his whole socket-wrench kit,” I broke in. “It was up behind some of those old tyres, you know, on the overhead racks. He put them up there so no one would rip him off.”