"Anyway, Jim picked her up, dropped her off, parked the car and waited in the lobby while she went up to the room."
"What room?"
"Nine-twenty-seven. Ten minutes later Rita comes down, runs into the lobby and straight over to Jim, demands to be taken home. Jim hauls her into a corner and tries to calm her down, find out what happened. Seems she got to the room and an old guy opened the door and let her in. She said he was dressed kind of funny-" He looked to Jim for confirmation.
"Old," said Jim. "He was dressed old-fashioned, like his suit was thirty, forty years out of date."
For the first time, Biggs looked uneasy. "It was strange, she said. There were no clothes in the room, no cases or bags, nothing but the old guy in his old suit. And she got scared. She couldn't say why, but the old guy frightened her."
"He smelled bad," said Jim. "That's what she told me. Not bad like rotten fish or eggs, but bad like there was something rotten inside him. Bad like… like if evil had a smell, it would have smelled like him." He looked embarrassed by his own words, and started examining his fingers.
"So he puts his hand on her shoulder," continued Lester, "and, immediately, she just wants to run. She pushes out at him and he falls back on the bed, and while he's down there she makes for the door, but he's locked it and she loses some time trying to get it open. By the time she gets it unlocked, he's behind her so she starts to scream. He's pulling at her dress, trying to cover her mouth, and she strikes out at him again, catches him on the head. Before he can recover, she has the door open and she's running down the corridor. She can hear him behind her, too, pounding after her, and he's gaining. Then she turns a corner and there's a group of people getting in the elevator. She reaches them just before the doors close, jamming her foot in the opening. The door opens and she gets in. There's no sign of the old guy, but she can still smell him, she says, and knows that he's close. She was lucky, I guess. The Eastland only had one functioning elevator that night. If she'd missed it, he'd have gotten her, no question. Then the elevator brings her down to the lobby, and to Jim."
Jim was still looking down at his hands. They were big and heavily veined, with scars on the knuckles. Maybe he was wondering if Rita Ferris might still have been alive if he'd had a chance to use them on the old man. "I told her to wait for me in the lobby, by the reception desk," he said, as he took up the story. "I went up to the room, but the door was open and the room was empty. Like she said, there were no bags, nothing. So I went back down to the desk, told them that I was supposed to meet a friend of mine who was staying in the hotel. Room nine-twenty-seven."
He pursed his lips, and tugged at one of his scars with a long fingernail. "There was no guest in room nine-twenty-seven," he said at last. "The room was unoccupied. The old guy must have bullshitted one of the staff so he could get in. I took Rita to the bar, bought her a brandy and waited until she had calmed down before taking her home. That's all there is."
"You find any way to tell the cops about this guy?"
Biggs shook his head. "How could I?"
"You have a telephone."
"I have a business," he replied.
Not for long, I thought. Biggs, for all his posturing, was no better than a cluster fly, insinuating himself into young women's lives and then draining them from the inside. "He could try again," I said. "Maybe he did try, and Rita Ferris ended up dead because of it."
Biggs shook his head. "Nah, these things happen. The freak probably went home and jerked off instead." His eyes told me that he didn't believe his own lies. Beside him, Jim still hadn't lifted his face. Guilt rolled off him like a fog.
"She give you a description?"
"Like we told you: old, tall, gray hair, smelled bad. That's it."
I rose. "Thanks, you've been a big help."
"Anytime," he said. "You ever want to party, you give me a call."
"Yeah, you'll be the first to know."
When I stepped outside, a car drew up: Ellis Howard's car. He didn't look overly happy to see me.
"What are you doing here?" he asked.
"Same thing you are, I guess."
"We got an anonymous tip-off."
"Lucky you." I guessed that Lucy Mims's conscience had got the better of her in the end.
Ellis rubbed his hand across his face, dragging his skin down so I could see the red beneath his eyes. "You still haven't answered the question," he said. "How did you know she was working as a prostitute?"
"Maybe the same way you did. It doesn't matter."
"But you weren't going to tell us?"
"I would have, eventually. I didn't want her labeled as a whore, that's all, not with the press around and not before I had a chance to find out if it was true."
"I didn't know you were so sentimental," said Ellis. He wasn't smiling.
"I have hidden shallows," I replied, as I turned and walked to my car. "See you around, Ellis."
CHAPTER EIGHT
After I left Lester Biggs's office, I headed down to the Bagel Works at Temple Street, where I ate a muffin, drank some French roast and watched the cars go by. A handful of people queued to see cheap movies in the Nickelodeon movie theater next door, or took the air around Monument Square. Nearby, Congress Street was bustling: it had suffered when the suburban malls drew the retail businesses out of the city, but now had restaurants and new stores and the Keystone movie theater and diner, and was pretty much Portland's cultural district
This was a survivor's city: it had burned twice at the hands of the Indians in 1676 and 1690, burned again under the guns of the Englishman Henry Mowatt in 1775 following a dispute over masts, and burned once more in 1866 when someone threw a firecracker into a boatbuilder's yard on Commercial Street and turned the eastern half of the city to ash. And still the city remained, and still it grew.
I felt about the city as I felt about the house in Scarborough: it was a place where the past was alive in the present, where a man could find a place for himself as long as he understood the fact that he was a link in the chain, for a man cut off from his past is a man adrift in the present. Maybe that was part of Billy Purdue's problem. There had been little stability in his life. His past was a series of unconnected episodes, united only by unhappiness.
In the end, I figured that Billy Purdue was probably none of my business. Whatever he had done to Tony Celli, for whatever reason, was a matter for them both to resolve. Billy was a big boy now and his actions at Ferry Beach meant that he was playing by big boys' rules. So if Billy Purdue was none of my business, why did I feel that I should try to save him?
If I stretched the point then Rita and Donald were none of my business either, but it didn't feel that way. In their apartment, as the two bodies lay on the floor, frozen briefly by the flashbulbs of the camera, I felt something ripple through me, something I recognized from before, something that had come to me as a gift from another. In the crowded coffee shop, as people sheltered from the cold, talked about their children, gossiped about their neighbors, touched the hands of girlfriends, boyfriends, lovers, I moved the fingers of my left hand gently over the palm of my right and recalled a touch more intense than that of any lover, and I smelled again the rich heady odor of the Louisiana swamps.
Almost eight months before, I had sat in the bedroom of an old, blind woman named Tante Marie Aguillard, a huge ebony form with dead, sightless eyes whose consciousness moved through the darkness of her own life, and the lives of others. I wasn't sure what I was looking for from her, except that she said she could hear the voice of a dead girl calling her from the swamps. I believed then that the man who killed the girl might also have been responsible for the deaths of my own wife and child-assuming the old woman wasn't crazy, or vindictive, or just plain lonely and seeking attention.