Leo called at eleven in the morning, waking me from the first deep sleep I’d had in weeks. “Apparently banging on your door doesn’t intrude into your consciousness.”
I mumbled something profane into my phone.
“Let me in,” he said. “It’s snowing.”
I pulled on pants and a sweatshirt from the chair, slipped on Nikes and into my pea coat, which is what one uses for a robe when there’s no heat, and hustled down the metal stairs to open the timbered door.
“Entrez,” I said, in what might have been flawless French. It’s one of three words Amanda has told me I’ll need to know if I ever become a doorman in Paris. The other two are “Merci,’” said with palm up, and “La patisserie?” voiced with raised eyebrow, for directions to the nearest bake shop. She assures me they’re all I’ll need.
“Jeez, it’s colder in here than outside.” Leo shivered as he stepped in out of the snow.
“Perhaps.” I closed the door. “But there’s less wind.”
Leo wore his usual winter ensemble—the orange traffic parka, the chartreuse knit hat with the purple pom. Today, though, he’d added a lemon-colored wool scarf. “For color,” he said, whipping it back with a flourish, like the Red Baron stepping down from his biplane after yet another successful aerial sortie. “Endora bought it for me.”
“She alone understands your style,” I said.
“Is the heat on in your office?” he asked, already ringing the stairs on his way up.
“Not yet.” I clanged up after him and turned left, toward the sink, to make a pot of coffee.
“No time for that now,” he said, coming out of my office and shutting the door.
“Where are we going?”
“Do you not own a calendar?”
“It’s March first… ah,” I said, realizing. Then I shook my head. “It’s snowing. He might not be open.”
“March first is Opening Day. Always. Finish getting dressed, if you own more clothes. I’ll wait for you in my car, where there’s heat.”
He started down, then stopped to launch his eyebrows into a little dance. “Especially this year,” he added enigmatically, before going down the rest of the way.
“I don’t understand,” I said to his back.
“You’ll see.”
“See what?” I said, but he was already out the door.
I was out to his Porsche in ten minutes. Astrud Gilberto sang softly above a Brazilian guitar as Leo drove us down Thompson Avenue. He turned at the river road and headed down the familiar heaved asphalt toward the concrete piers beneath the overpass. It was snowing harder.
“It’s too early—” I started to say.
Leo quieted Astrud and the guitarist a bit as he coasted to a stop. For a minute, neither of us spoke. Then he said, “Behold.”
I stared at the horror through the falling snow.
Kutz’s Wienie Wagon sat in its usual spot under the railroad overpass, on the same flat tires that had supported it since the Second World War. But its narrow clapboard siding was no longer covered with curling flecks of white paint, as colorless as birch bark.
He’d painted it purple. Not lilac, not lavender, but a ripping, jelly-damned-bean purple.
“What the hell has he done?” I shouted. There were few things in my world that I’d ever trusted to stay constant, but Kutz’s flaking hot dog trailer headed that short list. The world might continue to change, and Rivertown might continue to crumble within it, as the lizards went about corrupting it, brick by brick. Never, though, had I doubted that Kutz—eighty-some years old, mean as a snake stuck under a rock—would always, always, be boiling hot dogs under the overpass, and that he’d be doing it, always, always, from that peeling trailer that flicked off bits of leaded paint the way Kutz’s always upraised middle finger flicked off the world.
Now he’d gone and painted the thing. Purple.
“Shit, Leo. Double shit.”
He switched off the CD, silencing the murmurings of the Brazilian goddess. “Yesterday, at the Discount Den, they told me he’d just bought ten gallons of rubberized paint on closeout, that thick glop you’re supposed to trowel on rough walls. I knew what the nutcake was going to do. I swung down here, tried to tell him it would drive away customers. He told me to go screw myself and kept slopping it on, crazy as a jaybird.”
“Yesterday?”
Leo turned and grinned. “Yesterday.”
“It snowed yesterday.”
“Nuts like a jaybird,” Leo said again, “out there painting in the falling snow.”
“Why?”
“Check out the sign on the roof.”
I looked higher. Kutz had amended his old sign to read KUTZ’S WIENIE WAGON AND LATES.
“What are lates?”
“Lattes. Kutz is going in for snoot coffee, lattes and espressos and that stuff.” Leo cut the engine, and we got out.
He headed for the order window. I split away and went around to the back of the trailer. Of course, it was purple, too. Worse, it had been smoothed and filled in by the thick, rubberized paint.
Generations of Rivertown’s young bucks had carved their initials into the slats on the back of that trailer, guys who were now old men, guys who’d moved away, guys who were dead and never coming back. Since World War II, they’d carved their names, or their initials, or the initials of girls they’d known, or wanted to know, or would never know, with a quick knife cut into the soft, flaking wood. My initials were back there, too, with a girl’s, inside a heart carved two months after I graduated high school. Now they were gone like the rest, covered up with rubberized purple paint. Not even the indentations remained.
I walked around to the front. “What the hell, Kutz?” I yelled through the closed Plexiglas.
He bent down and slid open the order window. “Got to change with the times, attract a better crowd than you jerks just buying wienies.”
Leo’s hand found my shoulder as we waited for our order. He knew what I’d gone looking for on the back of the trailer.
Kutz bagged the six hot dogs, cheese fries, and the two drinks—a Big Swallow for Leo, a small diet for me—and handed them through the window. “Sure you don’t want a couple of lates?” he asked Leo.
“Not in this lifetime,” I said.
We carried the bags to Leo’s Porsche.
“Shit,” I said again.
“Trust the weather.” Leo started the Porsche up the potholed road.
“What do you mean?”
“Ever see Kutz cleaning anything inside that trailer?”
I shook my head. “Word is, he doesn’t even change the hot dog water, lets it sit over the winter because it’s too greasy to freeze.”
“Exactly.” He nosed the Porsche up onto Thompson Avenue and accelerated west toward the turret. “Kutz laid on that glop while it was snowing. No way he scraped or washed that old, flaking wood before he hit it with the paint. Give it a few freeze-and-thaw cycles, throw in some summer rains, and that ground’s going to be littered with sheets of rubberized purple, big as the shredded tires you see on the interstate.”
“What if the weather doesn’t come through?”
Leo flashed me a big-lipped smile that connected his ears with a mouth full of white teeth. “You’re crazy. You’ll think of something.”
At the turret, he went up to the heat in my office, and I went to the kitchen to put on coffee.
“It looks like it’s been snowing popcorn balls in here,” he called from across the hall. He’d noticed the wadded-up sheets of white paper from my typing frenzy. Then, “Jeez, what the—?” His voice stopped suddenly.
I switched on the coffee and walked across the would-be hall. I knew what had silenced him so abruptly.
He was standing back from the card table desk, the bags of hot dogs and drinks in his hands forgotten. His always pale face was two shades whiter than I’d ever seen it. He was staring at Carolina’s typewriter as if he were looking at the dead.
“Just like…” He let the sentence die away.
“I know.”
He roused his thoughts enough to put the bags on the card table, but his right hand lingered close to the old Underwood.
“There’s nothing scratched on the bottom, Leo.”
In a kind of exaggerated slow motion, he turned to look at me.
“I checked,” I said. “Several times.”
He dropped his hand and stepped backward.
“Old times,” he said.
“Old times.”
His eyes surveyed the mess of wadded-up paper on the floor, hunting, I thought, for a place—any place—to look rather than at the typewriter. “You writing a book?”
“Indulging a fury.”
He nodded, without questioning, and pointed at the thick tan envelopes and newspaper sheets stacked beneath the card table. “Louise Thomas’s?”
“Carolina’s. Her real name.”
His eyes had strayed back to the old typewriter. “You knew her?”
“I don’t remember a Carolina, either.”
He shrugged out of his orange parka. Underneath, he wore a red rag knit sweater, two sizes too long, that on him resembled a sock knitted for a dinosaur. He bent down to peer more closely at the piles of newspaper sheets. “Advice columns?”
“I think she wrote them in Florida and in Rambling. I’ve read them all. She answered each with compassion, respect, and a good bit of humor. I think she’d known pain herself.”
A faint smile touched his lips. “Dek Elstrom, ever the romantic.” He straightened up, about to open the bag of hot dogs, when he must have spotted the white envelopes with Carolina’s name written on them. He raised an eyebrow. I nodded. He picked one up and slid out the sheet inside. “Her editor wants to know why she’s stopped sending in material.”
“She quit submitting around the end of last year.”
“Because she was killed.”
I waved a hand at the litter of wadded-up sheets. “I was up late, trying to find the best way of communicating that to her editor.”
He set the small drink and one hot dog on the table for me and took the other five dogs, with the cheese fries and the Big Swallow, to the plastic chair. He would eat all that and still weigh a hundred and forty pounds. It is an injustice. I wear every Oreo I’ve ever eaten.
I sat in my red swivel chair, unwrapped my hot dog, and took a bite. It tasted as good as ever, though who knew what the absence of lead paint dust would do to the ancient flavors in the boiling water, long term.
“She was nationally syndicated, but she wrote with that old—” He stopped, not wanting to even refer to the old machine. The typewriter had spooked him, the way it had me at first.
“No computer word processor for her.”
Leo bit into a hot dog, chewing slower than usual. Always, he ingested Kutz’s tube steaks at warp speed. Not today. He’d been slowed by the past.
“It’s not hers, Leo,” I said.
He looked at me from across the small room. “You’re sure?” He was bald, with the shadow of a man’s heavy beard on his pale skin, but it was a boy asking the question, the boy he’d been the summer we graduated high school.
I tapped the typewriter next to me. “Nothing under this baby except smooth black paint.”
He grinned then, after a fashion, and shook his head as if he were clearing it. “Saudade,” he said.
“Saudade?”
“Brazilian word, somewhat untranslatable into English, but it can mean a kind of yearning, a grateful nostalgia, for a love past.”
I raised my Diet Coke and toasted the typewriter. “Saudade,” I said, being bilingual, too.
Leo took a bigger bite of his hot dog. “You said this Rambling, Michigan, place is dirt poor?”
“Everything on its main street is vacant or burned. Half the houses outside of town appear to be abandoned.”
He unwrapped another hot dog. “She made a few bucks writing advice columns for shopping rags, lived in a rented shack, drove a clapped-out old car, owned few clothes and almost no other personal possessions?” He was chewing faster, and thinking faster.
“Yes.”
“Except for that?” He pointed at the typewriter with the last inch of his second hot dog.
“Except for that.”
“If she had nothing, why name any executor? Why name you?”
“I work cheaper than anybody.”
It didn’t fetch a laugh. “You knew her,” he said.
For a moment, neither of us spoke as we pondered the riddle of that.
“I’m guessing Carolina worked at a client’s, years ago, before she started writing her columns,” I finally offered up. There was nothing else to think.
Leo slid the wrapper of a fourth hot dog away. I hadn’t seen him eat the third.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s get back to the second biggest question. Why was she living in Rambling?”
“Because nobody would know she was there. She had her mail—her readers’ mail, notes from her editor—sent down to Florida, then forwarded again, up to the Woodton post office box, which was a half hour’s drive from her home. She had no possessions, no personal stuff except a few clothes, a car not even titled in her own name, and a typewriter. She could pack up and be gone in fifteen minutes.”
“What about that key you found?”
“That’s where she kept what valuables she had. In a bank box.”
“Near Rambling?”
“No. The way she cemented the key into that typewriter tells me she wasn’t planning on using it for some time. I’m guessing that key works in some bank in Florida, or maybe on the route she took coming north.”
I looked at the typewriter, then back to Leo. “But somebody did.”
“Did what?” He dropped a limp cheese fry back into the sodden tray.
“Somebody did know she was in Rambling.” I told him about the man in the pull-down hat who tried to finesse his way into her mail at the Woodton post office.
“You didn’t find any money in her cottage?”
“I don’t think she had a bank account. I’m guessing that guy grabbed whatever cash she had in the house.”
“It wasn’t a random home invasion?” He unwrapped the last of his five hot dogs, bit into it, and waited.
“A home invader doesn’t track her mail to Woodton.”
“What, then?”
“She’d been hiding from the man who finally found and killed her,” I said. “For years.”
“That explains why she left Florida, and her secretive life in Rambling. And that brings us back to the number one question: Why name you executor of a valueless estate?”
“She didn’t name me. She hired me.”
“To do what?” He watched my eyes as he slid the last of the hot dog into his mouth.
There was only one answer.
“She wanted me to find her killer,” I said.