“Harry Neal, my father is never out. My father has not been out for something like six goddamn months now.”
I nodded again. “Is this voluntary or do you have him chained to the furnace?”
She smirked, pulled a pack of menthol cigarettes out of her pocket, fired one up, and said, “If you leave the cat upstairs with me, you can go see for yourself. Papa is allergic to the things.” She turned and walked back into the house.
I followed her into a small living room filled with thirty-year-old furniture. She slumped in a misshapen black recliner, put her cigarette in a glass ashtray filled with smoldering butts, and held out her arms. I slipped Cat out of her sling and with some apprehension handed her over. “Please be gentle, she’s rather fragile,” I said.
“Rather,” she said. “The poor thing looks like she’s just been liberated from Dachau. The basement door is in the kitchen, to the right of the dishes.”
I paused at a gray door to the right of several stacks of dirty dishes, then pulled it open and descended a staircase made of unfinished two by sixes. Past the furnace, sitting on bare cement, was a new-looking bright red recliner. An old man with a hatchet face and limp, shoulder-length gray hair was slumped in it in front of a huge black television. His left hand, which lay on his thigh, trembled badly. His right hand gripped a stopwatch. The television was off. The man’s eyes were open.
I tapped him on the shoulder. “Mr. Kinch? My name is Harry Neal. I wonder if I may talk to you a moment. It concerns your old business partner, Bob Kokar.”
He looked at me, looked at the stopwatch, licked his blue lips. “Maury comes on in three minutes and fifteen seconds.”
I sighed, avoided looking at that trembling hand, and said, “Mr. Kinch, do you remember your partner, Bob Kokar?”
His manic gray eyes never left the television. “Of course I do. I have Parkinson’s, not Alzheimer’s.”
“Sorry. The day of his stroke, when you and Bob were doing inventory, he had the keys to a Chrysler-made vehicle. Would you happen to know why?”
“Cost you a dollar.”
“What?”
“I said, cost you a dollar.”
Jesus. I fished a dollar out of my pocket and dropped it in his lap. The spastic hand grabbed it and slowly crushed it into a little ball.
After a long silence I asked again, “Mr. Kinch, what was he doing with keys to a Chrysler car?”
“Because he was driving one that day. Had it parked by the loading dock.”
“What kind of car was it?”
“A Chrysler-made vehicle.”
“What kind of Chrysler-made vehicle?”
“Cost you a dollar.”
I fished another dollar out of my pocket and dropped it in his lap.
“It was a 1976 Plymouth. Station wagon.”
“Why was he driving that? Where was his Buick?”
“Cost you a dollar.”
I dropped another dollar in his lap. I had three dollars left.
“Buick was at the garage with a flat tire. He was going to make a delivery. The people who ordered the piece let him borrow their car.”
I dropped a dollar in his lap. “Who were the people?”
The television came to life. The screen glowed, and an excited voice roared, “And only three flex payments of forty-nine ninety-five, so order now! Order now!”
“Mr. Kinch, who were the people with the Plymouth station wagon?”
He flapped that twitching hand at me. “Get out of here. Maury’s on.” And on the huge screen appeared a middle-aged man with a stewardess’s grin and the eyes of an evangelist. Underneath in black letters I read WOMEN WHO MARRY DWARFS.
I stepped in front of the screen, leaned into his face, and said, “Who were the people with the station wagon?”
Mr. Kinch pushed at me with that spastic hand, leaned way to his left so he could see the screen, and hollered, “I don’t know. I never saw them.”
I dropped another dollar in his lap, leaned to my right, stared into his eyes, and hollered, “What was the piece? What did they order?”
Mr. Kinch frantically sat upright. “A chest, a big goddamn chest, like a pirate’s treasure chest.”
Mrs. Ogden was sitting in her recliner, a cigarette hanging out of her mouth and Cat nestled in her arms. She smiled at me. “He give you any trouble? I heard shouting.”
“Not much. He was upset that I was causing him to miss the start of something called The Maury Show.”
She smiled again. “How much?”
“Five dollars.”
She dipped into her sweat suit, pulled out a damp looking fistful of balled-up bills, and counted off five. “Every time I go near the sonofabitch it costs me six or seven dollars, but I get them back when I do the wash.”
I smiled sympathetically, eased Cat into her sling, and asked, “Do you remember any of the people who worked for Bob Kokar and your father? Any who are still around?”
Mrs. Ogden lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of her last one. “Cost you a dollar.”
I dug in my pocket, found a faded, wrinkled dollar, and dropped it in her smoldering ashtray. She grinned. “You’ll find C. C. Dorfman at the health club.”
I said, “Thank you,” and, as my dollar burst into flames, headed for the door.
There are two health clubs in town. The Muscle Stop, located in the old train station, and Blood Sweat and Black Iron, in the old town garage. I phoned The Muscle Stop, and an angry voice informed me that C. C. Dorfman owned Blood Sweat and Black Iron.
Thanks to a significant raise in taxes, the Public Works Department moved into a new garage four or five years ago, leaving a rundown building of gray cement and red brick. In a line along the front of the garage were four bay doors; stuck on the north end was an awkward looking two story barracks.
I pedaled across a gravel parking lot filled with pickup trucks and sport utility vehicles with tough sounding names and leaned the bike against the first bay door. A confused jumble of noise came from inside the building, and I thought I heard someone scream. I put Cat in her sling and walked through a small door built into the first bay door.
And confronted primordial grunting, cries of exertion, weights crashing and banging, and rock-and-roll music screaming from large loudspeakers hanging by clotheslines from steel beams high above my head. The thick, humid air smelled of dirty socks and pizza.
Perhaps thirty people were working the weights. Blood Sweat and Black Iron was just what it said. No treadmills, stairsteppers, or other modern exercise gizmos, just free weights, I-beams with cables, and crude looking devices with discs of black iron hanging on them.
I must have appeared lost and confused, which was accurate, for a short bald man dressed in billowing red pants strutted up to me. He was muscle on muscle, almost as thick as he was tall, and his eyes spoke his devotion. He stared a moment at Cat, who was hanging half out of the sling taking everything in, looked at me, and raised his eyebrows.
I bent down and yelled in his ear, “I’m looking for C. C. Dorfman.”
He pointed to the far end of the garage, gave Cat a last look, shook his head, and strutted back to a barbell with a massive amount of black iron hung on it.
Clutching Cat, I threaded my way through thousands of pounds of grunting, sweating, absurdly veined muscle to the other end of the garage and huddled in a corner, wondering which one of the mutated creatures might be C. C. Dorfman.
Finally I approached a man who was lying on a bench with a loaded barbell above his chest and hollered, “Are you C. C. Dorfman?”
He laughed. “Don’t very damn well think so,” he yelled. “Try the one with the tits.”
I looked to my left and saw a woman standing behind a barbell. She was my height, looked a young forty, and was dressed in drab gray spandex shorts and halter. Her brown hair was cut very short, and like everyone else in the place she was superbly muscled with veins like rope and her face was a lesson in angles and hollows.