I left.
I drove to Kutz’s. I wasn’t hungry for the greasy hot dogs Kutz floated in tepid water no one had ever seen him change. I needed a calm place to think, and maybe I needed a laugh, if only for a moment.
The wienie wagon beneath the viaduct was more Leo’s place than mine, so much so that he prided himself on being among the very first to visit Kutz’s each spring. That year, Kutz had roused himself early in the calendar and had opened the peeling wood trailer just a few weeks before. There’d been plenty of snow on the ground, and ice stuck to the bare branches of the trees. No matter. Leo breezed over to the turret that morning, grinning his wide grin. He always knew, always, when Kutz would open.
“Spring has arrived,” he said, stomping snow off his red galoshes. “Kutz is cooking.”
“It’s February. There’s more than a foot of snow on the ground.” Kutz never opened for the season until the first of his most relentless visitors, the flies that called Kutz’s trailer their summer home, were ready to take wing. That wouldn’t happen for weeks.
“Which is why I’ll suffer a ride in your Jeep. I’m assuming your ultralow four-wheel drive will work today?”
It was a cheap shot. My low-gear transmission worked more than half the time. That day, it worked particularly fine, blazing a new trail in the snow, for there were no other tire marks. Only Kutz’s snowshoe tracks led down to the trailer beneath the viaduct.
Leo and I were first for the new season. Again.
“I could say I’m pleased to see you jerks, but I’m not, so I won’t,” Kutz had said, as Leo and I trudged across the snow.
As always, a scowl creased his grizzled, unshaved face. Young Kutz, as he was most formally known, was on the wrong side of eighty and looked every bit of it. That day, he was bundled up in thick coats and a sagging knit hat, as shiny with old grease as the hot dogs he served up.
Charitable people said his lack of social grace stemmed from his advanced years. Others, who’d known Kutz for many of those eighty years, said it was less complicated: Kutz had always been a mean son of a bitch.
“Happy to see you too, Mr. Kutz,” Leo said, effervescing at the thought of the delights to come. He ordered his usual six dogs, cheese fries, and huge root beer.
“And you?” Kutz fixed his beady eyes on me.
“My usual as well. One hot dog, and a small Diet Coke to soften part of the grease.”
Waiting for Kutz to snag the hot dogs from the muck of last year’s water, we stomped our feet and studied the peeling paint on the menu board. The items were the same, but he’d lined out last year’s prices and marked in new ones.
“Your prices have gone up twenty percent,” I said.
“Ain’t you heard? There’s been a depression.”
“Recession.”
“Recession, depression, whatever. They all mean the same thing: hard times.”
“Exactly. And that’s why you raised your prices, because people are having a harder time getting by?”
“Some TV asshole says I got to embrace my financial destiny. That means I charge more. I keep the recession away from me, it spreads. Pretty soon the whole planet is doing better.”
Clearly, Kutz hadn’t been idling over the winter. He’d been watching Lester Lance Leamington, same as me.
Our lunch was slid out beneath the scarred Plexiglas window in less time than would be needed if he served things hot, and we stomped around to the picnic tables in back. We brushed the snow off a table and two benches and sat down.
Surrounded by drifted snow that was almost knee deep, Leo lined up his six hot dogs like torpedoes in a row. “Ah,” he said, as he took his first bite of the season. With Leo, so much was ritual.
That had been less than a month ago.
“Where’s the other jerk, the tiny one?” Kutz asked now, as I walked up alone.
“In the hospital, with tubes in every orifice, draining what he ate here the last time.”
His face lit up with joy. He loved compliments.
I pretended to examine the unmarked snow around the trailer. “Business good?”
“Word’s getting around. We got celebrities coming here now. We’re going to be on the news, any day.”
“Board of Health?”
“Laugh your ass. That broad from Channel 8, she came around.”
“Jennifer Gale?”
“That’s the one. Nice rack, though you can’t see much when she’s wearing a coat.”
“She was here to eat?”
“She said she didn’t have time, but she heard I was real popular with the construction trade, and was they coming around, now that they was building that new mansion? Millionaires is coming for sure, I told her. I’m going to be busting my butt real soon, with all the new houses going up.”
I took my hot dog and diet around to the back. Most of the snow was gone off the same table Leo and I had used that first time this season. I sat there. With me, things could be ritual, too.
I took a sip of the Coke and tried to think. Stumbling around, I’d exposed Endora and Ma to a bulky killer. Stumbling around, I’d turned one of Rivertown’s building inspectors purple at the mention of the only new construction to come to town in years. Stumbling around, I was seeing Jennifer Gale everywhere.
I took out my cell phone and called her. She didn’t answer. I left a message and took a bite of the hot dog. It was cold. I was cold.
I downed the last of the Coke, left the hot dog on the table for the pigeons, and got out of there.
Fifteen
The simultaneous ringing of my cell phone and the thunder of someone pounding on my door jerked me out of the La-Z-Boy the next morning. I’d fallen asleep with my clothes on, sometime in the middle of the night, when my nerves had at last become exhausted.
I grabbed my phone and ran down the wrought-iron stairs to the front door.
“Dek?” Jenny Galecki was saying, simultaneously to her cell phone and to me as I pulled open the door.
“You’re returning my call?”
She was out of breath, and her face was flushed. “What?”
“I called you yesterday.”
“Five times.” She pushed past me and pulled the door shut. “You know Tebbins at city hall?”
“A lizard,” I said. “You want coffee?”
“Where were you this morning?”
“Sleeping.”
“Alone?”
“I have intimacy issues. What’s with Tebbins?”
“You were screaming at him yesterday.”
“He wasn’t being productive. Neither were you. As you said, I called five times.”
“Leo Brumsky? Was he screaming at him, too?”
“Leo, with Tebbins? What are you talking about?”
“Snark Evans, for openers. Remember him? That guy I checked out for you? Who is he? Was he there with Tebbins, Leo, and you?”
“You’re talking riddles. I need coffee.” I feinted a turn to go up the stairs.
“Tebbins’s secretary said she heard you yelling at him. Leo’s name came up, along with your vanishing man, Snark.”
“You’re really not going to tell me what’s going on?”
“I’ll buy you breakfast, but only if you move quickly.”
“Why’s that?”
“So we won’t be interrupted by the police arresting you. Someone, if not you or Leo or Snark Evans, just killed Tebbins.”
One of the advantages of falling asleep in one’s clothes is it takes no time to get ready to go out. I followed her to her Prius, fast.
“How do Snark Evans, Leo Brumsky, and you relate to Tebbins?” she asked, pulling away from the curb.
Things had just gotten elevated. I’d have to trust her if I wanted to get any new information.
“Back when Leo was in college, he and Snark worked for Tebbins at the city garage. Years passed, and then, a few days ago, Snark called Leo, looking for something he supposedly left with him, back in the day.”
“What was it?”