Suddenly I realized where I was and what I was touching.
The back doors of the bookmobile must have been loose and popped open when the van went over. That would explain the books on the bank; they had bounced out when the vehicle went into the water, and due to the way the bank was sloped, the van had landed at a slant with its rear end up, and I had accidentally swum inside. The walls I had hit were the sides of the bookmobile, and the things that had jumped off the walls were books.
What my right hand was touching now was a steering wheel. That’s what had cued me. Tactile memory reaction. Common sense, something I seemed short on these days, told me what my left hand was most likely touching. A water-ballooned corpse. I made myself reach around and feel along what I thought to be the face. I couldn’t tell much about features, nose, jawbone, the like. The flesh was too swollen. After a few seconds, I’d had enough. I jerked my hand away from the corpse but held to the steering wheel with the other.
I was beginning to pass out from need of air. Black spots swirled inside my head. It was hard to remember not to try and breathe.
I pulled myself over the seat and reached between the corpse and the steering wheel to where the driver’s window ought to be. It was open. I yanked myself through and shot up, surfacing like a dolphin at a marine show. The moonlight jumped on me. The air was sharp, and I took in deep breaths that seared my lungs.
I swam to the bank where Leonard stood watching. He leaned out and gave me a hand and pulled me up. I coughed and shivered, said, “Next time, you go in.”
“The van down there?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And I believe Illium Moon is too.”
21.
“I think we should go to the police,” I said. “Talk to Hanson.”
“Not yet,” Leonard said. “Let me think on it.”
My shirt was still damp from dressing while wet, but it felt comfortable in the close heat. I smelled faintly of pond water. We were back over on the East Side, at a little, smoky black juke joint called the Congo Bongo Club, having a beer. Well, Leonard was having a beer. I was having a nonalcoholic beer. The place served them, but they seemed embarrassed about it. The bartender, who was also the waiter, kinda slunk over and put it on the table like a patient giving a pretty nurse a urine specimen.
The lights in the joint were not too good. Most of what light there was came from red-and-blue neon beer signs at the bar and the blue-white glow from the jukebox. In fact, it was so dark in the back of the place you could have pulled your dick out and put on a rubber and no one would have known it. It wasn’t the kind of place had a no-smoking section either. The cigarette and cigar smoke was thick enough to set a beer glass on.
The joint smacked of fire hazard. If there was a rear exit, you probably had to go through a back office to get to it. A fire started here, the office was locked, and the front door got blocked, you could kiss your charred ass good-bye. The music on the juke was great, however. John Lee Hooker.
We were trying to figure our next move. Or Leonard was figuring our next move. I was wondering what the cops did to you if they found out you had discovered a body in a pond and went away and didn’t tell them. I was certain dire consequences hovered above the question. I had already spent some time in prison, and I didn’t want another stretch. I wasn’t even crazy about a small fine.
“There’s things here don’t jive right,” Leonard said, “but I can’t put my finger on the problem.”
In the glow of the jukebox, I saw a big black man eye-balling us from a table across the way, throwing back beer like water. Actually, he was eyeballing me, as carefully as a birdwatcher might a rare yellow-throated two-peckered brush warbler. I suddenly realized just how white my skin was. Maybe we’d have done better to have picked up a six-pack at a convenience store.
I didn’t say anything to Leonard, as the faintest hint of intimidation made his dick hard, but I kept my eye on the guy.
We shouldn’t have gone in the Congo Bongo anyway. In my old age it seemed I was becoming less wise and cautious. It was supposed to be the other way around. Maybe, after forty, a kind of self-destruct button kicks in.
“I don’t know for a fact there was a body in the van,” I said, blinking away tobacco smoke. “It just seems likely, because it damn sure didn’t feel like a bundle of books I was touching. Question is, if it is a body, and it is Illium, why is he in the pond?”
“Bad driving?”
“That’s not high on my list. Seriously, Leonard.”
“Suicide?”
“Actually, I thought of that one. Don’t get pissed, but let me throw out a theory, OK?”
“Toss it.”
“Say your uncle and Illium met and took to one another like flies to shit, discovered they had something in common. They liked little kids, and not to pet on the head.”
“I see this coming.”
“Say your uncle did kill the child under his flooring. Killed him somewhere else and brought him back to the house.”
“To play with?”
“I’m trying to be delicate here.”
“That don’t mean you ain’t thinking it.”
“Illium and Uncle Chester find they both like this kind of thing, and Uncle Chester likes to show Illium what he’s got in the trunk under the floorboards, and they share a few magazines, and let’s say when your uncle dies, Illium begins to feel guilty… No, let’s say lonely. I mean, this isn’t a club. You can’t go to Child Molesters United and find a bunch of guys like you.”
“Way I understand it, it ain’t as hard as you think.”
“So Illium misses your uncle. Gets tired of looking at the kid fuck magazines by himself, just sitting around in the house, waxing his well rope-”
“So he gets all dewy eyed, puts his box of pornography on the couch, and his kid’s clothes, possibly acquired from murders he’s committed, or my uncle’s murders if Illium was just a fantasizer, and he says, ‘Good-bye, cruel world’ to his box of toys, jumps in the bookmobile, runs off in the pond and drowns himself.”
“It’s a theory.”
“It sucks, Hap. It sucks the big ole donkey dick. I don’t buy any of it. And what’s with the coupons? And you know that book I picked up on the bank? It had a mark in it that’s in the copy of Dracula Uncle Chester gave me. A black circle with a red heart on the inside.”
“It’s my turn to say that’s nothing. They were friends. Makes sense Illium marked the books he loaned that way, and your uncle got one.”
“Yeah, and my uncle left me a safety-deposit box containing a book with that inside, and some coupons, so maybe it means more than it seems like it ought to. The coupons seemed nuts until we found those coupons at Illium’s, now I’m beginning to think Uncle Chester was trying to tell me something.”
“And he left you a painting,” I said.
“Yeah, and there’s that,” Leonard said. “And if he was trying to tell me something, why didn’t he just write it down and explain it? Or get in touch with me and tell me? Why the code business? What’s it all mean?”
“I’m afraid Hanson’s right,” I said. “This is starting to sound like Agatha Christie shit, and I don’t know from puzzles. They make my head hurt.”
“Reckon we need Miss Marple?”
“Could be she’s coming over right now,” I said.
The big black guy who’d been watching strolled over to our table. Well, not exactly strolled. He listed a little. He’d had just the right amount of beer. I sized him up, looking for striking zones just in case it wasn’t his intention to discuss politics or summer fashion.
He stopped at our table, said to Leonard, “What the fuck you doin’ in here with this honkie, brother? You trying to get a job promotion? This ain’t no honkie place.”
Leonard leaned over the table, said, “He’s talking about you.”