It was a hell of a lot colder than it had been in Wichita, and the cabbie laughed when I mentioned it. “Yeah, yesterday fooled you. You thought it was really springtime, didn’t you? Big arctic front coming down from Canada. Snowing in Chicago right now, is what it says on the radio.”
“You don’t say.”
“Could have some here tonight. And yesterday it got up into the high sixties.”
He was about my age and looked to be in sound health. “Let me ask you something, buddy. You in the war?”
“Sure was,” he said. “You?”
“Yeah. Miss it?”
He looked at me in the rear view mirror like I was either kidding or crazy. “Hell, no. I never had a worse time in my damn life than in the lousy goddamn Navy. There’s a petty officer I came damn close to killing. If I thought there was any chance of getting away with a murder on a United States aircraft carrier I by God would have done it, too, no regrets.”
I almost laughed; there was the Navy for you. An Army man would have figured out a way, and a Marine would have just killed the son of a bitch and damn the consequences.
IT HADN’T OCCURRED to me in the slightest that Vickie might be less than thrilled to find me standing there all chipper and horny on her welcome mat.
“Jesus, Wayne, don’t you ever send a telegram or anything?” She looked worse than I’d ever seen her look, which was still a cut above most women. Puffy-eyed, her hair a wreck, no makeup, and wearing just a tattered bathrobe, she gave me an up and down that, while still disapproving, was moving into the realm of the friendly. “You know perfectly goddamn well I work nights.”
“I could use some shuteye myself,” I said. “I only slept an hour or two on the train.”
“No, huh-uh. I need to sleep, and I mean sleep and nothing else.”
“How about I crash on the couch?”
“Nuh-uh. You be on your way. You’re lucky ’cause I’m off tonight, but right now I’m going to sleep. Come back at four or five and you can take me out on a proper date and then maybe we’ll see what happens.”
When she shut the door on me she had a look on her face that was almost affectionate.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER a cab was dropping me off outside a dingy office building on Troost. The building directory led me to a suite on the top floor, and when I rang the buzzer no one answered at first. After a third and a fourth buzz, a baldheaded man with a painfully annoyed look on his face answered.
“Whatever it is I don’t need it. Scram,” he said. He was in his shirtsleeves and his suspenders were frayed. One lens of his black-framed eyeglasses was cracked.
“Hold on,” I said, and stuck my foot in the door.
“Scram,” he said again.
“Used to be a customer. United States Army Quartermaster Corps in Rome. Wayne Ogden’s the name, if that means anything to you.”
He cocked his head. “Ogden. The hell you say. I’m Merle Tessler.”
“I used to order quite a lot of material from you. I was in town, thought I’d look you up.”
“Huh,” he said. “Never ever had a customer visit in the flesh before.”
“Glad to see you’re still in business. I have a buddy stationed in Japan right now, running the same type operation I used to. Thought maybe you could send him a set on approval.”
“Hell, come on in. We could sure set something up like that.”
IT WAS LIKE any other photographic studio, with a skylight above and a portrait lighting kit. A corner of the room was used as a set, with various pieces of furniture. There was a darkroom in the corner, and a number of cameras in different formats, including one I hadn’t expected to see.
“Is that a Bolex, there? Swiss?”
“You know your gear, don’t you?”
“My grandfather was a photographer, and my dad was an amateur. So you’re making movies.”
“Yep. Sixteen millimeter. Started making stags right about six months back.”
“No fooling. I bet my buddy in Japan would like to get his hands on some of those.”
From a file cabinet he extracted a folder and handed it to me. Inside were pictures of girls, most of them better-than-average looking, getting fucked by an assortment of disreputable-looking men. Most of the men had the haggard, hopeless look of dope fiends, skinny degenerates with well-defined ribcages and jutting Adam’s apples.
“That’s the regular sex stuff. Shot those