The Third Bullet - Страница 3

“Fair enough, Mr. Swagger. I’ll see you there.”

She was punctual and found him sitting in a booth in the rear of the gaudy place, whose cheesy cheerfulness seemed in counterpoint to his grave countenance and all the hollows and planes of his tight old face, with its deltas of fissure extending from each eye like the broken cataracts of an ancient river of kings. Or maybe, sans the warrior romance, he was just a beat-to-hell old guy. Meanwhile, the kind of citizen who defines the interstate as freedom and paradise swirled and bobbed through the busy place, raising clamor, eating ice cream, yelling at children, and exhibiting all the discontents of motorized civilization that one can manage.

“Ma’am? Say, I don’t even have a name for you.”

She sat across from him. “My name is Jean Marquez. I’m Filipino by heritage, born and raised here. I am a journalist by profession, though this is not about a story, and I’m not working for my newspaper. I’m the daughter of two doctors, fifty-five years old, and a widow.”

“I’m sorry to hear of your loss, Ms. Marquez. I’ve lost some very close people and understand the hurting.”

“I thought you might. Anyhow, you should call me Jean. Everybody does. My husband was named James Aptapton. Does that name mean anything?”

“Hmm,” he said, and somehow, yes, it did. His mind and face fogged in search, and finally, he said, “I’m coming up with some kind of writer. Wrote about snipers? Knew guns, is that right? Don’t believe I ever met the fellow or read his books, but I’d run into the name here and there. I’d get asked, now that I remember, if I was some hero he wrote about, Billy Don Trueheart, something like that?”

“Something like that. Yes, Jim was a gun guy. He was one of those men who loved guns, and if you lived with him for twenty years, as I did, you got used to guns everywhere. He eventually got wealthy enough to spend seventeen thousand dollars on a Thompson machine gun. If you want to rent a Thompson machine gun, let me know. I can let you have one at an affordable daily rate.”

“I’ll bear that in mind, but I hope my Thompson days are long over.”

“Anyhow, the guns everywhere, the gun magazines, the biographies of people like Elmer Keith and John M. Browning, the dead animal heads, all that, that was who he was, and I knew that going in and accepted it. His politics, never, but the gun thing, it was okay because he was also funny about it, as he was funny about everything. He was also kind, and even when he became successful, he never turned into an asshole and stayed true and decent to his kids and my family and his mother and the people he knew. It was never about getting to the table where the cool kids sat. It was about buying guns, drinking vodka, and making people laugh. Everyone who knew him is missing him and will for a long time.”

“Is this about his death?”

“Yes. The idiot went to a bar one night and had three instead of the allowed one martini. He walked home, reflexes all messed up, and managed to get himself killed by a hit-and-run driver. It was merciful, they say, he went fast.”

“I’m sorry. Did they catch the driver?”

“No. That’s part of the issue. It seems that over two thousand people a year are killed by hit-and-runs, and about ninety-eight percent of those cases are solved. There are those that aren’t, and it is remotely possible that he was murdered. I know, I know, it was probably some kid high on meth in a hopped-up car who saw an old guy staggering down the street and stomped on the pedal. For kicks, for laughs, for the warm and fuzzy memories, I don’t know. But. . maybe not.”

“I have had experience with a man who killed by car. It’s more than possible. Driven by a professional, it can be a lethal instrument. I suppose you’re going to tell me why this could be a murder.”

“I am. We are at the boring part. Maybe you’d better pour yourself a cup of coffee.”

“I like your husband. I like you. It’s fine. Go on, try to bore me.”

“As I say, it’s a story in which almost nothing happens. It has no vivid characters, no sudden turns of fate, no dramatic reversals, no humor, no drama. It’s about something that happened in a workplace a long time ago.”

“So far, so good.”

“It can’t be verified. It’s hazy in parts. It might be a hoax, though it’s so dreary, I can’t imagine how anyone could gain anything off it. I don’t have the exact dates. It was first told in a letter, then years later in another letter, then years after that in a third letter. I’ve read none of the letters, and the passage of time between each installment suggests the erosion of failing memory. On top of that, my only experience with it was as told to me by my husband, and I must confess I didn’t pay much attention, so my own memory is questionable as well. All in all, as evidence of a crime, it’s a pretty pathetic deal.”

“It must linger?”

“It does indeed linger. People can’t quite put it aside. They think they have, and go about their lives, and then it comes back in the middle of the night and pokes them awake. It did that to the three letter writers and to my late husband. It did it to me enough times that I found out about a Mr. Bob Lee Swagger and tracked him to a flyspeck diner in a dying wide-spot in the road called Cascade, Idaho, and invested close to two months in earning an audience with him.”

“The lingering part is very interesting. So far, you’ve got me hooked.”

“We start with a young man, a recent graduate of an engineering school in Dallas, Texas. The time is unknown, but I’m guessing mid-seventies. He’s smart, ambitious, hardworking, decent. He wants to join a construction firm and engineer giant buildings. The first job he gets is entry-level, for an elevator contractor.”

“Elevators?”

“Right. Not exactly the glamour trade. But elevators, which we all take for granted, are heavily engineered. That is, they are overde-signed, overmaintained, overregulated, and no one involved with them takes them for granted. His firm installs them and maintains them on contract so they can pass their yearly examinations and don’t drop ten people fifty stories.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“It’s hard, crummy work. The shafts and ‘engine’ rooms, as they call the motor and pulley devices that make them run, are dark, poorly ventilated, and not air-conditioned. Even more so back then. The space is cramped, and it involves a lot of twisting and bending to get access. The work is intensive and highly pressurized, because the building managers hate it when they have to shut down the elevators and the tenants hate it and everybody hates it. Are you getting a picture?”

“I am.”

“This young man and his crew are in the engine room on the roof of a particular building, and they’ve set up lights, and they’re measuring cable wear, gear wear, electrical motor wear, lubricating, trying to work fast so they can get the box, as they call it, back in service. It’s hot, crowded, and except for the light beams, dark. Not pleasant, not happy, and suddenly-kaboom.”

“Kaboom?”

“One of the workers, maybe resting, maybe backing away to make room for someone else, maybe doing whatever you do in an elevator engine room, bumps into something on the wall, and there’s a loud crash and the sound of stuff falling to the ground, a big cloud of acrid dust, everybody’s coughing and wheezing. All the flashlights go onto it, and they discover that he’s bumped into a shelf on the wall, and for whatever reason-the screws rusted or came out, the brick or stucco or whatever gave way, the metal itself sheared-when he jostled it, it collapsed, dumping its pile of whatever was stored there to the ground. That’s the action scene, by the way. The shelf falling, that’s as exciting as it gets.”

“My heart’s beating so fast, I can hardly stand it.”

“Here’s the really boring part. They figure out what’s wrong with the shelf, and somehow get it remounted, and start restacking the stuff on it. The stuff is carpet remnants. That is, the lobby of the building has a big carpet, and they ended up with remnants that they had to keep around for patching or whatever, so they had a shelf in the engine room and someone decided that would be a good out-of-the-way place to store the remnants.”

“Sounds pretty top-secret to me.”

“And someone says, ‘Hey, look at this.’ Be cool if it was a rifle, huh? Or a box of ammo, a telescopic sight, a spy radio, something really James Bond?”

“That would be very interesting.”

“Sorry. It’s just a coat. I told you it was a boring story.”

“It ain’t without interest. Please go on.”

“It turns out to be a man’s overcoat, XL, tan gabardine, fairly high-quality, in extremely good condition. Maybe almost new. It had been methodically folded and slid into the pile of carpet remnants in the engine room sometime in the past. Again, no dates, no specifics, nothing.”

“I’ve got it,” said Swagger.

“They unfold it and immediately make a discovery. It stinks. Unfolding it puts out some kind of chemical stench, very unpleasant. Flashlights go onto it. It seems that the left breast wears a rather gaudy petro or chemical stain, and even now, who knows how many years later, the odor of that stain is powerful. It hasn’t gone away. Instead of finding a free coat, they’ve found a fixer-upper, which would involve dry cleaning, which might or might not get the stain and the smell out, and no one is interested, and so it goes into the trash. It is thrown out. It disappears. It is gone forever. End of story. Not much of a story, is it?”