“Oh, but you do, huh? You’re a real great guy that way, right?” Running his fingers along her wrist now.
“I’m trying.”
“This woman-she small and blond and fucked up on quaaludes and Midori from seven in the morning on?”
“She was small and blond. The rest I wouldn’t know about.”
“C’mere, honey.” He tugged Holly gently onto his lap and then stroked strands of hair off her neck. Holly chewed her lower lip and looked into his eyes and the underside of her chin quivered.
Warren turned his head so that Holly’s chest was pressed against his ear and looked directly at me for the first time. Seeing his face full on, I was surprised by how young he looked. Late twenties, maybe, a child’s blue eyes, cheeks as smooth as a debutante’s, a surfer boy’s sun-washed purity.
“You ever read what Denby wrote about The Third Man?” Warren asked me.
Denby was David Denby, I assumed, long the film critic for New York magazine. Hardly someone I expected to hear referenced by Warren, particularly after his wife had claimed to not even know what movie I’d been talking about.
“Can’t say I have.”
“He said no adult in the postwar world had the right to be as innocent as Holly Martens was.”
His wife said, “Hey!”
He touched her nose with his fingertip. “The movie character, honey, not you.”
“Oh. Okay, then.”
He looked back at me. “You agree, Mr. Detective?”
I nodded. “I always thought Calloway was the only hero in that movie.”
He snapped his fingers. “Trevor Howard. Me, too.” He looked up at his wife, and she buried her face in his hair, smelled it. “This woman’s effects-you wouldn’t be looking for anything of value in it, would you?”
“You mean like jewelry?”
“Jewelry, cameras, any shit you could pawn.”
“No,” I said. “I’m looking for reasons why she died.”
“The woman you’re looking for,” he said, “stayed in Fifteen B. Small, blond, called herself Karen Wetterau.”
“That’d be her.”
“Come on.” He waved me through the small wooden gate beside the desk. “We’ll take a look together.”
I reached his wheelchair, and Holly turned her cheek on his head and looked up at me with sleepy eyes.
“Why you being so nice?” I asked.
Warren shrugged. “’Cause Karen Wetterau? Nobody was ever nice to her.”
14
There was a barn out back, about three hundred yards from the rear of the motel, past a blighted grove of bent or broken trees and a small clearing dyed black with motor oil. Warren Martens propelled his wheelchair through decayed branches and the mulch of a few seasons’ worth of unraked leaves, the litter of nip bottles and abandoned car parts, and the crumbled foundation of a building that had probably died somewhere around the time Lincoln did, as if he were riding atop a lane of fresh blacktop.
Holly had stayed back in the office in case anyone showed up here because the Ritz was full, and Warren led me out the back and down a wooden ramp toward the sagging barn where he stored the contents of abandoned units. He got ahead of me in the grove, pumping those wheels until the spokes hummed through crackling leaves. The leather back of his chair had a Harley-Davidson eagle sewn into the center and bumper stickers affixed on either side of the bird: RIDERS ARE EVERYWHERE; ONE DAY AT A TIME; BIKE WEEK, LACONIA, NH; LOVE HAPPENS.
“Who’s your favorite actor?” he called back over his shoulder as his thick arms pumped the wheels over crackling leaves.
“Current or old-time?”
“Current.”
“Denzel,” I said. “You?”
“I’d have to say Kevin Spacey.”
“He is good.”
“Fan of his since Wiseguy . ’Member that show?”
“Mel Profitt,” I said, “and his incestuous sister, Susan.”
“Well, all right.” He tipped a hand back and I slapped it. “Okay,” he said, getting excited now that he’d found a fellow cine-geek out here in the dead trees. “Favorite current actress, and you can’t say Michelle Pfeiffer.”
“Why not?”
“The babe factor’s too prevalent. Could skew the objectivity of the poll.”
“Oh,” I said. “Joan Allen, then. You?”
“Sigourney. With or without automatic weapons.” He glanced over at me as I caught up, walked alongside him. “Old-time actor?”
“ Lancaster,” I said. “No contest.”
“Mitchum,” he said. “No contest. Actress?”
“Ava Gardner.”
“Gene Tierney,” he said.
“We might not agree on specifics, Warren, but I’d say we both got impeccable taste.”
“Ain’t that the truth?” He chuckled, leaned his head back, and watched the black branches roll overhead. “It’s true what they say about good movies, though.”
“What do they say?”
He kept his head tilted back, kept thrusting the wheelchair forward as if he knew every inch of this wasteland. “They transport you. I mean, I see a good movie? I don’t forget I don’t have legs. I have legs. They’re Mitchum’s because I’m Mitchum and those are my hands running down Jane Greer’s bare arms. Good movies, man, they give you another life. A whole other future for a while.”
“For two hours,” I said.
“Yeah.” He chuckled again, but it was more wistful. “Yeah,” he repeated, even more softly, and I felt the sharp tonnage of his life roll over us for a moment-the broken motel, the blighted trees, the phantom limbs at thirty, and those hamsters climbing their hamster wheels back in the office, squeaking like mad.
“It wasn’t a motorcycle accident,” he said, as if answering a question he knew I wanted to ask. “Most people see me, they think I dumped my hog on a turn.” He looked back over his shoulder at me and shook his head. “I was shacking up here one night when it was still Molly Martenson’s Lie Down. Shacking up with a woman wasn’t my wife. Holly shows up-all piss and vinegar and fuck you, motherfucker-and she throws her wedding ring at me in the room and bolts. I go chasing her. There wasn’t no fence around the pool then, but it was still empty, and I slipped. I fell in the deep end.” He shrugged. “Cracked myself in half.” He waved his arm at our surroundings. “Got all this in the lawsuit.”