Depression times came to mind. Poor people dragging themselves across the land in search of work probably stayed in places like these. And back then they would probably have been glad to have gotten them. They were preferable to sleeping outside in the rain and snow. And if you did it right you could probably pack a family of five or six inside them. There were migrant workers today in this home of the free and the brave who still lived this way.
Grimes’s car was parked near the entrance behind a rusted dumpster.
A faded clapboard house sat just to the right of the sign. A lone light burned behind the dirty front window.
When I pulled in, a man in a red-and-white hunting jacket and a Cubs cap stepped out onto the porch. He had a handgun pointed straight at me. The welcoming committee.
‘No need for that,’ I said as I got out of my car.
‘I’ll be the judge of that.’
‘I’m Conrad.’
‘Makes no difference to me. I want you up here on the porch where I can see you. Grimes is so scared he’s got me scared.’
‘You hear from him?’
‘Nope. Figured I’d wait for you to check his cabin. I don’t like him havin’ a gun.’
‘Well, I’m not crazy about you having a gun, either.’
‘Well, tough shit. I’m old and you’re young. Figure the gun gives us some equality.’
When I walked up onto the porch the entire house shook. The recent rain had left the wood smelling of rot.
Skully’s face in the window light was as weathered and woebegone as his home. He had a pair of quarter-sized growths on his left cheek that were light-colored and hairy. I wondered if he’d had a doctor look at them.
‘You got some ID?’
‘Sure.’
I dug in my back pocket for my wallet. The handgun — which turned out to be an old-fashioned .38 snubby — was still unerringly pointed at my chest. I handed it over and he managed to snatch it without losing his grip on the pistol.
He leaned back in the light to get a better look at my driver’s license and that was when I saw that he had a third growth, just like the other two, on the right side of his neck. ‘Yeah, I guess it’s you all right.’
Who the hell else would it be?
‘You have the envelope he left for me?’
He tapped the front of his hunting jacket. ‘Right inside here.’
‘You mind handing it over? And while you’re at it, putting your gun away?’
A sigh. ‘I should be inside in my bed right now ’stead of up all night with this kinda bullshit. If I don’t get a good night’s sleep I catch a cold. Soon as he showed me the envelope I shoulda kicked his ass out.’
But he slipped the gun into the wide pocket of his jacket and then reached inside and pulled out a white number-ten business envelope.
‘It’s all yours.’
It was so light there couldn’t have been anything else besides a letter inside.
Then I felt the slight bump. Something maybe two inches long and a quarter inch thick, if that.
‘Mind if I step over to the window there to read it?’
He didn’t say anything, but he did step aside so I could move closer to the grimy light.
A single wooden stick match. Unburned. The significance of it was lost on me.
The letter itself was written on the back of some kind of supermarket flier. No fancy-pants stationery for Grimes. And it was written with a ballpoint pen that was running out of ink. Some words were imprinted more heavily than others. I could see and hear him shaking the pen impatiently and cursing it out as if it were a human being. Cindy had quite the granddad.
The message — written in a single paragraph — read as follows:
Conrad,
I had the recorder all along. I called Showalter and told him I wanted a hundred thousand for it. It’s my turn to have some money in this life. He said all right. But when I showed up for the hand-off at the boat dock somebody fired at me. Showalter. So I hid the recorder and I’m hiding myself. I’m gonna give him one more chance to pay up. I got a call into him now. If I turn up dead you let Cindy know about this letter and the stick match. She’ll know where the recorder is.
I folded up the letter, shoved it into my jacket pocket and dropped the stick match into my shirt pocket.
Skully said, ‘Now you’re gonna help me.’
‘I am?’
‘You’re damn right you are. He dragged me into this. I want you to help me kick him out.’
‘I guess that makes sense.’
‘Then he’s your problem, not mine.’
‘Let’s go get him then.’
‘You stayin’ at the Royale and all, I figured you’d be some big snooty asshole. I guess maybe I was wrong. At least a little bit.’
It’s all relative, isn’t it? You stay at the Four Seasons in Chicago, you might get known as a big snooty asshole. But in Danton, at least for folks like Skully, it’s the Royale.
He led the way.
The so-called cabins formed a semicircle in a clearing half-hidden by thick pines. The largest of them was four times the size of the others and bore a large sign that read: TOILETS & SHOWER. The closer we got, the clearer the odors from the building struck like poison gas.
There was no evidence of any guests actually residing in this luxury spa. I could hear highway sounds and nightbird sounds and the sounds we made tramping across downed tree branches from past storms, but none of the noises you associate with human beings bedding down for the night.
‘You don’t have many people staying here, huh?’
‘Technically, we’re closed. The old lady died a year ago and it took all the money I had to bury her. Don’t have the money to pay for the ’lectricity in the cabins — just the house — so people don’t want to stay here when they find that out. Plus the stools’re kinda backed up. Your buddy Grimes is the first guest we’ve had in quite a while. He remembered stayin’ here when he was a teenager. Brought his girlfriend out here. Only place he could afford. He’s hidin’ out tonight so he don’t mind not havin’ lights.’ The last remark warranted his old-man laugh.
We reached Cabin Six by following a curving path, and there situated between two smothering pines was another example of life lived large. Cabin Six managed to be more of a shambles than the others I’d seen. The sole window was taped together with a fashionable swipe of duct tape and the door hung on its hinges with a look of desperation.
‘He wanted this one. He said he always used it when he was a kid.’
Grimes would have been in high school in the sixties. Maybe the sex was even better back then with the so-called sexual revolution giving teenagers a freedom previous generations could only have fantasized about.
I stared at the cabin, apprehension starting to fill my chest.
Had somebody beaten me here and killed him? ‘Let me go in and check on him.’
‘No argument from me, Conrad. I got the gun here if you try anything.’
God alone knew what the hell that meant.
I clipped on my flashlight and moved forward.
I saw two small cots, both swaybacked; a three-drawer bureau, a washbasin and a pitcher on top of it; a single straight-backed chair. The metal bucket was presumably used to pee in. This was the best suite in the house.
Grimes lay on the leftward cot beneath a small pile of faded quilts. In the beam of my light his face was a deep red and his open eyes were also tinted red. He had vomited on himself. This stench was actually preferable to the cabin stench.
From the little I knew about medicine I was somewhat sure I was looking at the victim of a heart attack. Cindy would be free of worrying about him now, even if the worrying was the most profound expression of her love for the old man. I forgot about his greed — why the hell not, anyway; I couldn’t argue with his contention that he’d worked hard all his life, even fought for his country, and had little to show for it — and allowed myself to feel some compassion for all the good-bad people in the world. Hell, I was one of them.