The Big Blast Page 2

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “That’s what I need your help with,” he said. “It’s what I’m doin’ in this hell hole tonight.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Lookin’ for Ernie’s girl,” he said. “She’s missing. He asked me to look her up and keep an eye on her until he got home, and I can’t even do that right.”

  “We’ll find her, don’t you worry.”

  Betsy and an eager john, who she’d managed to hook before he drank all his money, walked out of Nicks, strolled past us, and disappeared into the darkness on the other side of the warehouse.

  Orson had raised his eyebrows at her, then stared after her until she couldn’t be seen anymore, and I wondered how long it had been since he had been with a woman.

  “She was his girl before we left,” Orson was saying. “You remember Joan, don’t you? They’re mad about each other. Were gonna marry. She really, really wanted to. They both did, but he didn’t want her to be tied down while he was away, wanted to make sure he was gonna come home. Now he’s comin’ home and she ain’t here.”

  I didn’t remember a lot about Joan—never knew her very well. I only remembered thinking back then that Ernie Ford and Joan Wynn were perfect for one another.

  “How long’s she been missing? Where was she last seen? Who have you talked to? What do they know?”

  “Jimmy Riley is on the case,” he said.

  “When does Ernie get back? How long do we have? Have you told him?”

  “Any day now,” he said. “Don’t know exactly. Have I told him? Are you kidding? You think I want to write something like that in a letter to a guy lying there thinking only of her?”

  I looked at my watch.

  “I’ve got to get over and pick up Lauren at the—”

  “Lauren, that your girl?”

  I nodded. “She volunteers at the USO. I’ve got to—”

  “Joan worked at the USO. It’s one of the last places she was seen. I think maybe she ran into the wrong fella there and . . .”

  “You wanna go with me to talk to her or meet me in my office in the morning to—”

  “Ain’t stopping ’til I find her. I’m coming.”

  Chapter Four

  “I remember Joan,” Lauren said. “I didn’t realize she was missing. Figured her fella had come home. She said he was going to soon.”

  Lauren was as beautiful as ever, but looked tired and frail. She was overdoing it, but wouldn’t hear of doing any less than she was—and often talked of doing more.

  She no longer wore her hair to hide her burns, and I hoped it was because I had convinced her just how truly beautiful she was in spite of them, but suspected it was at least in part due to the fact that every other person you passed these days was marred in some way.

  We were standing out in front of the USO near the end of Harrison, after I had introduced Lauren and Orson and told her about Joan and Ernie.

  Rain was imminent, the moist night pregnant with it, and the increasingly brisk breeze blew the American and USO flags to the right of the building, whipping and snapping the cloth about and clanging the rigging against the flagpole.

  “Before we go on, can I just ask . . . Did Rita meet anyone?”

  I shook my head. “She did not.”

  Lauren smiled her brilliant, sweet smile that said people were better than I thought and so was the world.

  “She got stood up,” I said. “And in a dangerous place too.”

  As usual the USO was hopping. People coming and going, milling about—on the large front porch, in the front yard, and in the back down by the bay. Music, talking, laughter, as well as dancing feet on the hardwood floors could be heard from inside, its volume spiking every time the door opened.

  We had stepped several feet away near our car.

  “What do you remember about Joan?” I asked.

  “She was a sweet, kind girl. Spent hours listening to the frightened young soldiers cycling through here.”

  “But no funny business, right?” Orson said.

  Lauren shot a look at me and said, “No. No funny business.”

  She wasn’t sure how much she could say in front of Orson, and I appreciated her discretion.

  “Anybody get fresh with her?” Orson said. “Try anything?”

  “Sure, but no more than normal.”

  I was reminded of what I tried not to think about—how many lonely young men were falling for Lauren each night, how many making a play for the woman who meant the world to me, the entire world.

  “Any regulars?” I asked. “Any guy in particular have a hard time hearing ‘no’?”

  She shot me another look.

  “I’ll have to think about it.”

  “Was she acting strange in the days leading up to her disappearance? Did anything happen?”

  Again the look.

  “Tell you what,” I said to Orca. “Lauren’s exhausted and in poor health to begin with. Let me get her home. I’ll talk to her in the morning. Meet me at my office around eight.”

  “Make it nine,” Lauren said.

  “Nine,” I said. “It’s a walkup on Harrison not far from the Ritz Theater. Easy to find.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy,” he said. “You’re a real pal.”

  “Get some sleep tonight,” I said. “We’ll find her. And before Ernie gets home—so she can welcome him herself. Okay?”

  Chapter Five

  “Wasn’t sure what I could say in front of Orson,” Lauren said as we drove away.

  “You did good. He may find out everything eventually anyway, but . . . better to see what we’re dealing with first.”

  We drove through the late night traffic of downtown, careful to keep an eye on the myriad pedestrians—many of whom were attempting to walk without the aid of sobriety.

  Since the start of the war, Harrison Avenue had stopped sleeping. Twenty-four hours a day people spilled out of the stores and restaurants, hung over balconies, congregated on the sidewalks and sometimes into the streets, and entered and exited hotels and drugstores and buses.

  It was every bit as busy at night as it was during the day—maybe more so.

  “You mind if we swing by Gary and Rita’s on our way home?” Lauren said.

  “Was gonna ask if you felt up for it.”

  “I do.”

  “So tell me about Joan. And don’t hold anything back.”

  “I’m not saying she was doing anything she wasn’t supposed to,” she said, “but . . . I wouldn’t’ve said she was in a relationship. She seemed restless, like she was looking, you know? Nothing very overt. She was subtle. But like I say it surprised me to hear she was in a relationship. You okay to talk about this?”

  I’d had a hard time with Lauren working in the USO, spending so much time with single young men under such intense and extreme conditions, but I knew it was something she had to do, a way to give back, a way to help win the war—one of many she was doing.

  I nodded.

  We eased past the Ford dealership, the Texaco station, and the Tennessee House.

  “Our job in there is to help the soldiers focus on what they’re fighting for, to help them relax and leave some of the pressure they carry around with them at the door. Lots of ways to do that. Best way is to get them to talk. I get them to tell me about their hometown, their family, their friends, and their girl back home. I don’t talk a lot, mostly just listen. When I do talk, I always talk about you, about us. Gently remind them I’m taken as taken can be, but also let them know what’s possible, what they can have with their girl if they don’t trade it away for something unworthy of them, and if we win the war.”

  I thought about it as we drove past Child Drugs and the Marie Motel.

  “Do you believe me?” she asked. “Do you know in your heart what I’m saying is true?”

  “I do,” I said. “I know you are true. I made the mistake of not trusting you once and it nearly got us killed. I won’t make that mistake again.”
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br />   Nearly got us killed? Nearly?

  Sometimes, like in moments like these, I get the strangest, most dissonant feelings—almost like an existential echo—and I think that it wasn’t nearly. That I had, in fact, gotten us killed, that wherever and whenever this was and however we were here, we were not, strictly speaking, among the living.

  And as usual in these disconcerting turns of the dial that tuned in this eeriest of frequencies, I could’ve sworn I saw Ray Parker, my old partner and former Pinkerton, stepping out of the Marie and around the various people congregated there, giving me a quizzical look, then adjusting his hat and heading down Harrison in the night air thick with the threat of rain.

  Like the night itself, the sensation was hypnotic and had a dreamlike quality.

  Was I sleeping the sleep from which there was no waking, dreaming the dream of a world never to be born?

  For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come?

  “You okay?” Lauren said.

  “Huh?”

  “Where’d you go?”

  “Sorry. What were you saying?”

  “That Joan and girls like her—”

  “Girls like her?” I asked.

  “Girls there looking for something—a good time or a husband—don’t get the boys to talk about home or the girls they left there. They talk intimately, romantically, as if they are the only two people on the planet, who need to embrace each other in this moment because they might not be here tomorrow.”

  I nodded.

  “You sure you’re okay?” she said.

  “Yeah, sorry. Think Ray Parker just walked across my grave.”

  She shuddered at that.

  “Thankfully it’s us who get to walk across his—if we ever wanted to, which we will not. Let’s change the subject. You think it’s ever going to rain?”

  “It’s inevitable,” I said, then thought, Like death. “It’ll come in due time. Won’t be much longer now.”

  “Needs to. The night needs the release.”

  I nodded my agreement, then said, “So Joan was looking?”

  “I’m just saying she seemed to be. Could just be immature, needing of attention, restless, scared, bored, who knows? Usually if someone is really in a relationship—I mean all the way in—they don’t seem to be single.”

  “True. What else?”

  “I think she was acting strange in the week or so leading up to her disappearing, but only now in hindsight. I really didn’t at the time.”

  I thought about it. “She may not even be missing. Just because Orca can’t find her doesn’t mean that she is.”

  “He seems like a nice guy, but . . . yeah, think I’d confirm she’s actually missing before I did a whole lot. But if she is . . . I may just know who has her.”

  “Oh yeah? Who’s that?”

  “Don’t know his name, but I’ll try to find it out. Most of the boys cycle through, but the ones stationed here become regulars I guess. He must be stationed here. Used to come in and just stare at Joan for hours. I don’t think he ever even spoke to her—not sure about that, but he was so creepy. Made her uncomfortable. Several of us spoke to him. Hell, a couple of the guys actually took him outside one night and gave him a stern talking to that included more than words. Next night he showed back up, black eye, bruised face and all, and just sat and stared all night.”

  “Ever see him with anyone else?”

  “Never.”

  “Who would know who he is? When’s the last time he was there? Was he in tonight?”

  “Oh my God.”

  “What is it?”

  “I just realized . . . He hasn’t been back since she disappeared.”

  Chapter Six

  By the time we reached Gary and Rita’s it was raining.

  Sheets of it sweeping in from St. Andrew’s Bay.

  They lived in a small house on 11th Street, which meant we were driving straight into the deluge, our vision as intermittent as the ineffective wipers impotently rubbing the windshield.

  I parked on the opposite side of the street and we strained to see through the rain into the lives of others.

  Gary’s car wasn’t parked in its usual spot beneath the carport, but through the large plate glass window in the front, we could see that Rita had made it back from her adventure at Nick’s. She was pacing about the room, smoking, coming to the window often to look out into the rainy night, searching up and down 11th—for Gary or someone else?

  “So she’s home and he’s not,” Lauren said.

  “Probably out looking for her.”

  “You’ve done all you can do for tonight,” she said. “Take me home and make love to me.”

  Which, when Rita left the window again, I cranked up the car, drove us home, and did.

  Lauren and I lived in a small home on Grace Avenue not far from downtown. The place was modest in every way—particularly considering how much money Lauren had.

  Of course, she had less now than she’d had just a short while ago, and at the rate she was giving it away, she’d soon have even less. It was a rare day that went by that she wasn’t helping someone in need or funding an investigation she wanted me doing or contributing to the war effort in some way—all of which was fine by me. I didn’t like the money or where it had come from, and had only made an uneasy peace with it so she could get the best medical treatment it could buy.

  “This is my favorite time of day,” she said.

  Her naked body was draped across mine, her head on my chest, her hand tracing random designs on my skin.

  “Mine too,” I said. “Well, maybe a few minutes ago.”

  The room was dim but not dark, the streetlamps backlighting the rain on the windows casting shimmering patterns that danced across the walls and ceiling.

  Charlie Christian and Benny Goodman were on the phonograph, way down low, barely audible above the rain.

  “Sometimes I wonder why we ever do anything else,” I said.

  “It’s the other things we do—doing our part—that helps make this so good.”

  “I don’t think this needs any help being good,” I said.

  “You really think Rita is cheating on Gary?” she asked.

  I shrugged, causing her head to rise a little. “My track record on such things is not so good.”

  “Thank God,” she said.

  “Do you really think she’s not or do you just not want her to be?”

  Now it was her turn to shrug. When she did, it caused her breasts to caress my side—and I immediately tried to think of another question that would prompt the same response.

  “I’m just not sure. How about Joan? You think she’s gone off of her own accord, or was taken?”

  “Of her own accord is most likely.”

  “Which means no happy ending for Ernie,” she said.

  “Not many of those.”

  “Not nearly enough.”

  I nodded.

  “I used to think it was just the way of the world,” she said. “That discontent and despair were sort of built in—goes along with the whole ‘fallen world’ notion. But now I really think it’s just us. We just won’t let ourselves be happy—always choosing things that take us away from instead of toward happiness.”

  “Not all of us,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “not all of us.”

  And those were the last words we spoke on that or any other subject, as our breathing grew as heavy as our eyelids and we fell asleep entangled in each other to the sound of the night rain and Helen Forrest joining Benny Goodman on “Taking a Chance on Love.”

  I dreamed of childhood.

  A sunny day at the beach.

  Me and Ernie and Orson swimming in the Gulf and playing in the sand—marco polo in the water, king of the mountain on the sand dunes, football on the beach.

  Sandy. Sticky. Dried salt on our sunburned bodies. So much fun.

  A kid we encountered had a pet seagull, and from the moment Orca saw it he wanted one. The kid, a boy a bi
t younger than us, whose name I couldn’t recall, helped us catch one for Orca and clip his wings.

  Even as a boy, Orson was enormous, and the small clipped-wing creature disappeared in the cradle formed by his huge hands.

  As if born to care for the weak and defenseless, Orca stopped participating in all the activities, just so he could walk around holding his new pet, talking to the bird tenderly and gently caressing it with a single chubby finger.

  When the sun was sinking and it was time to leave, Orca’s grandmother, who was raising him and who had brought us to the beach, told him he wasn’t allowed to carry the bird home.

  But Grandma, I already clipped his wings, he explained.

  Then you’ve killed the poor creature, she responded. Now put it down and let’s go.

  On the long, quiet drive back home, the only sound inside the car was Orson softy crying, an occasional sniffle, and his big hands wiping the tears streaming down his chubby cheeks.

  On either side of the sad, large little boy, sat two average-sized lads, each with a consoling hand on his shoulder.

  Chapter Seven

  It was nearly nine before I reached our offices the next morning.

  I always intended to make it in earlier, but Lauren moved very slowly in the mornings, and the ministrations and medications always took longer than anticipated. I was glad she told Orson to come after nine.

  Miki and Clip were already there waiting on me, Miki at her desk, Clip leaning against a nearby filing cabinet reading the paper.

  If you looked closely enough, you could still see some puffiness in his face from his fight with Leonaldo Linderman, particularly around the patch over his missing eye.

  I was worried about the damage the fight had done—and not just to his body.

  Clipper Jones was a young black man who had been part of the 99th Fighter Squadron, 1st Tactical Unit before suffering the loss of his left eye. He picked up the nickname Clipper while training at Dale Mabry Field because of the way he would fly in low and clip the tops of the North Florida pine trees.

  He was also my best friend and the best man I knew.

  I had managed to beat Orson in, and I was glad for that.