“Wouldn’t you have inherited under the terms of the will?”
“Wouldn’t it have been an easy job for him to get her to make a new will? And then that too would have been significant. You’re right, Travis. Evan Lawrence was a temporary person. He could only last so long. How long was it, a half year maybe? And now he’s back in his safe place. And sooner or later he’ll come out again, as someone else. On the hunt. Prowling. Searching. Smiling.”
Back up to speed, each of us thinking, adding up the little morsels we had discovered, from Christine Statzer, Martin Eagle, Betsy Ann Larker, Bunky Boomer, Paul Sigiera. Like a child’s game in the Sunday comics. Connect the dots and find the animal.
“Common disasters are hard to stage,” Meyer shouted.
So I worked on that one, through the end of daylight into night, into late quarter-pounders at an almost deserted McDonald’s at Seguin. “You can arrange it with fire,” I said, “if you can find somebody approximately the right size. Hitchhiker. Backpacker. A transient is best, because he won’t be missed for a long time, if ever. Chunk them both on the head, drive off the road into a tree, jumping liree at the last minute, the way he probably did in Ingram. Then toss the match. Put your ring on his finger before you toss the match. Take off any rings he might have. Car fires are hot. Water is easier. Overturned boat, drowned woman, man missing presumed dead. Explosives are good too, except it takes an awful lot. Send her up in a plane with a bomb in the luggage, after buying two tickets. Last minute excuse. Join you later honey. But you kill a lot of other folks that way.”
Suddenly a small elderly woman jumped up out of a booth across the way. I hadn’t noticed her. She glared at me. “Monsters!” she said in a breathy whisper. “Monsters!” She scuttled out.
And Meyer started laughing. It was the first genuine laugh I had heard from him in a year. His eyes ran. He hugged his belly and groaned. “Oh, oh, oh.” I levered him up and aimed him toward the car. He staggered with laughter. The little old lady might call the law, and it would be well to be up to speed in reasonable time.
On Friday morning at a travel agency in the shopping mall near Piney Village, we discovered that if you want to get to Utica, Houston isn’t a good place to start from. Maybe there aren’t any good places to start from. But they could get us to Syracuse by six that evening, with a long wait between flights at Atlanta.
A few minutes from Houston we came up through hot murky clouds into a bright white blaze of sunshine. At Atlanta we took a train from our gate back to the terminal. I wandered back and forth past a row of phone booths and finally went in and phoned Naples.
She answered on the first half of the first ring. “Yes?”
“Me,” I said. “Where are you?”
“Atlanta, heading north pretty soon. I wondered about the job.”
“You didn’t wonder enough to call me on Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday, or-”
“I thought about it every day.”
“I bet.”
“I really did. We’ve been doing a lot of scuffling. Okay, tell me how it came out.”
“The job was offered and the terms are marvelous. They gave me until Monday to think it over, so I did, and I phoned them and said yes.”
“And if I had phoned Sunday?”
“McGee, I would like to stick you with it. I would like to tell you that if you’d called, maybe I would have said no. But it just ain’t true, darlin‘. I want that job so bad I can hardly breathe.”
“When will you be leaving?”
“The man I’m training to replace me reported this morning. They want me in Maui on August fifteenth.”
“How’s the guy they sent?”
“Howard is a little bit slow to catch on, but once he has something firmly in mind, it stays there. I think he’ll be okay. Cornell hotel school. They made him very well aware of the records I set here, so he knows he’d be a fool to make any big changes.”
“Seems awful soon.”
“It is soon. I’ve been a little bit depressed ever since I said yes, as a matter of fact. Not just about you but about the whole thing here. It’s been a wonderful part of my life.”
“Past tense.”
“What’s over, as they say, is over. How are you doing?”
“We learned the name he started with. Cody T. W Pittler. And we think we know why he is a congenital murderer.”
“More murders?”
“Lots we don’t know about, probably.”
“Do be careful, will you?”
“We may never get any closer to him than we are now. We’re going up north to see his sister. She hasn’t seen him in twenty-two years, probably. We think he has some safe place from which he ventures forth from time to time, to evil do. The great lover. He sets up passionate affairs with women and then does them in.”
“At least they die happy. Sorry. That was bad taste.”
“I encouraged it. I was giving it the light touch. But I don’t feel light at all inside. I’m depressed by how soon it is going to be the middle of August.”
“I’m glad, at least, that you finally called. I was beginning to get really annoyed with you.”
“I’ve been basking in garden spots, like Freer, Encinal, Cotulla, and Eagle Pass.”
“City life, huh? Excuse, Travis. I was on my way out when the phone rang. I’m to have a rum something with Howard by the pool, and we are going to talk about getting the east forty rezoned. We really need it if we’re to have any room at all to grow here. Phone me, please, when you get back home. The minute you get home, okay?”
“Okay. Good luck with the rezoning.”
“Good luck with your mass murderer, baby.”
I hung up and went over to where Meyer was sitting. He was fatuously content. He had found a copy of The Economist on the newsstand and was learning all about economic crisis in the NATO countries.
By the time we reached the Avis counter in the Syracuse airport, it was six thirty on a hot sticky Friday evening, the sun still high. We’d reserved the car in Atlanta, on Meyer’s card, and it was waiting for us out in slot 20, a burgundy two-door with a drooped nose and a memory of cigar smoke inside. The Avis woman had given us instructions as to how to get on the Thruway. It was still bright daylight when we took the Utica exit and found, on the way toward downtown, an elderly and overpriced Howard Johnson motel. I could stomach the motel but not the restaurant, so Meyer studied the yellow pages. He has good instincts.
“What they seem to have the most of here is Italian,” he said.
“So one goes with the tide. Objection?”
“Not at all.”
“Grimaldi’s, I think. Let me see. Yes. Grimaldi’s.” When we finally found it, the daylight was almost gone. It was on a corner, with a public park across from one side of it and some sort of yellow-brick public housing project across from the front entrance. We had a hard time finding a parking place. Meyer said that was a good sign. The doors opened onto smoke, loud talk, laughter, a general Thank God It’s Friday flavor. The bar was off to the left, the dining area to the right. A slender, grave, darkhaired woman led us to a table for two against the far mall and gave us over-sized menus. A small bald elderly waiter came trotting over and took our order for extra-dry martinis with twists. They came quickly. Meyer sipped, he smiled, he relaxed. “The food will be good,” he said. “You never get a generous and delicious cocktail in a proper glass in a restaurant where the food is bad.” Another Meyer dictum. They seem to work out.