Lullaby Town Read online

  "Yeah. You know my mom?"

  "I'm here to see her. I saw you guys racing down the street. You were really flying."

  His smile flashed a yard wide. "I really creamed her today. Usually she wins."

  Karen Shipley said, "Mr. Cole? May I help you?" She was standing in the little passage at the end of the tellers' counter.

  I got up and went over and shook her hand. The handshake was firm and dry and poised, and she looked at me with a clear confidence that she could meet my every banking need. No wedding ring. Up close, and with the sunglasses off, you saw that she was the woman in the video, yet not. It was the face, yet not the same face. As if she had stepped into the transmogrifier with Calvin and Hobbes and had been changed. Her voice was lower and there was a light network of lines around her eyes and she looked better now than she had then, the way most women do as they move into their thirties. I said, "I hope so. I'm going to be moving to the area, and I'd like to discuss financing for the purchase of a home."

  She opened the gate and gave me a warm, professional smile. "Why don't we go back to my office and talk about it."

  "Sure."

  Her office was neat and modern, with a polished executive's desk and well-tended green plants and comfortable chairs in which people with legitimate business could sit and look at her. A Toshiba My Café coffee machine sat on a lowboy filing cabinet between a couple of smoked-glass windows that looked out on the parking lot, and on the wall behind her desk there were framed photographs and certificates and diplomas. Official-looking men and women were standing with Karen in the photos, and in some of them the official-looking people were presenting Karen with what looked like plaques and citations. Some of the citations were on the wall. Greater New England Banking and Trust Award. PTA Meritorious Service Award. Appreciation Award from the Five-Town Area Rotary. A framed real estate license hung beneath a diploma from the State University of New York for a bachelor's degree in finance. Gee, Peter, do I havta? It had been awarded two years ago. I blinked at her and maybe smiled a little. It had been a long time since she'd made herself up like a waitress. She said, "Would you like coffee?"

  "No, thank you."

  She went around and sat behind the desk and folded her hands and smiled at me. "All right. How can I help you?"

  I got up and closed the door.

  She said, "You don't have to do that."

  I left the door closed and went back to my seat. "It's better if it's closed," I said. "I'm afraid I've come to you under false pretenses."

  She made a small frown, wondering what I was talking about.

  I said, "I'm not moving to the area, and I don't want to finance a house. I'm a private investigator. From Los Angeles."

  Her left eye flickered and she didn't move for several seconds. Then she made an effort at the professional smile and sort of cocked her head to one side. Confused. "I'm afraid I don't understand."

  I took out the 8 X 10 of nineteen-year-old Karen Shipley made up like a waitress, unfolded it, and put it on her desk. I said, "Karen Shipley."

  She leaned forward and looked at the 8x10 without touching it. "I'm sorry. My name is Karen Lloyd. I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Your ex-husband, Peter Alan Nelsen, hired me to find you."

  She shook her head, smiled patiently, then used a pencil to push the picture back toward me and stood up. "I don't know anyone named Peter Alan Nelsen and I've never been to Los Angeles."

  I said, "Karen. Come on."

  "I'm sorry. But if you're not here to discuss business with the bank, I think you should leave." She came around the desk and opened the door and stood there, right hand on the knob. Outside, Joyce Steuben glanced at us from her desk and a woman with blue hair took money from the teller.

  I picked up the 8x10 and looked at it and looked at the woman with her hand on the knob. They were one and the same. I had not lost my mind. 'Ten years ago you and Peter Alan Nelsen were divorced. Your theatrical agent was a guy named Oscar Curtiss. You lived in an apartment house on Beechwood Drive

  owned by a woman named Miriam Dichester for almost a year, and then you skipped out on three months' back rent. Twenty-two months after that, you mailed a U.S. postal money order for four hundred fifty-two dollars and eighteen cents to Ms. Dichester. It was postmarked Chelam. This is you in the picture. Your maiden name was Shipley. Then you were Karen Nelsen. And now you're Karen Lloyd."

  She was gripping the door knob so hard that the tendons in the back of her right hand were standing out like bow strings, as if the force of the grip was not so much to hold on to the knob as it was to hold together something that had been carefully constructed over many years and was now in danger of being pulled apart. Her eye gave the flicker again. "I'm sorry. I don't know what you're talking about."

  "Don't know."

  She made the professional smile, but it didn't quite work this time. "I'm sorry."

  I held up the picture. "This isn't you?"

  The little smile again. "No. We do look alike, though, so I can understand your confusion."

  I nodded. Outside, the woman with the blue hair put money in a plain white envelope and put the envelope in her blouse and walked away. Joyce Steuben talked on the phone. The guard read Tom Clancy. Nobody seemed ready to jump up and give me a hand, but then they rarely do. I said, "Peter doesn't want anything from you. He doesn't want to impose on you or to interfere with either your life or the boy's. He just wants to meet his son. He seems sincere in this. You're not going to gain anything by acting this way."

  She didn't move.

  I spread my hands. "Karen, you're found."

  She made a little shrug and shook her head. "I hope you find whoever you're looking for. I really do. Now if you don't mind, I have work to do."

  She didn't move and I didn't move. Outside, a black man in a New York Yankees baseball cap approached the teller and Joyce Steuben hung up the phone and began to write on a yellow legal pad. Somewhere in the back of the little building the heating system clicked on and warm air came through the vents. I said, "If there's nothing to anything I've said, call the guard and have him throw me out."

  She squinted to make the left eye stop moving. The knuckles on the hand holding the knob turned white. Neither of us said anything for quite a while. Then the tip of her tongue appeared and wet her lips. She said, "I'm sorry that you've wasted your time, but I know nothing about any of this."

  I took a deep breath and let it out and then I nodded. "Karen Lloyd."

  "Yes. That's my name."

  "Never been to Los Angeles."

  "Never."

  "Don't know Peter Nelsen."

  "I can understand your confusion. I do look very much like the girl in the picture."

  I nodded again. The black man finished his transaction and left and the teller walked over to Joyce Steuben's desk and sat down. Toby Nelsen appeared in the teller's window, reached through, took a pencil, then disappeared again. Karen Shipley stood very still, legs together, elbows tight at her sides, right hand on the knob and left hanging down at her side. The left was red as if blood had pooled there. I folded the 8 x 10 and put it in my pocket and stood up. "Sorry," I said. "You do look very much alike."

  "Yes."

  "I'll be seeing you."

  "Have a nice day."

  I walked past her and past Joyce Steuben and around the end of the tellers' counter and out past the guard to the front door. I stopped and looked back at her. She had not moved. Her face was tight and contained and her right hand was still gripping the knob of her door. She stared at me a little longer and then she stepped back into the office and shut the door. Toby was concentrating on the math workbook and did not look up.

  I went out to the parking lot and stood by my car beneath a sky that had grown heavy and dense and the color of shale. There was a cold wind coming from the northwest and a formation of large black crows beating their wings a hundred feet overhead. Because of the wind, the crows were pointing in one direction
but traveling in another. I wondered if they knew it, and, knowing it, understood it, or if they were simply oblivious, carried along by a force that was felt but not seen. The same thing happens to people, but most of the time they don't know it, or when they know it, they think it an action of their own devising. They are usually wrong.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Just after four o'clock I drove back to the Howard Johnson's and took a room for the night. I brought in my things, pulled off my clothes, then went into the shower, letting the hot water cut at my scalp and my neck and my shoulders. I let it cut for a long time. When I got out, I drank a glass of water, got dressed, and went down to the bar.

  The bartender was a red-haired woman in her early forties with white lip gloss and heavy silver earrings that looked like little Rorschach patterns. She was cutting limes with a very large knife with a wide, flat blade. She said, 'You're the guy from Los Angeles." These small towns.

  I nodded. "Really packing'm in tonight." I was the only one in the place.

  "Wait'll you have one of my drinks. You'll see why."

  "Uh-huh." You come to these small towns, the people think they're a riot. "The beer cold?"

  "Yeah, but it's flat." You see?

  I asked her for a Falstaff, but all they had was Rolling Rock. She put down the knife and went to a refrigerator with a see-through door and took out a long-necked bottle. She said, "I always wanted to go out to Los Angeles. What they say about the smog true?"

  "Yep."

  "Bet it's nice, though." She opened the bottle and put it and an icy glass on a little napkin in front of me. I had some.

  "It is." I took a little more. Second pull and the bottle was almost empty. Maybe Rolling Rock just sort of naturally went down easy after a hard day of dealing with women who hung on to their lies as if the lies were living things. I had most of the rest of it.

  The bartender said, "I was a kid, I wanted to go out there. I used to think about it all the time, palm trees and people roller-skating at the beach and cruising down the freeways in a convertible." The knife went through another lime. Thunk. "Sometimes things just sort of get away from you." Thunk. She stopped cutting and looked at me. "You want a piece of lime in your beer?"

  "No, thanks."

  "I heard people in California put lime in their beer."

  "No."

  She looked disappointed.

  I left a two dollar tip and went next door into the restaurant. Two guys in plaid flannel L.L. Bean shirts and bright orange hunter's caps sat at a Formica counter, holding heavy white coffee mugs in coarse hands. A chalk board that said Today's Special: Homemade meat loaf sat on a little easel on the counter across from a row of booths. Farther back, there were tables and chairs for people with a greater sense of formality. I sat in a booth by the windows with a delightful view of the parking lot.

  A short woman in a black waitress outfit brought a menu and a glass of ice water, and asked whether or not I'd care for a drink before dinner. The first Rolling Rock had been so good I told her that I'd have a second. Without lime. She wrote on a little pad and said, "We have a special tonight. It's the meat loaf. It's very nice." She was in her sixties.

  I handed back the menu without looking at it. "Then that's what I'll have."

  She gave me an approving smile and went away. I felt the warmth of her smile and was glad that someone approved of me. Karen Shipley probably didn't. You have me confused with someone else. Not much you could do with that. A stranger walks in off the street and tells you that everything you've worked for was about to change. Who you gonna call? Gumshoebusters?

  The waitress came back with the beer. An older couple strolled in and took a table in the dining room. Formal. A single guy in a gray business suit came in carrying the New York Times and sat at the counter, well away from the two guys in the orange hunting caps. He opened his Times to the real estate section. I drank the Rolling Rock and marveled at how good Karen and the boy and the Rotary awards had looked together, and wondered if that would continue with Peter on the scene. With Peter around, maybe their lives would disintegrate and Karen would fall into prostitution and Toby would end up running with a dope fiend vampire motorcycle gang and the Rotary would take back their awards. It happens all the time with Hollywood families.

  The waitress brought the meat loaf on a heavy white plate like the kind they used in cafeterias in the forties. The slice of meat loaf was wide and thick and weighed almost a pound. There was a large portion of creamed potatoes and about a million green peas, and a thick brown gravy had been ladled over the meat loaf and the potatoes. Nurture food. It smelled wonderful. She said, "Can I get you anything else?"

  "Tabasco sauce and another Rolling Rock."

  She brought the Rock and the Tabasco. I applied both liberally. Tabasco is great for clearing the sinus and putting the ruination of lives into perspective. So is the Rolling Rock. The meat loaf was excellent.

  What's wrong with this picture? Peter Alan Nelsen was a celebrity, and the profits from his pictures were subject to stories in Newsweek and Time. Karen would read those stories and know that her ex-husband, the father of her child, was worth millions. Many people, perhaps most, would go after a piece of that, yet she hadn't. Either for herself or for the boy. Interesting. Maybe Peter wasn't the boy's father. Maybe Peter had done such hateful things to Karen that this was her way of punishing him and he deserved it. Maybe Karen was a nut case.

  At five minutes before seven a tall guy with a nose like a chayote squash came in and looked around. He was wearing a bright turquoise shirt with a squash-blossom string tie and black slacks and a black duster. The black slacks were a half inch too short and the pointy black shoes were cut a half inch too low, so you ended up seeing a lot of black socks with little red triangles. He looked at me and the guy with the Times and the couple in the back and then he left. Probably looking for the disco.

  I worked on the meat loaf and the potatoes and the peas and a growing depression. There were questions, and the questions bothered me, but I hadn't been hired to answer questions or even to get Karen Shipley to admit that she was Karen Shipley. I had been hired to find her whereabouts and I had done that. The rest was up to Peter Alan Nelsen. So what if Karen Shipley didn't like it, and so what if I didn't like it. They don't pay me to like it.

  I ordered two more of the Rolling Rock to bring back to my room. A couple more Rock and I'd probably like it just fine.

  Out in the parking lot the guy in the string tie met a white Thunderbird and said something to the driver. They talked for a minute, then the guy in the string tie got in on the passenger's side and the Thunderbird crept away around the side of the motel.

  The waitress brought the beer in a little brown paper bag and the check and a single peppermint. I signed for the check and went out through the lobby. My room was on the ground floor, off the parking lot on the west side of the motel, halfway down a two-story row of rooms and just past a little alcove with an ice machine and a Pepsi machine and a stair leading up to the second floor. The Taurus was parked outside my room and a green Polara station wagon was parked closer up on the street side of the lot. A Peterbilt eighteen-wheeler took up most of the far end of the parking lot, looking like a supertanker in dry dock. No white Thunderbird.

  When I got to the stairwell, the guy in the string tie and another guy stepped out. Guess they put the Thunderbird on the other side.

  The guy with the string tie said, "Hey, Joey, you think this is the guy?"

  Joey was shorter and wider than me with a round cannonball head and caviar zits and a thick fleshy body that made him look sort of like an overgrown Pillsbury dough boy. He was wearing a blue Navy pea coat open over two layers of flannel shirts. The shirttails hung out. He said, 'Yeah, this is him. Looks like a fuck from out of town who don't belong around here. Like he needs a little help to find his way home." He was maybe twenty-six, but he looked younger. He also looked mean.

  The guy with the string tie nodded and made a sort of sn
ickering sound. The snickering sound was a nose whistle. "Fuckin' A, Let's get him on his way."

  I said, "Are you guys for real, or is this going to be on America's Funniest Home Videos?" They sounded like Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall. Brooklyn or the Bronx or Queens, but I couldn't tell which. New Yorkers all sound alike.

  The guy with the string tie took out a piece of pipe maybe ten inches long and Joey took a half-step forward. Joey said, "We got a message for you, Mickey Mouse. Pack your fuckin' mouse ears and go back to Disneyland."

  I blinked at them. "Did Karen Lloyd put you guys on me?"

  The string tie waved the pipe so I could see it better. "You don't ask questions, fuck face. You just do what we say." He was breathing hard and the nose whistle was loud. Even Joey looked.

  I said, "That's some nose whistle. Is it natural or did you have to stick something up in there?"

  Joey said, "This fuck thinks we're kidding."

  Johnny Style swung the pipe from somewhere out around the North Atlantic.

  I stepped to the inside and hit him in the forehead with the two bottles of Rolling Rock. The broken glass cut through the bag and beer sprayed back along my arm and across the wall and the sidewalk. Johnny Style said, "Uh," and dropped the pipe and fell backward over a curb stone. Joey sort of waddled forward, throwing a lot of overhand rights and lefts without much in the way of control, trying to do it the way he'd done it in schoolyards and on playgrounds for most of his life.

  I sideslipped and hit him twice in the face and once in the neck and drove a straight kick from the tae kwon do into his solar plexus. He stopped swinging and made a sort of coughing sound and stepped back. Surprised.

  I said, "What's this got to do with Karen Lloyd?"

  Joey made the coughing sound again, then something hard hit me behind my right ear and I went down. Third guy in the Thunderbird. I kicked up and punched, but I don't think I hit him. My eyes weren't working too well and it was hard to see through the starbursts. Joey leaned over and punched me some more in the ribs and again in the back of the head, saying, "You fuck! You fuck!" He was slow, and he was stupid, but he was strong. He lifted my head by the hair and sort of shook my head and said, "Get out of town and keep your mouth shut or we'll turn you into a fuckin' piece of hamburg. You got that? You got that, you fuck?" I tried a claw move at his eyes, but I missed. The guy with the string tie said, 'Jesus Christ, I gotta get to a hospital."