“You need to rest, Olivia,” Marie says.
“I will. But first we have things to discuss.”
July 27, 2021
At quarter to eleven in the morning, the universe throws Holly a rope.
She’s in her office (all furniture reassuringly in place), filling out an insurance company payment invoice. Every time she sees a jolly insurance ad on TV—the Aflac duck, Flo the Progressive lady, Doug and his emu—Holly mutes the sound. Insurance ads are a laugh a minute. The companies themselves, not so much. You can save them a quarter of a million dollars on a bogus claim and still have to bill them two, three, sometimes four times before you get paid. When filling out invoices of this sort, she often thinks of a line from some old folk song: a handful of gimme and a mouthful of much obliged.
The phone rings just as she’s finishing the last few lines of the poopy three-page form. “Finders Keepers, Holly Gibney speaking, how can I help?”
“Hi, Ms. Gibney, this is Emilio Herrera. From Jet Mart? We talked yesterday.”
“Yes we did.” Holly sits up straight, the invoice forgotten.
“You asked me if any other of my regulars ever just stopped showing up.”
“And have you thought of someone, Mr. Herrera?”
“Well, maybe. Last night before I went to bed I was switching around the channels for something to watch while I waited for my melatonin to work, and The Big Lebowski was on AMC. I don’t suppose you’ve ever seen it.”
“I have,” Holly says. Three times, in fact.
“Anyway, that made me think of the bowling guy. He used to come in all the time. He’d buy snacks and soda and sometimes Rizla papers. Nice kid—seemed like a kid to me, I’m pushing sixty—but his picture could have been in the dictionary next to stoner.”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t really remember. Cory, maybe? Cameron? This was five years ago at least, maybe more.”
“What did he look like?”
“Skinny. Long blond hair. He kept it tied back, probably because he drove a moped. Not a motorcycle and not really a scooter, just a kind of bike with a motor. The new ones are electric, but this one ran on gasoline.”
“I know what they are.”
“And it was noisy. I don’t know if something was wrong with the motor or if that was just the way mopeds like that are supposed to sound, but it was really noisy, blak-blak-blak, like that. And covered with stickers, silly stuff like NUKE THE GAY WHALES and I DO WHATEVER THE LITTLE VOICES TELL ME TO. Also Grateful Dead stickers. He was a Deadhead kind of guy. Used to come in just about every weeknight in warm weather—you know, April to October. Sometimes even November. We used to talk about movies. He always got the same thing. Two or three candybars and a P-Co’. Sometimes rolling papers.”
“What’s a P-Co’?”
“PeruCola. Kind of like Jolt. Do you remember Jolt?”
Holly certainly does. For awhile in the eighties, she was a Jolt fiend. “Their motto was ‘all the sugar and twice the caffeine.’ ”
“That’s the one. P-Co’ was all the sugar and about nine times the caffeine. I think he’d go up to Drive-In Rock and watch the movies at Magic City—you can see the screen really well from up there, he said—”
“I’ve been there, and you can.” Holly is excited now. She turns over the pain-in-the-butt insurance payment invoice and scribbles Cory or Cameron, moped w/ funny stickers.
“He said he only went up on weeknights, because there were too many kids on the weekends, goofing off and grab-assing around. A nice enough young fellow, but a stoner. Did I already say that?”
“You did, but that’s okay. Go on.” She scribbles Drive-In Rock and then RED BANK AVENUE!!!
“So I said what’s the point when there’s no sound and he said—I got a kick out of this—he said ‘It doesn’t matter, I know all the dialogue.’ Which was probably true of the movies they show there. Oldies, you know. And actually there are movies where I know all the dialogue.”
“Really?” Of course really. Holly knows long stretches from at least sixty movies herself. Maybe a hundred.
“Yes. You know, you’re gonna need a bigger boat, get busy living or get busy dying, stuff like that.”
“You can’t handle the truth,” Holly can’t resist saying.
“Right, that’s a famous one. Tell you something, Ms. Gibney, in my business the customer is always right. Unless it’s kids wanting cigarettes or beer, that is. But it doesn’t stop me from thinking, does it?”
“Of course not.”
“And what I thought about this kid is that he was speedballing. I think he’d go up there, smoke some dope to get high, then chug a can of P-Co’ to put chrome on it. They quit making that soda two or three years ago, and I’m not surprised. I tried a can of it once and just jittered. Anyway, that guy was a regular. Like clockwork. He’d get off his shift, drive his blatty little moped here, buy his candy and soda, sometimes rolling papers, talk a little, then off he went.”
“And when did he stop coming in?”
“I don’t know exactly. I’ve been working at that Jet Mart a long time. Seen em come and seen em go. But Trump was running for president, I remember that because we joked about it. Seems like the joke was on us.” He pauses, perhaps thinking over what he just said. “But if you voted for him, I’m only kidding.”
Like fun you were, Holly thinks. “I voted for Clinton. You called him the bowling guy?”
“Sure, because he worked at the Strike Em Out. It was right on his shirt.”
They talk a little more, but Herrera can’t remember anything else of value. It shouldn’t be hard to find out the bowling guy’s name, though. Holly cautions herself that it may not mean anything. And yet… same store, same street, no car, about the same time of evening when Bonnie Rae went missing. And Drive-In Rock, where Holly herself was sitting after finding Bonnie’s earring.
She checks her iPad and sees that Strike Em Out Lanes opens at eleven AM. They’ll know the bowling guy’s name. She heads for the door, then gets another idea. Imani McGuire didn’t allow her to record their interview, but Holly recapped the high points on her phone afterward. She opens that recording now, but even as she’s about to push play, the name of Imani’s husband comes to her. Yard, impound yard.
She finds the number for the city impound and asks if Mr. Yardley McGuire is there.
“Speaking.”
“Mr. McGuire, my name is Holly Gibney. I spoke with your wife yesterday—”
“About Ellen,” he says. “Immi says you had a good talk. Don’t suppose you tracked Ellen down, did you?”
“No, but I may have stumbled across someone else who went missing a few years earlier. Might not be connected, but it could be. He drove a moped that was covered with stickers. One of them said NUKE THE GAY WHALES. Another one might have been a Grateful Dea—”
“Oh sure, I remember that moped,” Yard McGuire says. “It was here for a year at least, maybe longer. Jerry Holt finally took it home and gave it to his middle kid, who’d been yelling for one. But he tuned it up first, because—”
“Because it was noisy. Went blak-blak-blak.”
Yard laughs. “Yuh, pretty much just like that.”
“Where was it found? Or abandoned?”
“Gee, no idea. Jerry might know. And listen, Miz Gibney, it wasn’t like Jer stoled it, all right? The license plate was gone, and if there was a registration number, nobody bothered to run it through DMV.org. Not for a little kettle-burner like that.”