“You find something?” Donna asked.
“I’ll explain later.”
“Boy, aren’t we mysterious?”
If there’d been time I would have shown her the envelope I’d just picked up, the one with the peculiar but familiar logo on it, the one that explained a whole other side to Mrs. Bridges, and also where Lockhart probably fit into all this.
“I just want to wrap things up and get out of here.”
“You’re right, Dwyer. I just can’t wait to get back outside in that cold and rain.”
“Just keep looking.”
But there was nothing else to be found, and a few minutes later we were heading down the fire escape.
“This has a very good effect on my cramps,” Donna said.
“How’s that?”
“I’ve got such a fucking head cold coming on, I hardly notice them.”
I knew better than to laugh.
14
While Donna was taking a shower, I sat in her living room feeling a growing sense of betrayal. I was getting the distinct impression that old Mrs. Bridges had set me up. What I’d found in Michael Reeves’s apartment was an envelope bearing the Bridges’ personal logo, which meant that she and Reeves had been in some kind of contact. That meant that she had not told me the truth, probably about much of anything.
Donna came out with a towel wrapped around her head. I tried hard not to notice her body in the green silk robe. “Your turn,” she said, sniffling. Then she bent over the couch and looked at the envelope I’d set on the coffee table to study. “What’s that?”
I told her.
“So you think she lied to you?”
“I’m sure she did. This letter is addressed to Reeves, and it’s obviously written by a woman in her older years, and it’s her family logo.”
“Why would she write Reeves?”
“I don’t know. But after we meet Wade, I’m going to find out.”
“You want some tea?”
“Sure.”
She put the kettle on to boil and came back and gave me a hug. She smelled of perfumed soap and wet hair. She smelled wonderful. “I’ll have the tea ready for you when you get out of the shower.”
“Is that a hint?”
“No sense in both of us catching cold.”
In the shower I kept wondering about Mrs. Bridges and why she’d write Michael Reeves, and I kept remembering Anne Stewart and her husband in the cabin. What had they been after? And why had Sylvia Ashton visited Michael Reeves the night of the murder? I put on some fresh clothes from the end of the closet Donna had allotted me and went back to the living room.
Donna hadn’t put any clothes on yet. She sat in an armchair in front of the TV. MTV was on: Stevie Nicks working a little too hard at being ethereal. I should have kept my mind on Mrs. Bridges and Reeves and Anne Stewart and her husband and what Evelyn had been doing with Keech in her car, but I didn’t. The thunder made me skitter across the floor like a scared animal. Donna must have been feeling the same way, because when I got there she put her arms out and drew me in. Our first few kisses were very tender — we were giving each other some inexplicable kind of reassurance — and then they were something other than tender. I pulled her up, and the way we stood we might have been dancing, she in her green silk robe, me in jeans and a T-shirt. I suppose we were dancing in a way, all the way over to the couch, where I eased her gently back. She said, “Wouldn’t the bed be better?” but for some reason the couch had great appeal at that moment. Then all she said was, “I just put in a Tampax.” I said, “I’ll buy you another one,” and she went off to the bathroom, where she spent what seemed like four or five hours. When she came back I turned out the light, and we made a slow sort of protective love with the rain and the violence unable to touch us as long as we were in each other’s arms.
“I thought we were going to meet Wade,” she said. This was half an hour later in my car. It was still pouring.
“We’ve still got an hour.”
“So where’re we going?”
“Over to the recreation center where Reeves held his acting classes for the ex-convicts.”
“Why?”
“Well, first of all because that board at the halfway house said that Anne Stewart teaches tonight. Second, maybe some of the men there will know where Lockhart might be. I still want to know what he wanted in Reeves’s office yesterday.”
“Right. I forgot about that. I wonder what he was doing with Evelyn Ashton this afternoon, back at the cabin, I mean.”
“Exactly.”
“Boy, this is starting to be fun again, Dwyer.”
The Stanley Recreation Center shows the scars of being located in what passes for a ghetto in this city. It’s a small brick building that used to be a school, but you wouldn’t know it the way graffiti covers its walls and hundreds of yards of tape cover the cracks in its windows. Even in the rain there were teenagers out prowling, white and black alike, their eyes filled with fear and hunger. I read a book once about juvenile delinquency in the original thirteen colonies. I read it while I was in jail the weekend of my sixteenth birthday for going on a joyride in a stolen car. I wasn’t driving but I knew it was stolen. Anyway, things changed after that weekend. The book taught me that there was nothing unique or special about being a punk, and forty-eight hours in the county lockup taught me that there were guys far more terrifying than I’d ever imagined and that I didn’t want to be like them at all. That night, in the gloom and the downpour, I glimpsed kids as angry as I’d been and prayed they’d have the same kind of luck I’d had.
We parked next to a new tan Saab and got out. “Anne’s car.”
“Well, so far so good.”
“Yeah, and remember that the next time you question what I do.”
She goosed me hard enough that I gave out an unmanly yelp and jerked away from her. She’s good at tickling, but she’s twice as good at goosing.
The interior of the place changed our playful mood abruptly. The institutional green walls were lit by naked bulbs hanging from an exposed electric cable. Unused desks were piled along the walls, which were swollen with moisture. A tidy pile of petrified dog crap had been pushed off to the side of a door, and the graffiti alluded to virtually every part of the human anatomy. Down the corridor was a small gym where two young black men took turns taking devastating shots from past the free-throw line. Next to this was a smaller room where a group of elderly women listened to a public health nurse talk about Medicare benefits, or what was left of them now that the boys in Washington had decided to turn the country into an arsenal. A hand-lettered sign said ACTING CLASS and an arrow pointed upstairs. The deeper into the place we went the more it smelled like the schools of my memory — the aromas of floor wax and chalk dust, window panes cold with rain, steam heat, and the most ineffable smell of all, wood aging over the decades, a smell peculiar to old schools and old garages.
Just before we entered the classroom, I thought I heard a noise at the opposite end of the corridor in the deep shadow. I waited thirty seconds but heard nothing else, so I followed Donna up to the threshold.
There were half a dozen of them, all but one seated in ancient cane chairs. They were watching a tall guy in the center of the big empty room as he put his face in his hands, apparently trying to come into some sort of mystical contact with himself. He reminded me of a coke junkie on the downside. Over in a corner, near a barren steam-heat register, sat Anne Stewart and Keech watching the man in the center of the room. They seemed as fascinated as the ex-cons by whatever process was going on.
Abruptly, the tall guy threw his head back and screamed. For the first time I saw his face full on. His black hair needed cutting and his lantern jaw needed a shave, but what he seemed to need most right then was some kind of medical help to calm him down. His scream lingered in the damp, dusty air. It wasn’t a theatrical scream, not at all. There was real frenzy and horror in it, as he proved by grabbing one of the empty cane chairs and smashing it against the register near where Anne and Keech stood. There was something orgiastic about the way he beat the chair into splinters. His dark eyes looked psychotic. Rheumy spittle shone on the edges of his mouth. He grunted in rhythm to his violence, and his grunts were far more obscene than any words he could utter. Donna put her face into my arm to hide her eyes. The poor bastard was coming undone. I looked around the room. In their way, the audience was just as spooky as the guy. They watched him with glazed fascination. They seemed to be in the same sort of psychosis that he was. One guy writhed in his chair. He appeared to be caught up in some kind of sexual rhythm. I glanced over at Anne and Keech. Their spell seemed broken now. Anne was putting out a hand to the crazy guy, muttering reassurances. Keech just looked scared. But the guy had found a new way to dazzle himself. He started pounding his fists against the register. He didn’t seem to notice the blood that smeared his knuckles almost immediately or the bones that made cracking sounds like dry twigs snapping.