Nighttown Page 4

  By 1894 he had obviously re-crossed the Atlantic to the land of his birth because he was arrested, under the name of Horton, in Brooklyn, New York, for aggravated jewel theft, the aggravation being assault and battery via fists. It wasn’t much of a crime, since the jewels had belonged to a widely disliked arriviste rather than a member of one of the establishment clans who owned the judicial system, and fist fights were accepted at the time as a diverting form of masculine conflict resolution. Still, the arrest made the papers during a slow news week when a search of Horton’s rooms turned up two complete sets of documents in two names, Horton and Codwallader. There was no way to sort out which, if either, was real and which was bogus; it was still seven or eight or nine years before the first criminal was convicted on the basis of a fingerprint and more than a decade before the military and police departments began storing them as a means of identification. The Man with Two Names, as the papers styled him—it was a very slow news week—disappeared after being released on bail, and both of his sets of identity papers, which had been in the custody of a small police precinct station, disappeared with him. As was often the case in those days, the questioning of the cops charged with safekeeping the documents seems to have been, well, mild.

  He then worked his way back west, where he was spotted by vengeful victims in Virginia City, Nevada. They tracked him to the vicinity of San Diego, where he left misleading signs suggesting he’d fled into Mexico. He then ambled north, and as Henry Wallace Horton, Jr., he burrowed into Los Angeles, grew a beard, talked with a mild British accent, distributed his money in attention-getting quantities among several local banks, learned some manners, married above him, built the house I was currently disliking so much, and bought his way into the social register. In his stout, prosperous sixties, he capped his saga by siring the girl-child who, ninety-seven years later, would wither away at the center of a cloud of baby powder in the master bedroom just to my left. A Miscellany of American Rogues hinted that there might have been another kid or two, by a mistress or several mistresses—it really was a man’s world back then—but no names were given, either because they were unknown or because the publisher’s lawyers got nervous.

  And at some unknown point, before, after, or during Horton’s sojourn in England, something extremely valuable had found its way into his hands, something that the woman with the rented children and the orange Dynel hair wanted very badly. Something small enough to be concealed in a nineteenth-century doll.

  Okay, the evidence said I was alone. I turned right and made a quick pass down the hallway, walking on the balls of my feet. The floor responded with resentful protest, so I sidestepped to the right-hand wall and hugged it until I came to the first door. There were two on this side and two on the left side, and all were wide open.

  The first room was a bedroom that no one had used in a long time. There was a leak in the roof and water had probed its way down to the ceiling above the bed, where someone, perhaps in the ’30s or ’40s, had installed a ceiling light, a nice, circular piece of thick etched glass in a heavy brass fixture, now tarnished to a dull, ashen gray-green. The water had found the hole that had been drilled for the electrical wire and followed it down around the fixture and onto the bed. As I stood there, I heard a plop that sounded like someone dropping a quarter into a bowl of pudding. The bed had, at some time in the past, grown so heavily soaked that one side of the frame had snapped, creating a v-shaped break in the middle and putting a valley in the center of the mattress, where the old ruffled fabric covering the box spring had become a black ripple of mold. The place stank of rotting cloth with an undertone that might have been wet feathers if the mattress was old enough, which I doubted. Whatever it was, it reeked, but I preferred it to the baby powder.

  An old book, its covers warped and its pages puckered, sat on a small table at the head of the bed. Beside it were a pair of dainty wire-rimmed spectacles. The whole room said maiden aunt, a term not currently much in use, consigned to the linguistic trash heap reserved for so many thoughtless and casual insults. Whoever she was, she was undoubtedly long dead by now. But, unlike the portion of the house I’d seen so far, in this room the furniture and fittings seemed intact.

  I’d intended to check the bathroom, but when I stepped onto the bedroom’s carpet it made a disorienting squelching sound, and I figured, what the hell. Above me, the tapping of the rain increased in volume and another splorp landed percussively on the bed.

  The next room, which was on the street side of the house, was probably the sitting room, although there wasn’t much left to sit on; like the first floor, it had been picked over. Faded dark spots on the carpet, places unbleached by the sun that had poured through the big rippled windows in pre-paper bag days, made it clear that someone had carried off the furniture. In this case, judging from the disembodied shadows left behind, the furniture had been a couple of short couches and what might have been an armchair. A nice cherrywood table, as yet unlooted, stood at the juncture of the L that had been formed by the couches. On the room’s long wall, opposite the door, were more bookshelves, but these had fewer open spaces. The expensive knickknacks had probably been downstairs where they could impress visitors.

  I almost missed the single long shelf on the wall to my immediate left because it was down at about hip height. Stretched along it I saw, with a sudden increase of interest, a line of dolls.

  The carpet was dry in here. I stepped through the door and beamed the little yellow light at the small figures grouped there in an unlikely assembly, a mixed lot that ranged from cheap old toys to some that had gradually become collectible. Five of the fourteen dolls on the shelf were rag dolls, and two of those had black faces—“calico and button dolls” from the end of the nineteenth century. While some black-faced dolls from that period are racist caricatures, these were nicely, if inexpensively, clothed, not wearing the patched rags and head scarves that distinguish the more judgmental dolls. Cheap when new, each of these was worth almost a thousand to the right buyer, probably more than some of the knickknacks that had been swiped from the bookshelves on the first floor. But the people who had been emptying this place had been looking for substance and shine, and these folk art dolls, beautiful in their way, didn’t make the cut.

  I scanned the rest of the shelf quickly; the rain was coming down harder, and my car was more than a block away. A few of the dolls were very nice indeed, including a fancy one from Paris, but nothing of Maison Jumeau quality. Not even close.

  The room across the hall was completely empty. Even the carpet had been pulled up, leaving strips of wood at the juncture of floors and walls, into which the carpet tacks had been driven. There was a leak in here, too, slowly expanding a small dark puddle in the far right corner. Hurrying a little now as I headed back toward the master bedroom, I peered into the third room and saw a child’s bed, a glorified cradle of sorts, set into a small gondola that had been carved, it appeared, from a single piece of heavily lacquered wood, a cream color that probably emphasized the pink flesh tones of the child—presumably Miss Daisy—who slept there. I went over and touched it. The wood felt cool and smooth, and the gondola rocked gently side to side, with a surprised creak. Mice had nested pungently in the snarl of sheets. I figured this was probably the mistress of the house’s first bed, and it seemed to be time to stop postponing my look at her last.

  4

  Intimate Agonies

  When I pushed on the door to the master bedroom, which was ajar, it bumped against something, making a little thunk, but it kept going. Whatever it hit hadn’t been alive, so I just stood in the doorway and played the light around the room.

  It was a big room with a higher ceiling than the others, as befitted the master or mistress of the house, and more window space; both the opposite wall and the one to my right were covered in brown shopping bags. In the far right corner was a fireplace, its tiles black with use, and in the fireplace were two scorched and blackened twists that I
could identify, even from where I was standing, as cloth. The charred, knotted forms nestled among the charred hearts of some thick logs.

  Up close, they were just clothes: some kind of patterned dress, it looked like, and a few lighter-colored things that could have been either shirts or blouses. They’d apparently been wadded up and tossed in on top of the tag end of a fire so that they’d sparked and blackened and stiffened without actually bursting into flame except the outer layer or two. The sheer volume of smoke it put off, I thought, must have been formidable for anyone who remained in the room. I bent at the waist and sniffed the acrid aftermath of the fire. Sharp as it was, it smelled better than the floral excess of the baby powder, the scent of which was almost overwhelming in here. The clothes, whoever owned them, had probably been burned after Miss Daisy’s final departure. Surely no one would have intentionally created such a choking stench in a room containing a woman who couldn’t walk.

  Or maybe they would have. I straightened and turned to face the bed, which I was surprisingly reluctant to look at. My instinct had been correct. For all her money and her hard-bought social standing, Miss Daisy had passed her final years in a cheap, flimsy hospital bed, barely as big as the miserly single mattress in the room behind the kitchen. At some point the bed had been kicked or had banged into something so forcefully that the wheel at one corner of the mattress’s foot had been bent, tilting the whole thing down a little, like a derelict pool table. It looked incredibly uncomfortable.

  But the sheets eclipsed everything else that was wrong. They were splotched and filthy, a map of various intimate agonies: incontinence and bleeding and hair loss and the sharp wrinkles caused by fear- and pain-sweat, and above all of that, the sheer, monstrous indifference of those who’d been tasked with caring for her. I closed my eyes, inhaled that fucking powder, and forced myself to go to work.

  A little gathering of blankets at the foot of the bed released a puff of scented powder when I lifted it, looked beneath it, and let it fall again. Nothing there. Nothing under the bed. Nothing on the two shelves along the windowless wall to the left of the door except some old, worthless books, mostly Reader’s Digest condensations of best-sellers from the ’40s and ’50s: stately names like Thomas B. Costain, Daphne du Maurier, Kathleen Winsor, Samuel Shellabarger. Each sounded whiter than the last. I had read du Maurier’s Rebecca and Shellabarger’s Prince of Foxes, both found on my mother’s shelves, but what I remembered most clearly was that Shellabarger had married a woman with the indelible name Vivan Georgia Lovegrove Borg. In these volumes these writers’ imaginary worlds had been shrunk and repackaged, boiled down to size for people who would rather talk about books than read them. There was no doll behind the books.

  No doll in the closet, not hidden in or between any of the clothes, musty and moth-eaten, that hung disconsolately there, abandoned decades ago; nothing on the shoe racks other than Miss Daisy’s old but almost unworn twenty or so pairs of shoes. Nothing in the shoes. In the bathroom, nothing. Four moving boxes stacked in a corner contained nothing but more books, some baby clothes that practically disintegrated when I picked them up, a couple of tarnished necklaces—costume jewelry from another time—and, at the bottom of the last box, a stack of folded newspapers all with the same front page, brittle enough to break between my fingers. They were dated 1931, and in the lower right-hand corner was a story about the death of financier and philanthropist Henry Wallace Horton, Jr.

  In other words, nothing anywhere. I got on hands and knees, pushed the grate with its burned clothes aside, and pointed the penlight up the chimney. Nothing but soot and bricks.

  Harried Mom had said it would be in the bedroom.

  I turned back to the door and stopped. Sticking out from behind it was a piece of smooth wood.

  When I moved the door, I saw several pieces of what had once been a chair made out of some light wood: just a seat, four dowelled legs, and a curved back. One side of the back had been forced down, wrenching it hard enough to pop the pegs that had held the legs in place, splintering the wood.

  Because of where the chair was, it was impossible not to see how the damage had occurred. It had been propped beneath the door knob in an attempt to close it against someone who fully intended to get in. The door could only have been barred from inside. Miss Daisy, I knew, had been unable to walk. Had she crawled out of bed and across the room to force that chair into place? And had she made it back to bed before the chair shattered and the door flew open?

  Fifty thousand bucks wasn’t enough for this.

  But here I was, and I figured that the house, vile in so many ways, had shown me its worst. I clenched the light between my teeth so I could use both hands and ransacked the entire second floor, just barging room to room, moving everything, tossing things aside as an outlet for the anger. Looking everywhere and finding nothing. Coming back toward the master bedroom I saw the pull-down in the hallway ceiling that would give me access to the attic, and I climbed up the steps that unfolded when I yanked it down. The attic was dark, dusty, wet, and empty. I could see where things had been stored by the trails through the dirt that they’d created when they were shoved toward the pull-down, but other than that, my beam bounced off nothing between me and the walls. The water was dripping pretty good up here.

  I stood there on the rickety fold-down stairs and thought until I began to sneeze like a machine gun, probably from the dust. When I had it under control, I went down the ladder, shoved the pull-down back into place, and drifted into the nursery, avoiding even looking into Miss Daisy’s room. There was a folding chair beside the gondola-shaped baby’s bed, and I sat there and rocked the gondola, listening to the creak, and thought some more. After I ran out of things to think about and got my anger under control, I got up and went down the stairs, figuring I might as well backtrack all the way to the front door, search the elephant’s foot umbrella stand, and then go over the house inch by inch, including, this time, the basement.

  At the foot of the stairs, the scent of baby powder suddenly blossomed. It increased as I passed the archway to the living room, but by the time I registered the conundrum and slowed, a light had snapped on behind me, and someone said, “Stop.” I must not have stopped quickly enough because an instant later I heard a soft thup, and the hardwood floor beside my right foot erupted into splinters.

  5

  The Way Some People Have Dobermans

  After Harried Mom left McDonald’s, $27,500 poorer, I’d done exactly what she’d made me promise to do.

  I sat right where I was, without getting up, without going to the bathroom, without picking up my phone, without looking at or speaking to anyone, keeping both hands in plain sight, for ten minutes. For the first sixty seconds or so I was counting my heartbeats, which were coming hard and fast; I knew I’d made a mistake. The phone rang twice, but I ignored it and sat there, breathing in enough airborne fat to clog an artery, and wishing I’d gotten up and left when I first wanted to.

  But Ronnie and I needed the money. And we needed it now.

  When my phone said the ten minutes were done, I got up and went to my car without looking around, started it, and headed north on Western with the phone on my lap. When it rang this time I punched the speaker button without picking it up, and Louie the Lost said, “Nobody touched your car. Guy with a head of hair like a porcupine looked at it from eight, ten feet away and wrote down your license plate, but nobody planted nothing on it.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Did you get a picture?”

  “Lotta hair,” he said. “Looked like an exploding armchair. I got him sort of sideways, but it’s mostly hair and the tip of a real honker of a nose. Hair’s gotta be a wig.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Where are you?”

  “Five, six cars back. Nobody suspicious between you and me, by which I mean nobody who pulled out from Micky D’s. Why don’t you haul over to the curb for a minute and let me make sure nobody slows down.
Hang on. I’m pulling over in about five seconds. You see a space?”

  “I do,” I said, heading for it. The curb was red, but I wasn’t getting out. “In,” I said.

  “Okay, I’m just watching here.”

  A couple of cars went by. I said, “God, this is an ugly street.”

  “Rents are going up anyway,” Louie said. “You know what I like about crooks?”

  “No. I haven’t even wondered—”

  “The whole fucking world economy has turned into a giant sponge that the only reason it exists is to squeeze all the money there is up to the One Percent. That’s why these rents are going up. It’s like, whatever river you’re on, the water flows into Lake Fatso and stays there. But us, we don’t do that, crooks don’t. We steal it and keep it all for ourselves. The thick-fingered assholes on top never even smell it.”

  “Makes me all patriotic. Can I move yet?”

  “Think she’s in position?”

  “If I didn’t think she was in position,” I said, “I wouldn’t move. She’s had plenty of time.”

  “Little cranky, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I said, pulling back into traffic. “I hate not having choices.”

  It was one of K-Town’s biggest malls, four immaculate floors that would have stood out even in Seoul. I’d chosen it because of the layout.

  I punched the speed-dial for Ronnie’s number as I crossed the second level of the garage, heading for the double door I wanted. “Coming in,” I said. I put the phone, still on and connected, into the pocket of my yellow T-shirt so I could be heard while I was out of sight and pushed the doors open with my free hand. The other was holding the thick manila envelope, which now had the smaller envelope inside it.