Page 24 of The Happy Month
In the morning, Ronnie, John and I drove up to the Silver Lake area. The storage facility had turned out to be the one on Beverly Boulevard near Virgil in my old stomping ground. General Storage was housed in an Art Deco building about fifteen stories tall and made of beige stone that was ornately carved on the first floor. The entrance was just off Virgil. I parked in their lot, and we went inside.
A grumpy young man, practically a teenager, sat at the reception desk staring at us.
“Yeah?”
“We’re going up to lockers 1018, 19 and 20.”
“Take the elevator to the tenth floor. Shocking, I know.”
He was annoying, so I said, “Have a nice day.”
I’m not sure I meant it. All right, I know I didn’t mean it. We walked over to the elevator and hit the button. Ronnie rolled his eyes at me.
In the elevator, John asked, “What exactly are we looking for?”
“Personal papers, diaries, photo albums, photographs, bills, taxes… Anything that might give us more information on who Patrick Gill was and who he was involved with: friends, lovers, associates. Particularly in the nineteen forties and early fifties.”
“Personally, I don’t have a lot of those things—mementos, I mean. I have friends and…” John said. “I do have a photo album and a box of important papers, but that’s about it. I don’t keep bills or taxes…”
“You’re supposed to keep your tax records for seven years,” Ronnie said. “In case you get audited.”
“I use the EZ form. There’s not a lot to audit.”
I knew almost nothing about my taxes. Ronnie did them. When the elevator opened, we found ourselves in a long bland hallway. Following the numbers, we found 1018, 19 and 20. From a pocket, I took out a keychain that was labeled SHEILA K STABLES and held three keys. The locks were the kind of lock you bought for your gym bag if you weren’t good at remembering numbers. Not very secure, but then simply being ten floors up was pretty secure, so it probably didn’t matter.
One by one, I opened the lockups. John rolled up the doors. Once they were all open, I stood back and looked at them for a moment. Each lockup was full to the brim. I could see the ends of sofas, mattresses, dressers, some really ugly lamps, easy chairs, a dining table, a bunch of end tables, framed art, pillows, rugs, bookcases, a console television—and boxes, lots and lots of boxes. Each lockup seemed to have a path that went through to the back.
“We should each take one,” I suggested. “Preferences?”
“I want the center one,” Ronnie said.
“I’ll take 1018,” John said. It was the one to the left.
“Okay, let’s get going,” I said as I headed for 1020.
They’d left me the lockup with the most boxes. Which was good because what was in them was probably what I wanted. But also bad because it meant I had to lift them.
Years ago, twelve years ago, I got shot. The bullet went through my chest messing up a rib, nicking a lung, and doing a number on my right shoulder blade. That had resulted in one surgery. The doctors had such a good time with that, they wanted to do it again six months later. But by that time I was gone, and seeing a doctor was not exactly a priority.
And it’s really not that bad. I have trouble getting things off the top shelf—and when you’re six-foot-three people ask you to get things off the top shelf all the time. I’m a continual disappointment. I also have trouble with things like push-ups and pull-ups and lifting weights. Bodybuilding was out of the question. And I have a problem with heavy boxes—well, heavy anything.
In lockup 1020, there were fifteen boxes lined up, five deep, three tall, right next to the door. The only way I was going to be able to open them was to move them out to the hallway. I grabbed the first one; it was just below chest height. Not too bad. But then I had to put it down. I squatted and then a pain shot through my shoulder. I got the box close to the floor and dropped it.
The box had been taped closed. I pulled out my keys and used the key to my Jeep to open the box. Inside, I found six thick, red lawbooks. I didn’t bother looking at the titles, they weren’t what I wanted. I pulled the next box out, the one below the first. Same thing. Law books.Different color. I decided to leave the bottom row of boxes where they were. I opened that box. More legal books.
Then I began shifting the boxes from one stack to another, so I didn’t have to move them far. I worked my way through all fifteen boxes. Nothing but legal books. It had taken a half an hour for me to look in the fifteen boxes. This was going to take a while.
I asked myself why Edwin or his brother hadn’t taken the books. But then I realized they were probably outdated. Patrick was eighty. He likely stopped practicing ten, fifteen years ago. The books were out-of-date. Useless.
Why did they keep them at all, then? I couldn’t imagine the Karpinskis loading up a moving van themselves. They must have hired movers and then not paid a lot of attention. I left the two boxes I’d put into the hallway out there and moved on.
Next to the boxes was an absurdly large, mahogany desk with a couple of straight-backed chairs sitting on top of the leather inlaid surface. I moved the chairs, sat down in one of them, and began opening the drawers. The drawer in the center contained things you’d expect: pencils, pens, erasers, stamps, business cards, a stapler, a staple-remover, matchbooks, paperclips, clamps and a cigarette lighter.
The top drawer on the left side contained stationary, both letter-sized and note-sized. The drawer directly below was full of boxed envelopes. Several sizes. And below that, manila envelopes 9x12.
On the right side, there were only two large drawers. The top drawer held an old black, rotary desk phone. The kind the telephone company used to rent. It was always the cheapest one when phones began to come in colors.
But all that was a long time ago. Patrick must have bought the phone at some point. I wondered if it stillworked. The bottom drawer was filled up with cassettes. They were numbered P1, P2, P3… or at least I assumed that. They weren’t in order. What I was seeing was P12, P8, P2. I suppose there were around fifteen tapes. I had no idea what they were. I’d have to look around for a tape deck somewhere.
