I nodded, trying to make the gesture broad and pleasant. Two of them nodded back. One of them snuck a peek at Donna again. He licked his dry lips, as if somebody had just put a big Thanksgiving dinner down in front of him.
“We’d like to see a man named Lockhart,” I said.
The first man, in greasy green work clothes that smelled of car oil, smiled. He had bad teeth. “You ain’t the only one. He’s been gettin’ a lot of calls the past couple days.”
“You can’t find him?”
Now the second man spoke. He was tall and tubercular. His Adam’s apple looked like it weighed twenty-five pounds. His face didn’t make sense. He had a sad little mouth and a jackal’s eyes. “Oh, everybody knows where he’s at.”
The third man grinned. “He’s up in the attic. The poor sumbitch.” He had Elvis sideburns and greasy black hair. Blackheads gave his face an unfinished look, like a board with too many knots. “Anderson’s gonna keep him there, too, you can bet your ass on that.”
“Anderson the man around here?”
“You got that right, mister,” the first one said.
“He inside?”
The third man guffawed. “He always inside, pal. Always. Try’n sneak out some time and you’ll find if he’s inside or not.”
It was then, for the first time, that I realized that these guys were stoned. Between the first and second I saw a small brown prescription bottle. It probably contained cough syrup, which is a cheap high because it doesn’t take much and it lasts a long time.
“All right if we go inside?” I asked.
“Hey, prince, you’re askin’ the wrong man.”
I smiled. “Guess we’ll have to go inside to find out if it’s all right to go inside, huh?” But they were too stoned to see the irony.
We went inside. I almost had to pick their eyeballs off Donna’s behind, like ticks after a picnic.
Once there had been a vestibule but it had been knocked out. Now most of the first floor was one big communal room with wobbly furniture from at least five different eras. There was a Motorola black-and-white that had been new about the time Uncle Miltie was laying claim to Tuesday nights, and a phonograph that had probably played a lot of Bing Crosby records. From the kitchen drifted the odors of institutional food: oversalted, oversweetened, anything to kill the taste. There was a residue of cigarette smoke that could have been cut with hedge clippers. It was a sad place, a place where men without women and without dreams passed days in front of the TV or under the thumb of a minimum-wage boss who hated them — men who feared the slammer but didn’t really know where else to go. The majority, hapless, hopeless, would be back there within six months.
I took Donna’s arm and led her over to a big board that looked like a flight schedule in a terminal. There was a long list of men’s names, and next to each was written the place where he was employed. Next to these were two boxes, one that read “Time Out” and one that read “Time Back.”
We were reading all this when a whiskey voice behind us said, “Help you folks?”
When he reached us, I saw that his voice complemented his body perfectly. He had slicked-back forties-style hair and a wide, flat Slavic face with black eyes that knew all sorts of truths that most of us would rather not know. He had a gold-capped tooth and he used Aqua Velva green and he put out a hand that could have crushed a whole six-pack of beer. He wore an old blue cardigan sweater that sloped to cover his considerable girth and gray OshKosh washable pants and a pair of leather house slippers that fit as tightly as shoes. He was every boss in every institution I’d ever known.
I introduced myself and Donna, and then he introduced himself as B. J. Anderson. “Mr. Anderson,” I said, “we’re looking for a man named Lockhart.”
He smiled with his gold tooth. “Well, you’ve come to the right place, but unfortunately you’ve come at the wrong time. I’m afraid Mr. Lockhart has gone and got himself grounded.”
“Do you mind if I ask what for?”
He kept on smiling. “Not if you don’t mind if I ask why you’re so interested in Mr. Lockhart.”
I decided to tell him the truth. “He may know something about a murder.”
The smile went back into mothballs. “Lockhart? Murder?”
I explained our association with Wade, and how Stan, the janitor at the theater, had said that Lockhart had come over to look through Reeves’s office.
“So that’s where he went,” B. J. Anderson said.
“Pardon?”
“The other night Lockhart went out past his curfew. When he got back he looked kinda shook up but he wouldn’t tell me nothing. Not a goddamn thing. So I put him up in the attic.” He raised his black eyes toward the upstairs. “That’s where I keep ’em when they’ve been bad.” The smile played on his lips. “This is the only halfway house in the state that hasn’t had a man involved in a felony. And you know why? ’Cause I just put the bad apples upstairs and let them cool their heels a little bit.”
Donna said, “We’d really like to talk to him if we could.”
For the first time he seemed to recognize her. But he was past sex; he had his institution, and that was more fulfilling than any woman had ever been. “I’m not sure that’d be good idea, miss.”
“It’s very important.”
He turned back to me. “You say you used to be a police officer?”
“Yes.”
“You mind if I check that out.”
“Not at all.” I gave him Edelman’s name and extension.
“Be right back.”
“Spooky guy,” she whispered when he was gone. “No wonder so many men go back to prison. They’d probably do anything to get away from him.”
He came back maybe five minutes later and said, “Edelman damned you with faint praise.”
“Meaning what?”
“Oh, he said you had been a detective all right, and a decent one, and that you were a trustworthy type, but he didn’t seem all that happy that you were spending your time working on this Wade thing.” He looked at us and tucked a sour little expression into the corner of his mouth. “Hell, I read all about that Wade character. Alcoholic personality, violent tendencies when he’s juiced; hell, folks, our prisons are filled with people like that. Why should some TV star be any exception?”
Donna said, “We’d really like to see Lockhart, Mr. Anderson.”
He sighed and pushed his hands deep into his OshKoshes. “If I tell you five minutes then I mean five minutes, you understand?”
We both nodded like good little children.
He took us up a flight of stairs narrow and twisting enough to be part of one of those horror houses for kids that appear around Halloween. The stairs smelled of dust and disinfectant. When we reached the second floor we saw a large open area with bunk beds. Though there was another TV set and old posters of Farah Fawcett and Raquel Welch in their prime, there was no mistaking what this was. The place smelled of piss and jism and troubled sleep and grief. It was a different kind of prison than the ones the men had been in previously, but it was a prison nonetheless. The gray sky pressed at the window as if to signify as much. Everything in the open area seemed gray.
“It’s the next floor we want,” Anderson said, and we continued our way up.
By the time we reached the third floor, Anderson, whose fingers were stained mahogany from smoking too many unfiltered cigarettes down too low, had to fall back against the wall to catch his breath.
“I kinda hate puttin’ myself through this walk for somebody like that Reeves fella,” he said.
“You didn’t like him?” I asked.
“Like him?” Anderson said, trying to catch his breath. He looked to be fifty, maybe older. “I hated him. He was a con artist.”
“I’m not sure what you mean?”