I swung by Leo’s ma’s bungalow. Leo knew I knew the Bohemian and he’d relax more knowing Chernek was involved, if only peripherally. The Bohemian could fix so many things.
No one answered my knock. I called him from the curb.
‘Give me good news,’ he said tersely, amid thunderous whoops and shrieks that sounded like kids playing in a cave.
‘Let’s not talk on the phone. Where are you?’
‘Health club.’
‘You’ve joined a health club? Exercise is good for stress.’
‘Not me. Ma and her friends won free memberships at bingo.’
‘Free? Where, Leo …?’ An ugly thought reared up like a stallion spooked by a snake. ‘Certainly not in Rivertown,’ I ventured, needing to be wrong.
‘It’s free,’ he repeated, with what sounded like defensiveness amid the background whoops.
I paused to think the unthinkable, that he’d brought his own mother to the Rivertown Health Center. Built decades earlier, when young Christian men, new to town, needed cheap rooms, Rivertown’s YMCA was disenfranchised for filth, locker-room theft and drunken inhabitants even before the last of the town’s manufacturing companies toppled to foreign competition.
The lizards that ran Rivertown wanted the land. They seized the property, much as they’d seized my grandfather’s, but when they found the building too expensive to demolish they dubbed it a health center and kept it running on a shoestring, though those few seeking exercise were far outnumbered by the welfare winos living upstairs and the hoodlums lounging in the parking lot. The health center was no place to bring Leo’s septuagenarian mother and her friends.
‘The lizards can get federal funding if this place qualifies as a rehabilitation center for seniors, so they’re handing out free memberships,’ Leo went on as I sped along Thompson Avenue toward the health center, passing the usual handful of daytime working girls, veterans all and some seriously arthritic, milling along the curb.
‘Your ma will get tetanus from the rust on the equipment,’ I yelled into the phone. It was why I used only the duct-taped running track that surrounded the exercise machines.
There was silence.
I thought perhaps he hadn’t heard. ‘Leo? The machines? Tetanus?’
By now, I’d gotten to the parking lot. I shifted the transmission down into low four-wheel drive, the hill-climbing gear, to creep over the potholes. Leo’s Porsche was nowhere to be seen but a brand-new silver Dodge Ram window van with a temporary handicapped card was parked in the restricted zone.
‘No worry,’ he said. The odd echoes in his background remained deafening and confusing. The fitness room had never sounded like a cave to me.
An impossible thought flared into my head as I came to a stop in my usual spot next to the doorless Buick. ‘Not the pool, Leo. You didn’t put your mother in the pool.’
‘They assured us it’s been power-washed,’ he said, adding, ‘three times.’
I paused only for a second to make sure the Jeep’s doors were unlocked, in case the younger hoodlums – the thumpers – needed to verify they’d already boosted my radio, and hurried inside. Three residents lounged on the torn vinyl chairs in the lobby, filling the portal to health and fitness with blue cigarette smoke. I hustled past them and down the stairs with my phone still pressed to my ear.
‘They didn’t just use Lysol and bleach,’ Leo was saying. ‘Industrial etching acids, too.’ He sounded proud of what he’d not overlooked.
No amount of Lysol, bleach and acids could eradicate the memory of why the pool had been closed ten years earlier. One of the upstairs residents had gone missing. No one thought much of it; residents often wandered off and were usually found semi-upright near one of the town’s liquor stores, asleep on one of benches along the Willahock or propped up against my turret. But this one particular fellow remained missing for a full week, until at last a hardy swimmer, having lost his goggles, dove deeper into the pool’s murky water to retrieve them and touched something soft. It was the missing resident, spongy but mostly intact. Wags said he died of malaria.
The county health department made the town’s lizards drain the pool and for ten years it remained dry, if not particularly clean. But now, according to Leo, there was an opportunity for federal tax dollars if they filled it back up. The lizards always seized opportunities, even when they were legal.
‘Aren’t you concerned the locker room attendant is rifling their purses?’ I was just a few feet from the pool door now.
‘Au contraire,’ he said, slipping into French, a language he does not know. ‘I’m watching the purses.’
And so he was. Looking through the glass door, I saw Leo sitting on a folding chair in front of a row of purses lined against the wall. Water was puddled at his feet. I opened the door and went in.
‘Welcome to my world,’ he said with no trace of a smile.
‘Where’s your Porsche?’
‘At home, in the garage. Ma made me buy a stretch van to bring the ladies here to get healthy,’ he said, with no trace of irony on his face. He motioned for me to grab the stool next to the door.
I brought it over, sat down and looked around. There was no lifeguard.
‘There’s no lifeguard,’ I said, observantly.
‘That’s another reason I’m here.’
Six gray heads bobbed in the water as a seventh – Ma’s octogenarian friend, Mrs Roshiska – pulled herself up on the ladder beneath the diving board, grabbed her wheeled walker and began pushing it toward the board. Her one-piece black bathing suit was wool and looked to have been enjoyed more than once by hordes of moths. Dime-sized spots of puckered white flesh protruded everywhere.
‘She’s not going to dive …’ I let the thought dangle.
‘Oh, but she is.’
It took Mrs Roshiska five excruciating minutes to negotiate the twenty feet to the diving board. When she got alongside it, she threw her walker at her friends in the water, rolled her ample belly onto the diving board and began crawling toward the end of the board. Five feet from the end, she pushed herself up to a shaky standing. The whole process wanted to trigger thoughts of the moment ancient life first slithered from the sea.
‘She might fall, Leo.’
‘Time to retreat,’ he said, getting to his feet. I didn’t understand, but I moved backward to the purses.
‘Now, behold the transformative power of youthful exuberance,’ he said.
Mrs Roshiska staggered the last few feet to the end of the board, bounced up with startling power, grabbed her knees and executed a perfect cannonball into the water. A huge wave shot over the edge of the pool.
The gray heads in the pool shouted, elated. Leo clapped, grinning for the first time since I’d come in. I did, too. Mrs Roshiska’s head rose above the surface to cheers.
Leo motioned for us to bring our seats forward again. His grin had faded. ‘Any news?’
Another gray head appeared at the side of the pool, tossed Mrs Roshiska’s walker up onto the tile and climbed up the ladder.
‘That’s a man,’ I said, surprised. I’d assumed all the swimmers were Ma’s lady friends.
‘Say nothing.’
The aged gent pulled himself out of the water and began walking on stiff-kneed legs toward the diving board.
‘He’s not wearing a suit,’ I whispered.
Leo nodded.
‘Can’t they see?’ I asked, gesturing at the women in the pool.
‘They invite him because he’s forgetful.’
‘Surely they’re not optimistic?’
‘Who knows what aquatic exercise might revive?’
The old gent made it up to the board, walked to the end and belly-flopped off the edge. He hit the water perfectly flat.
‘Ouch,’ I said.
‘At his age, it probably doesn’t matter …’ He let the thought fade away. Too many lines had formed around his eyes. ‘Who the hell is Marilyn Paul, Dek?’
‘A full-time Democratic worker,’ I said. I told him about my trip to Prairie Hill.
‘That’s all you know?’
‘The three men that Marilyn Paul, if it was Marilyn Paul, hired me to look up were friends. They worked together on a congressional primary twenty years ago with Timothy Wade.’
‘The Grain Man?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘How is that relevant?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘I shouldn’t have dumped her into the Willahock.’
‘Not dumped, Leo; relocated to keep me from getting charged with her murder.’ Then, ‘I went to see the Bohemian this morning.’
His face relaxed, but only a little. ‘How can he help?’
‘I’m hoping he’ll put me in front of someone who knows about that congressional campaign.’
There was faster movement in the pool. The ladies had swum up to surround the naked man, hands alternating between flailing to stay afloat and stabbing beneath the surface. I looked away from the roiling water. The swim party was getting ugly.
‘Have fun,’ I said, standing up.
‘Did you get rid of the box? Cadaver dogs can smell the faintest trace of decomposed human remains.’
‘I’ll burn it when I get back,’ I said.
And so I’d planned.