E-ZEE.
With that key in my hand, I leaned down and unlocked the padlock of E-Zee Self Store unit 27. I pulled up the door and stepped inside and switched on the light and closed the door behind me and found myself smack in the middle of a puzzle.
The space was about the size of a two-car garage, with cinder-block walls and a cement floor. Stuff was massed in dusty piles, all kinds of stuff, cartons, couches, a brass lamp with its pleated shade askew, spotted mattresses along with their box springs, pots and pans, strange masks, big copper bowls, a computer, a headboard, leaning towers of books, a large ceramic Dalmatian. But it wasn’t the amount of the junk in the piles that surprised – indeed, the amount was just what I expected, create a space for junk in America and America will fill it – but it was the way the piles were formed. Everything was jammed up against the walls, stacked high in teetering heaps that reached almost to the ceiling, so that in the middle of the unit was created a clearing.
And in that clearing, like a tableau of the ordinary in an avant-garde museum, was situated a La-Z-Boy chair and a six-pack of beer and a television and a VCR, the latter two connected to an extension cord that ran up to the light fixture in the ceiling.
Now, this was most peculiar. All of the contents of the unit, including the chair and television and beer, were covered in the same layer of dust, so nothing had been moved or touched in years. But why was this chair here, this television and VCR, the beer? Someone with a key had pushed everything to the walls and set up the television for viewing. Who? When? For whose viewing? And for viewing what? And even if it was clearly set up this way long before I first met François Dubé, why did I feel as if it had all been set up for me?
See what I mean about the puzzle?
In the cleared area were two boxes, one cardboard and one wooden. I opened the cardboard box first and immediately recoiled. I knew now what Mrs. Cullen meant when she talked about toys. Harnesses and cuffs, rings and electrical devices with long dangling cords, a hodgepodge of bizarrely shaped phallic toys made of metal, plastic, silicone, leather, all well worn, all enough to make me sick to my stomach. So tell me this, is there anything more disgusting than someone else’s used sexual devices?
I quickly closed it up and kicked it aside, then I stooped down to the wooden box, which sat beside the VCR. I lifted off the top. A box of videotapes, about twenty in all. I went through them, one by one. Fantasia? Sillyville? Magical Musical Mansion? Yes, tapes to keep the daughter happy when she came for a visit. Park her in front of the telly, press play, watch her pupils dilate.
But there were other videos, with less childlike names. Sodomania 36. Aim to Please. Sluts with Nuts 5. Succubus. Oh My Gush 7.And the ever-popular Bad Mama Jama. Nice. Let’s just hope he never intended to show his daughter Snow White and by accident slipped in Nubian Nurse Orgy instead.
And then there were a series of videocassettes without preprinted labels or covers, cassettes with French words scrawled across white labels, some of the labels badly stained with spots of something that looked like coffee. At least I hoped it was coffee. Yuck. Home movies of birthday parties and the like or something a little less innocent, though no less staged? I remembered the inventory found in the apartment at the time of François’s arrest, the video camera with tripod and lights but no videos. Now here they were, waiting for me.
I turned on the television, powered up the VCR, slipped in one of the self-labeled tapes. While I was waiting to see what was what, I sat down in the chair, pulled a beer from out of the cardboard six-pack holder, blew away the dust, twisted off the cap, took a whiff.
Skunk city. Ugh.
I twisted the cap back on, replaced it, leaned back in the La-Z-Boy, rested my shoes on the conveniently risen footrest.
Static, then the swelling music and HBO logo indicating the showing of a feature presentation, then a blank screen for a moment, before a fixed shot of a bedroom appeared on the screen. I had never seen the bedroom before, but I recognized it right off, what with the same brass lamp with pleated shade, the same headboard, the same ceramic Dalmatian that stood in the piles pushed to the walls. François’s bedroom. No clap from the clapper, no shout of “Quiet on the set and… action,” but it wasn’t needed, was it? First there’s nothing but the bedroom, then an entrance from stage left.
Gad.
60
Beth was waiting for me at the bar of Chaucer’s, a bottle of Bud in front of her.
I had called her from the seat of the La-Z-Boy and asked her to meet me here, and now I slipped in beside her and ordered another beer for her and a Sea Breeze for me.
When the bartender spotted me, he gave me a look. “No trouble tonight, right?”
“No trouble,” I said.
“It was bad enough cleaning up the blood from the last time you were here. Who was that creep anyway?”
“My dentist.”
“Really? Is he any good? Because I’ve been having this trouble with my…”
As the bartender described his dental issues, pulling down his lower lip to show a jumble of stained Chiclets, Beth stared at me as if I had grown a second head.
“Have you ever noticed the teeth in this city?” I said after the bartender, mercifully, had cut off his demonstration and left to get our drinks. “It’s like we’re living in England.”
“How was your trip?” she said.
“Instructive.”
“Anything I should know?”
“Just that our client didn’t do it.”
“I already knew that,” she said, and then she realized what I might have said. “You found proof in Chicago?”
“I found a strange coincidence that might be seen as proof,” I said, “if I can figure out one more thing.”
“What?”
“Why would my dentist murder Leesa Dubé?”
I told her about my trip to the Peppers’, about what I had discovered, about the coincidence of the photograph clutched in the dead woman’s hand. Beth gave me a hug when I was finished, like I had discovered a cure for cancer.
In the midst of her celebrations, the bartender brought our drinks. I lifted my glass. “Cheers,” I said.
We clinked, we drank, I drank fast. I felt suddenly better and gestured for another. Anything to get the sight of that video screen out of my head.
Beth suddenly grew pensive. “Is the coincidence enough?” she said.
“No, but it’s a start. We still have to figure out the why. But there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. Whitney Robinson dropped in to see me the other day and he said something that troubled me.”
“I know Whit’s your friend, Victor, but I don’t trust him. He’s a little too tweedy, don’t you think?”
“Never trust a man in tweeds, is that it?”
“Yes, actually. A hard-and-fast rule that has held me in good stead over the years. And bow ties trouble me, too.”
“What about George Will?”
“Proves the point on both counts. But there’s something else about Whit, at least as it relates to François. He seems – how do I put this? – a little too interested.”
She might have been right, but just then I didn’t care. “During Whit’s visit,” I barreled on, “he told me something intriguing about François that I thought I ought to pass along.”
“I’m not sure I want to hear it.”
“He said that François, for all his charming surface, is hollow inside.”
“He doesn’t know him.”
“Maybe not. But he said there existed some physical evidence to prove his point. Our client lied about his stuff. It wasn’t all gone. It was in a storage locker. And this afternoon I found it.”