“Yeah.” She changed the subject. “Cady make it in?”
I nodded. “So you were in on it?”
She was already back to her reports. “Everybody was in on it.”
I picked up my beer and left. Some detective.
The door was closed to Room 32 when I got there, and no light was showing from under the sill. I checked my pocket watch, but it was too early for bed. I went ahead and knocked.
Nothing, so I knocked again.
Somebody moved in the room. “I got a gun.”
“Me too.” I tried the knob, but the door was locked. In fifteen years of visiting him, he had never locked the door. “Lucian, what are you doing in there?”
No answer. I leaned against the wall and gauged how much energy it would take to kick the door in. I was tired and didn’t feel like kicking in doors, so I went down to the end of the hall and got a passkey. Dean had moved on to “Winter Wonderland,” his voice gliding like a sleigh on cream cheese. Jennifer wanted to accompany me, but I wanted Lucian alone.
“Lucian, I’m unlocking the door and coming in.”
It took a moment for him to respond. “Go to hell.”
He said he had a gun, and I believed him. I unlocked and stood just to the side in case he was drunk enough to shoot. I brushed my fingertips across the door as the slab of light from the hallway bolted across the sand-colored carpet. The first thing to hit me was the smell. At some time during his vigilance, he must have soiled himself, and that smell overrode the tang of his unwashed body, the high heat of the room, and the bourbon. He was seated in a cowhide high-back chair with a 10-gauge sawed-off coach gun across his lap. Both hammers were pulled. “Lucian?”
“Go away.”
The empty bottle of Pappy Van Winkle’s Family Reserve was on the floor next to his artificial leg. He was wearing his tattered, checked bathrobe, his Stetson, and one cowboy boot. There were no lights on, and the chair had been pulled against the wall. “What’re you up to, Lucian?” I put the beer down by the door, which I closed, and crossed to stand in front of the brindle sofa against the other wall. I took my jacket off and tossed it behind me. “It’s hot in here.”
“Wha…?”
“It’s hot. You mind if I open the outside door?” He watched me, then took his fingers from the shotgun long enough to gesture toward the sliding glass. I slid the heavy, double-paned glass back about a foot and took a deep breath. The miniature multicolored lights blinked around Lucian’s patio, flashing blue, green, red, and yellow across the icicles on the canopy and across the dimpled surface of snow that had dumped into the small bowl at the back of the building. There was a claptrap Datsun pickup parked in the closest spot of the elevated parking area. The motor was running, but there wasn’t anybody in it. Probably somebody warming his truck up for the cold ride home. I went back and sat on the sofa opposite Lucian and picked up the empty bourbon bottle. “You been drinking?”
He snorted. “Drinkin’ hell, ’m drunk.”
I nodded and watched his fingers still on both triggers. “Scattergun out for a reason?” The smell was getting to me, so I breathed through my mouth.
He wobbled a little, attempting to think and sit still at the same time. He stared at a space to my left, but I was pretty sure he was still talking to me, “ ’M waitin’…” The glittering mahogany of his dark eyes was still visible in the gloom of the unlit room. “You wait with me.”
“You bet.” I sat back in the sofa and wished I had one of the beers in the paper bag, but one drunk and armed sheriff in the room was enough. I scratched my face, felt the hair, and tried to remember the last time I’d trimmed my beard. I reached out with my foot and nudged the prosthetic leg. “Maybe while we’re waiting, we should get you cleaned up and put your leg on?”
He was quiet for a while, staring at the floor between us. “You can’t keep ’em safe, y’know?” His eyes strayed up to mine where they wobbled. “Not always.”
I thought about the woman who had died in Room 42, how she had haunted Lucian long before her death, and how she was now galvanized to his soul forever. “I know.” He started to fall forward, but I caught him before the shotgun fell to the floor. He leaned against my shoulder; he weighed about as much as Cady. “Spent most of my life tryin’ to decide whether ta shit or go blind. Guess I made up my mind to do both.”
I laughed until there was a warm soft lump in my throat and a heat behind my eyes. I palmed the Damascus-barreled coach gun from him and gently lowered the two hammers. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you cleaned up.”
It didn’t take as long as I thought. After I got him in the bath, Lucian was able to seat himself on the specially constructed seat. I was stunned at how old he looked: small, naked, and drunk. I watched him as he clung to the stainless steel help bar and allowed the water to cascade over his scalp and carry the bad things away. The dent where Mari Baroja’s uncle had finally settled the matter of Lucian’s one and only marriage was evident. The water pooled there like some little eddy in his life and collected memories that refused to be erased.
I patted the old man on the shoulder, closed the curtain, and sat on the seat cover. There was a fresh copy of the Durant Courant on the floor next to the toilet brush. When I picked it up, I noticed that it had been carefully folded back to the obituary page. I sighed and looked into the black and white of Mari Baroja’s obit. She had died on her birthday; that explained the drunken jag. I dropped the paper on the floor and went back to the main room to give the poor man a little privacy.
I took the soiled chair and put it out on the patio for future cleaning. The Datsun truck was still warming up and, as I slid the door closed, I could see the ghost of myself in the reflection of the glass, or maybe it was the real me trying to whisper in my ear and tell me what it was that was specifically rotten in Denmark. There were other eyes out there, other shapes that shifted and fell away only to drift back up from the falling snow to watch me and see if I was going to get it right. These shapes moved softly in the deep snow and between the trees; they provided no insight, just audience.
I thought about Vic who was doing my investigative work. I should let her go home. There wasn’t any reason I couldn’t stick around and gather what little information needed to be gleaned here, my daughter notwithstanding. I went back to the partially closed bathroom door. “Hey, Lucian?” I heard some shuffling noises. “You’re not going to drown if I go tell Vic to go home, are you?”
“I don’t give a damn what you do.”
I took the beer with me.
On the way back to Louis’s office, I discovered Joe had replaced Jennifer at the front desk. He looked much as he had two nights earlier when I had fought the Christmas tree. He wheeled his chair back and stuck his arms out, blocking my passage to the bottlebrush conifer. “Very funny.”
“I just didn’t want you to risk electrocution again.”
I leaned against the counter and listened for a second. “How come there isn’t any music?”
“Oh, shit.” He fumbled under the counter with the stereo system, and pretty soon Gene Autrey was crooning “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
“Joe, do you have any idea what could’ve happened to that container of Metamucil?”
“I’m sorry, Sheriff, but it was just on a shelf in the main supply closet. I showed your deputy where it was supposed to be, but a lot of the clients get in there. None of the stuff is prescription, but we try and keep everyone’s name labeled on them.”
Vic said Shelly Gatton didn’t know anything about the missing container. She had seen Lana the morning I had seen her, after her grandmother had died, and the day earlier when she had brought Mari lunch, along with the cookies. She said Joe Lesky was less helpful in that he hadn’t seen anyone with or without cookies, and that, when he showed her the supply closet, there were four containers of the Metamucil, but none with the name of Mari Baroja. “You gonna test them all?”