The closet door was louvered and dusty. I opened it carefully, on dry hinges that creaked, and looked inside at my clothing hanging from the rod that had been positioned at eye level. A string attached to a light socket above hung in front of my face. I gave it a tug. The naked bulb was burned out.
From here, below the line of shirts and trousers, I could see only a pair of legs from the knees on down. The shoes were tasseled and expensive cordovan loafers. The trousers appeared to be dark blue and hand-tailored. But I wasn’t going to learn much this way. I pushed all my attire to the right side of the small dusty closet for a better look.
Even though I’d only seen him once, and then from a distance, I recognized the handsome and imperious face of Sam Lodge. He was still handsome, still the sneering art instructor and antique-shop owner but his charm was gone. The large butcher knife that had been shoved deep into his chest, almost to the hilt, lent him a violence that no amount of charm could have disguised anyway. The killer had shoved him up against the back of the closet so that his neck appeared broken, head resting at an awkward angle on his left shoulder. His blue eyes stared without interest at some point in the room behind me.
I closed the door and stood for a long moment trying to figure out what he’d been doing in my room in the first place. We hadn’t exactly been the best of friends. But even so, the enormity of death, of extinction, took me down for a few moments. After my wife died, I’d felt the same way, knowing that never again would she ever exist, not on this world nor on the billions of worlds filling the universe, never exist again no matter how remarkable were the discoveries of future science, never touch others with that special loveliness and grace and quiet self-effacing wisdom that had been so precious to me. And somebody was going to be feeling these same things about Sam Lodge, probably his wife and certainly his parents, when they learned that he was now broken and forgotten in a closet in a shabby little motel in the middle of a nowhere planet in a nowhere backwash of the dark and rolling cosmos.
I did the only thing I could. I went to the phone and called Chief of Police Jane Avery.
Four
1
Six days ago, he had to change cells, again. Five times in a year-and-a-half.
Another one of the warden’s grand plans. Probably got the idea from one of his Sociology texts.
He did what he always did, put his toothbrush and toothpaste and shampoo and hairbrush and deodorant and shaving cream and razor into his gym bag and shambled in line behind a guard who led him to a new cellblock.
Guy in the cell is this big dumb shaggy hick with warts or something all over his face.
Guard locks him in.
First thing he does, he starts sniffing the air.
What in hell is that smell?
So dirty, so overwhelming he feels like he’s choking.
“Name’s Lumir.”
He nods to Lumir.
“Not as loud over here in this cellblock. Not as many jigs.”
But he’s still sniffing, trying to figure it out.
“You don’t mind, I like the top bunk.”
“You cut your stools with water, Lumir?”
“Huh?”
“After you go to the bathroom, do you throw a glass of water into the toilet?”
“Huh-uh.”
“You should.”
“How come?”
“Kinda smells in here, Lumir.”
“I don’t smell nothin’.”
“Yeah, well, I do.”
That was six days ago and by now he knows what the trouble is. Or, troubles (plural) are:
1) Lumir doesn’t cut his stools with water, something some of the more thoughtful cons learn to do for each other.
2) Lumir does not partake of the morning shower any more than two mornings a week.
3) Lumir does not use deodorant because he claims it “makes me break out, like a rash on a baby’s butt donchaknow, and then I’m just ascratchin’ and ascratchin’ my armpits.”
4) Lumir is constantly picking his nose and eating the boogers.
5) Lumir is constantly snuffling up phlegm and spitting it haphazardly at the toilet.
6) Lumir changes socks no oftener than once a week.
7) Lumir can scratch himself in a really noisy way; and Lumir scratches himself eighteen hours a day. Some day Lumir will no doubt become the first man ever able to scratch himself while he’s asleep.
Now all these things are the stuff of great high hilarity when you’re sitting in a bar ten years later recounting them.
But he has to spend day-in, day-out with Lumir and there’s nothing funny about that at all.
Nights... he just lies there. He never gets used to the smells... the really foul stomach-turning odors of Lumir’s stools... or the rancid stink of his socks... or the sweet-sour stench of his unbathed body.
For the third time, he finds himself thinking seriously about escaping.
2
An hour later, I stood in the motel parking lot, leaning against my car, listening to Jane become more and more irritated with my dishonesty. Night was coming now, and with it the immortal teenagers in their immortal hot cars cruising up and down the main street, the joy of their radios obscene against the grim business in my room.
“You didn’t know him, right, Jim?”
“Right.”
“But somebody killed him in your room.”
“Guess so.”
“Just by coincidence.”
“That’s the only thing I can figure out,” I said.
“You think you’ll tell me what’s going on before anybody else gets killed?”
“I would if I could.”
“What’s that mean, ‘if you could’?”
I was thinking of Melissa McNally. Kidnapped.
“If I could. Just what I said.”
Jane sighed. In the gathering dusk, the downtown lights had come on, a little outpost of civilization in a land where only three hundred years ago Indians had roamed, killed rattlesnakes and wore them around their necks for good luck. Every once in a while you could feel those old winds blowing down the timelines, carrying the exuberance of the Mesquakie when this land belonged to them, and the peace of the vast prairie when it was nothing but wild corn and vivid flowers and free-roaming animals.
“You’re wandering off,” Jane said.
“I’m thinking.”
She shook her head, leaned close. Some of the fifty-or-so citizens filling the driveway had heard our sparring and moved closer for a more definitive version. We walked to the other side of the boxy white ambulance where we could argue without being heard.
“Why don’t you just tell me the truth?”
“Jane, listen, as soon as I can—”
The attendants were just now bringing the body out in a black bag on a stretcher. Inside, two of Jane’s officers, who regularly went to Des Moines for crime-scene training, were just now going through the room for fingerprints. Jane was irritated that the medical examiner, a man shared by several small communities, had yet to put in an appearance.