I handed him the decoded note. “The next clue is in the red Dumpster.”
He walked to the Dumpster, stuck his head over the edge and recoiled.
“Pretty ripe,” I said. “Maybe you want to put on some old clothes before you go in there.”
“What, are you nuts? I'm not wading through that shit.”
“It's your note.”
“Yeah, but I've hired you,” Eddie said.
“You didn't hire me to go Dumpster surfing.”
“I hired you to find her. That's all I want. I just want you to find her.”
He had two pagers clipped onto his spandex shorts. One of them beeped and displayed a message. He read the message and sighed. “Chicks,” he said. “They never stop.”
Right. It was probably from his mother.
He went to his car and made a couple of calls on his car phone. He finished the calls and came back to me. “Okay,” he said, “it's all taken care of. All you have to do is stay here and wait for Carlos. I'd stay, but I got other things to do.”
I watched him leave, then I turned and squinted beyond the lot. “Hey Maxine,” I yelled. “You out there?” If it had been me I'd have wanted to see Kuntz slopping around in the garbage. “Listen,” I said, “it was a good idea, but it didn't work out. How about you let me buy you a couple pieces of chicken?”
Maxine didn't come forward, so I sat in my car and waited for Carlos. After about twenty minutes a flatbed truck pulled into the lot and unloaded a backhoe. The flatbed driver fired up the backhoe, rolled it to the Dumpster and put the bucket under the bin's bottom edge. The Dumpster tipped in slow motion and then crashed to the pavement and lay there like a big dead dinosaur. Garbage bags hit the ground and burst, and a glass jar clinked onto the blacktop, rolled between the bags and came to rest a few feet from where I was standing. Someone had used a Magic Marker to write “clue” on the outside of the jar.
The backhoe driver looked over at me. “You Stephanie?”
I was staring, transfixed, at the Dumpster and the mess in front of me, and my heart was beating with a sickening thud. “Unh huh.”
“You want me to spread this garbage around some more?”
“No!”
People were standing in the doorways and staring through the windows of Cluck in a Bucket. Two high school kids dressed in yellow-?and-?red Cluck uniforms ran across the lot to the backhoe.
“What are you doing? What are you doing?” one of the kids yelled.
“Hey, don't get your undies in a bunch,” the driver said to the kid. “Life's too short.” He motored the backhoe onto the flatbed, got behind the wheel, gave us a military salute and drove off. We all stood there, momentarily speechless.
The kid turned to me. “Do you know him?”
“Nope,” I said. “Never saw him before in my life.”
* * * * *
I WAS less than a mile from my apartment, so I grabbed the jar, jumped into my car and headed for home. All the way, I kept looking over my shoulder, half expecting to be tracked down like a dog by the garbage police.
I unlocked my door and called to Rex. “Another one of those days.”
Rex was asleep in his soup can and made no response, so I went into the kitchen and made myself a peanut butter and olive sandwich. I cracked open a be
er and studied the new encrypted message while I ate. I looked for run-?together words and extra letters, but it was all a big glob of nothing to me. Finally I gave up and called Sally. His phone rang three times and his machine kicked in. “Sally and Sugar aren't home, but they'd just loooooove to talk to you, so leave a message.”
I left my name and number and went back to staring at the note. By three o'clock my eyes felt fried and there was no word from Sally, so I decided to go door-?to-?door to the seniors again. Mr. Kleinschmidt told me it wasn't a crossword. Lorraine told me it wasn't a jumble. Mr. Markowitz told me he was watching TV and didn't have time for such nonsense.
The light was blinking on my phone machine when I returned to my kitchen.
The first message was from Eddie Kuntz. “So where is she?” That was it. That was the whole message.