Leather Maiden

32

I rented a U-Haul truck and Belinda followed me in my car over to the address the landlord had given me. I called just before we got there and he gave me the gate code.

There were rows of storage buildings inside a fence, and there was a little outfit by the gate with buttons on it. I pushed the buttons Cripson had told me to push. The gate clicked open and swung back on its hinges.

In front of the building with the number Cripson had given me was the big black SUV he told me to look for.

Cripson got out of the SUV when we drove up. He was a short, fat, bald guy who wheezed when he walked, like a huge basketball leaking air. He was pulling a little tank on wheels and he had tubes hooked up to his nose that ran back into the tank.

I got out of the van and Belinda got out of the car and we moved through the summer heat like we were moving through gelatin; the heat rose up from the cement in wavy lines that made you feel dizzy.

I shook hands with Cripson. He didn’t offer to shake hands with Belinda, but he gave her an up-and-down look that no one could really blame him for. She was wearing blue jeans today and a simple top, but those jeans fit her as close as baby oil.

“Here’s the key,” Cripson said. “You unlock it. This emphysema wears me out if I so much as vigorously wipe my ass.”

I unlocked the storage shed and peeked inside. There were all manner of dusty boxes. The air was still and heavy and stunk of mildew and something spoiled. It was hot.

“What’s that smell?” I said.

“Now and again, animals crawl up under the back, get in there and are too stupid to get out,” Cripson said. “Possums, armadillos, rats. They die. Ain’t nothing stinks worse than a dead rat.”

“I can vouch for that,” I said.

“Hence, the saying: I smell a rat,” Belinda said.

“What’s that?” Cripson said.

“Nothing,” Belinda said. “I was entertaining myself.”

“Well,” Cripson said, “whatever. It’s all yours. Dig in. Get it all. That’s our deal. And when you leave, push the padlock in place. Give me the key now.”

A moment later Cripson wheezed back into his SUV and was gone in a puff of dust, leaving Belinda and me inside the storage shed looking around.

“It’s so hot I feel as if I’m going to swoon,” Belinda said.

I felt the same way, so we went at it easy, a little at a time, took a break and hung the padlock in place without locking it, went back to Belinda’s house to eat a sandwich, then returned to work before we got so comfortable we couldn’t force ourselves back.

It took most of the morning and into the early afternoon, and the stink got worse as we went along. It was coming from somewhere amidst the garbage. We didn’t find out what the stink was right then, but got everything loaded and over to Belinda’s place, where we put it in her garage.

When we were finished, Belinda said, “I can tell you this much, Cason. Ronnie didn’t just decide to skip out on her rent. She left in a real hurry, because she left her jewelry and her makeup, some awfully nice dresses and slacks, and a lot of shoes. I don’t think she’d do that. I wouldn’t do that, not unless I had to. Not unless I had to run quick.”

“Maybe Ronnie knew more about Caroline than overdue library fines.”

“And all those boxes,” she said, “I don’t know what’s in them, but that’s where the stink is coming from. My guess is Cripson hired someone to move all this stuff, and they unloaded her refrigerator and stuck the stuff in boxes and put it in the shed. The bottom is about to come out of a couple of them. Would she have gone off and left a whole refrigerator full of food?”

“Sometimes people do that.”

“Okay. But what’s her rush? And again, there’s the makeup, jewelry and clothes.”

“It’s a little curious,” I said.

We looked in the boxes, and sure enough, it was old rotten food that seemed to have mutated and become one with the boxes it was in. You couldn’t tell what kind of food it had been, but it was certainly a lively creation. We bagged all of that up in plastic bags and stuffed it in trash cans.

We poked around in the other boxes, looking for what we in the newspaper business like to call a big ole goddamn clue. I was prowling through a box of books, mostly cookbooks, and one book on sexuality that had some nice pictures, which I examined closely, just in case it might contain information we might need. Like certain sexual positions that required peanut butter and jelly. I was looking this over when Belinda said, “Put that down, Cason.”

I did.

“I got some letters here,” she said. “They are kind of curious.”

I went over and looked at them with her. They were letters from a Mrs. Soledad who lived in Cleveland, Texas.

“I don’t know they mean anything,” she said, “but it might not be a bad idea to look through them. It might give us some home information about Ronnie, where to find her. You can find anyone on the Internet these days.”

“We can try that. Anything else curious?”

Belinda shook her head. “Not really, and that’s pretty much all of it. We been through everything. Of course, if you need to examine that book a little more closely….”

“Nope,” I said. “Got it memorized.”

“Perhaps you could show me some of the points of interest later.”

“I can almost guarantee that,” I said.

We bundled the letters together, and I drove the moving van back to the rental company, Belinda following in my car, then we went back to her place. We had the letters with us the whole trip, and as I drove us back, Belinda looked through them. When she was finished, she bundled them together again and we carried them into her place.

It was really cool inside, especially after we’d been out in the heat all day, and we put the letters on the coffee table and got something to drink. We sat and drank and didn’t look at the letters. We soon found ourselves in the shower, where it was necessary to use the soap bar on each other so we could get to all those hard-to-reach spots. The water was warm but it wasn’t warm like the outside air. It was pleasant and we spent a long time in there, then rinsed in cold water until we shook.

We toweled off and lay in the bed under the covers. I told Belinda some things about that sex book I had been looking at in the garage, but neither of us was particularly inspired; the heat had sapped us. Without meaning to, we fell asleep.

When I awoke the room was dark. Night had fallen. I got out of bed carefully, so as not to wake Belinda. Still nude, I padded into the living room and sat down on the couch and took the bundle of letters off the coffee table.

I looked through them. Caroline was mentioned in them. A lot. The letters were obviously Mrs. Soledad’s response to letters written by Ronnie. Just being on the receiving end, not having Ronnie’s letters, I wasn’t exactly sure what some of it meant. But I could tell this: Ronnie was worried about Caroline and so was Mrs. Soledad, up to a point. I got the feeling maybe Mrs. Soledad didn’t miss Caroline as much as Ronnie did.

I read through the letters a couple of times. A lot of them weren’t about Caroline and were just hometown things. From the letters I understood that Soledad lived outside of Cleveland, Texas. That was about two hours from where we were.

I turned on Belinda’s computer and looked up Cleveland, and I looked up Mrs. Soledad’s address. It was there, easy as could be to find. There was even an aerial view of her house.

I was looking at the aerial view and thinking about some of the things in the letters when a hand clapped down on my shoulder and I jumped.

Belinda said, “Looking up porn sites.”

I turned. She hadn’t bothered with clothes either. I said, “Hey, I’m living one. Why look it up?”

She smiled at me. “What you got there?” she said.

“An address. Now all I need is a phone number.”