Footlocker

Chapter 1“Fine. Here’s a hundred bucks.”

Seth Coulter reached in to the pocket of his shorts, pulled out his rent money and peeled off five 20s.

“You’re lucky. It cost PEOPLE five hundred,” the guy behind the grimy glass at the front desk chuckled as he pocketed the cash with one hand and scratched beneath his stained wife beater with the other.

“Yeah. Lucky.” Seth took the key and walked up a flight stairs that hadn’t seen a mop since the Reagan administration, past a hooker with fire engine red hair wearing a fake lizard skin miniskirt and a halter-top that was the height of hooker-chic in the 70s. She looked older at first glance, but as he went by he could tell she was heavily made up, trying to cover up her youth.

“Hey baby, you want a date?”

“No thanks.” He kept moving.

“Come on, honey. You a good lookin’ boy. I’ll make you a deal…” She took a drag on her cigarette, coughed once and spit on the floor with a wet noise that sounded like pudding hitting a flat rock.

Seth ignored her and marched on until he reached the fourth floor, where he turned left into a magnificent odor that he couldn’t place but that reminded him of Bourbon Street at six AM, before the gutters have been hosed down. He walked away from the street toward the rooms at the back of the hotel, the cheaper rooms. The hall was dark and he noticed that all the light sockets were empty.

A hushed scraping noise came from the end of the hall and Seth squinted, trying to see in the dim light and caught the tail end of a rat, or maybe just a very healthy mouse, as it disappeared into a hole near the bottom of the wall. He counted doors as he went, stopping at the seventh one on the right, 413, shoved the key into the lock, turned the knob and pushed. The door stuck so he put his shoulder into it and the door swung back easily.

Standing in the hallway for a moment, he took a deep breath of stale air. This was it. He stepped into the room. On first glance there was nothing special. The bed was made up, the sheet at the top of the bed folded neatly back over the thin blanket, hospital corners at the bottom. Several framed pictures sat atop the dresser.

He crossed the room to the window and pulled the blinds up to reveal a stunning view of the back side of a cinderblock building across the alley. A big truck rumbled by in the alley below, bass thumping over the growl of the diesel motor.

He turned around and took the room in from the new angle. The special aroma from the hall wasn’t nearly so pungent in here. After a minute, he knelt down next to the bed and peered under. Cardboard boxes. He pulled one out and opened it up. Neatly pressed shirts, well worn, stacked to the top. He pulled another out. Jeans and frayed khakis. Next box, threadbare sweaters. Everything smelled like detergent, obviously clean, very organized.

“What’re you doin’?” a voice asked from the doorway.

Startled, Seth looked up to see a middle-aged woman who was probably forty but looked every day of sixty filling the doorway. She and her mustard colored cardigan had seen better days.

“I’m looking. The desk clerk gave me the key.”

“Typical. Nothing’s sacred. You’re like the fifth one this week. Who do you write for?” she asked.

“Post. Style section,” Seth replied going back to his snooping.

“Ha!” she snorted. “It’s down to that, is it?”

Seth looked over the bed from his place on the floor.

“The Times, Washingtonian, PEOPLE… now the Style section of the Post? What’s next, the Enquirer?”

“What’s wrong with the Post Style section?” Seth asked, taking another look under the bed. As a stringer, he was used to this, though not from people with only half their teeth.

“Nothing, nothing at all,” she said as she turned to leave. “Scavengers… Go away and leave him alone,” she muttered from the hall and slammed her door shut.

Seth continued to poke around under the bed, then lifted up the mattress. A hospital corner came loose from one side. Nothing between the mattresses. He took a minute to remake the bed, mostly out of respect for the dead.

A big part of the reason Seth had begged his editor for a chance to write this piece was the subject.

DG Rasmussen. The thought of the name sent a small shiver up his spine and Seth remembered the first time he read Rasmussen in high school, tenth grade American Lit. Even then, the author’s literary light was dimming, but Seth’s teacher had loved the work, “Scrambled Eggs.” He’d read it in two days, almost a week ahead of schedule, then read it again. It was the reason he started writing in the first place.

Seth moved across the hotel room to look at the pictures on the dresser and stuck into the gap between the mirror and its frame. It was definitely Rasmussen, grayer and more weathered than he remembered from the book dust jacket, but definitely him. A smiling Rasmussen with Stephen King, with John Grisham, Elmore Leonard. Another even older Rasmussen alone in front of the Smithsonian castle.

Seth looked intently at these pictures for a minute, then he started going through the drawers in the dresser. The top one was nearly empty, only a bottle of cheap knockoff aftershave and some generic deodorant. The second drawer was equally devoid of substance, three pair of boxers and some mended socks. He continued down the dresser, finally pulling the bottom drawer open. Still, nothing.

Seth sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the dusty floor, across the tape body outline. Finally, his eyes settled on the closet and he got up, causing a small riot from the squeaky springs, and pulled open the closet door. It was nearly vacant; a Member’s Only jacket and two t-shirts on wire hangers. An old steamer trunk sat on the floor. Seth kicked it once to see if it was empty. It didn’t move. He bent over to haul it out and had to pull hard.

He muscled it out of the closet, over next to the bed and pulled on the lock. It stuck, so Seth pulled the big paperclip he used as a money clip out of his pocket, unbent it and started in on the lock. After a few minutes of thoroughly unprofessional lockpicking, the lock clicked and popped open.

Anxiously, Seth looked around once before he opened it. What he found disappointed him. More clothes, Rasmussen’s winter wardrobe.

“Damn,” he mumbled to himself. He poked at the winter jacket on one side and noticed a photo album beneath it. He pulled it out and opened it on his lap. The first page was a clipping from the Reading Eagle, mentioning that Rasmussen’s first novel had been picked up by HarperCollins. Then there were others, following Rasmussen’s meteoric rise in the literary world, dozens of reviews, most beaming, heaping praise on this brave new voice. Those few that didn’t give positive reviews smacked of sour grapes, reviewers taking their own poor reviews out on the next lucky player. Seth turned the pages and followed the arc of his hero’s short career until he met blank pages. He flipped through the rest of the album but found nothing more.

Seth replaced the album and picked up a stack of loose photos, nearly all of them of Rasmussen and someone else. Clearly, the selection on top of the dresser were the favorites, but this stack was no less impressive. Rasmussen with Danielle Steele and Gore Vidal, Anne Rice and Carl Hiaasen. Rasmussen with Brooke Harlowe. Seth flipped through the stack, impressed with the collection of glitterati.

He selected one and looked closely at it. It was a photo of Rasmussen at a Vanity Fair party flanked on one side by a slim woman with cleavage that seemed to defy gravity who Seth assumed was his wife, and on the other side by Tina Brown. Although Rasmussen smiled, he obviously wasn’t happy. This was a smile pasted on for the photographer. Seth tucked the photo into his notepad and put the rest back.

As he set the stack down, he noticed the bottom of the locker. He looked closer, leaning down to get a better perspective. Something wasn’t right. The inside didn’t line up with the outside. He rapped on the floor of the trunk, but it didn’t sound hollow. Undeterred, he poked his pen around the edge of the trunk bottom until it caught in a small space. He levered it back, pulling it loose.

There, in two separate sections under the false bottom sat stacks of currency on one side and papers on the other. The blood drained from Seth’s face and he looked up to be sure no one was watching him. Quickly, he crossed the room and closed the door, throwing the bolt, then returned to the trunk.

Most of the bills were banded, hundreds and fifties. He picked up one of the stacks and flipped through it, then tossed it back.

“Holy shit!” he said to himself. “Holy Mother of God!” Seth looked up again, just to ensure he was alone, then looked back at the trunk. He pushed a journal aside, picked up a binder clipped stack of paper from the other side of the trunk and inspected it closely. It was writing, a novel.

Rasmussen’s novel.

Seth flipped through to a random page in the middle of the stack and read a few paragraphs, unable to believe what he was seeing. His mind raced. Quickly, he replaced the manuscript, grabbed a handful of bills and the journal, dropped the bottom back into the trunk and pushed it back into the closet.

The tale of DG Rasmussen was an inspiration to countless aspiring authors. His meteoric rise in the literary community was the stuff of legend. As the only janitor in the Reading, PA school system with a Masters degree in English Literature, Rasmussen toiled in obscurity, occupying any untaken time in his day with pen in hand. On any given afternoon, he might have been found leaning against his mop reading The Catcher in the Rye for the dozenth time and muttering about phonies.

On his own time, he wrote and re-wrote; he scratched and deleted. He would produce several thousand words in an evening. Just a likely, a Saturday sunset might find him staring at a blank piece of paper, seeing it not as unlimited potential, but as a personal failure to write even a single substantive word. He wrote with supreme confidence and on occasion he kicked holes in the wall, certain that he was an abject failure, unable to string half a dozen meaningful words together.

But the gods of literature, being both fickle and mischievous, eventually smiled on DG Rasmussen just as he was ready to throw in the towel. Having spent the previous evening in the company of José Cuervo and a file full of rejection letters, Rasmussen spent day zero, as he would later think of it, in the usual manner – that is, dreaming of the time when he wouldn’t have to be in an elementary school each morning before the students.

On arriving home that evening, he found the light on his answering machine blinking. He thought nothing of it until he listened to the message.

Agent. Love it. Must represent it. Brilliant. My number is…

These were the only words that registered with Rasmussen. At first he thought it was a prank, a cruel joke perpetrated by an old girlfriend who, like his mother, believed his talent and his advanced degree were wasting away and who wanted him to be more than a janitor.

“But, I am. I’m much more. I’m a writer,” he’d responded. And she’d laughed.

He pushed the replay button and listened again. Must represent it.

As fast as he could dial, he pushed the buttons. Working hard to steady his quavering voice, he left a message. That night he didn’t sleep and the next day called in sick so he could sit home and stare at the phone with a concentration worthy of Uri Gellar, willing it to ring. Finally, it did, and finally DG Rasmussen was on his way.

The pace of the next few weeks was hectic, a blur that Rasmussen would never be able to remember clearly although later he would try with all his might. The book sold quickly and garnered a small advance, nothing spectacular, but much more than he expected. His agent informed him that it was a perfectly respectable first sale.

As the book went to press, the publisher put little effort into the marketing, unknown authors having such poor track records, so Rasmussen blew the remainder his advance on a local PR firm to help him flog it. The gamble paid off.

When the first printing sold out, a second, much larger printing was ordered. The publisher put some muscle behind it, and a third printing was needed. Rasmussen kept all the reviews and newspaper clippings he could find, from any newspaper he could get his hands on. He gave his first interview to the local paper, the Reading Eagle, and he would fondly recall that interview later when working with his agent to arrange speaking engagements.

Although entry to the literary establishment is notoriously difficult to gain, once accepted, the fresh new voice is lauded and Rasmussen was no exception. The reviews came and, as each successive printing sold out, the reviewers began to wonder if lightning could strike twice.

Rasmussen, still wide-eyed at the wild ride he was on, assured anyone who asked that it could and that it would. Eventually, the lure of the writing life he’d pursued in obscurity for so long called him to New York and so he packed his bags and left his mopping days behind to answer the call and move to Manhattan, center of the literary universe.

Never again would he scrub misspelled graffiti from the walls (Mary is a hore!), buff tile floors or empty trashcans full of crumpled, single-rule notebook paper and fruit snack wrappers. He would never eat tapioca served in a loud cafeteria or sit in a chair designed for use by someone the height of a Hobbit. These things he would not miss.

But in his first days in Gotham, he found that he did miss the smiling faces of the children, their unflagging optimism and innocence. It eventually dawned on him that greeting those faces each morning renewed his belief in the power of humanity and gave him the confidence he needed to carry on each evening.

“How’s the book?” one of the third graders had asked him one morning.

A little surprised, he’d responded, “It’s coming along,” then retreated to the teacher’s lounge in search of the leak. All of the educators at Millmont Elementary School knew he wrote. By lunch time he’d narrowed the list of suspects to one, a Language Arts teacher.

“Well, of course I told them,” she’d replied when he asked about it. “You’re a hero. I tell them that no matter who you are, anyone can be a writer. To them you’re not just a janitor, you’re a promise, an example that everything is not as it seems on the surface.” It was a pleasant surprise, and after the initial shock, Rasmussen embraced his role model status, asking after the students in the hallways, telling them that reading opens up the world.

After the move to New York, he thought of them often and with great affection. It was one of the things that grounded him, one of the things he held tight to through thick and thin.

“I need to rent the room,” Seth told the guy at the front desk.

Desk man looked up from behind his laptop and placed a nearby copy of the Washington City Paper on his lap to hide the obvious erection.

“Three fifty a week, paid in advance.”

Seth handed over four Benjamins and desk man raised an eyebrow.

“What do you want to do with the stuff?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Seth replied, “I’m going to leave it right where it I found it.”

“Suit yourself,” desk man replied and went back to his surfing. “Keeps me from having to clear it out.”

Seth walked back to the steps, continued calmly up the first flight until he was sure he was out of desk man’s sight, then ran up the remaining flights, past the hooker still sucking on a smoke and on to the fourth floor.

“Slow, down, honey. Where’s the fire?” she asked as he passed.

Seth re-locked the door from the inside, pulled the shade over the window and wrestled the trunk back out of the closet. He’d neglected to lock it back up and made a mental note to not forget next time.

Seth forced himself to be patient while he put the winter wardrobe into the chest of drawers and when he finally got down to the false bottom, he noticed a piece of paper taped down on all four sides. On it were three names and addresses, all of them Rasmussens – Lisa, Dani and Sean, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. Seth knew Lisa was the wife and assumed the others to be children. He did a quick calculation and realized that they would probably be in their twenties by now.

He pulled the stack of pictures out and spread them across the bed, looking carefully at each one. He tried to order them, to impose some organization on them but realized that he had no criteria by which to do so. As he moved the pictures around, he thought for a minute, then started to arrange them by the amount of gray in Rasmussen’s hair.

After a few minutes, he noticed that the beaming face belonging to the black haired Rasmussen became less happy the grayer the hair became. If he’d thumbed through them like a flipbook, he’d have seen the unhappiness growing more distinct over time, a shadow on his face, until the smile became forced and plastic and the eyes dulled.

Until the Smithsonian picture. There Rasmussen’s hair was mostly salt, a little pepper and windblown, obviously the most recent picture. What struck Seth was how genuinely happy he appeared. The eyes once again sparkled.

Several times a minute he looked from the pictures to the false bottom in the trunk and several times a minute he forced himself to refocus on the photos.

Finally, when he couldn’t stand it any longer, Seth pulled the false bottom up and stared at the money. How much money was there? He felt vaguely guilty about using some of it to rent the room, but what the hell, that’s how Rasmussen would have spent it.

Questions caromed around inside his head. How much? Why isn’t this in a vault somewhere? What am I going to do? What was I thinking?

“Fuck!” he yelled, not loud enough to carry down to the alley, but loud enough to be what his girlfriend Annabelle called an “outside voice.” Well, not girlfriend exactly. More like potential girlfriend.

“Razz?” a voice called through the thin wall, followed by three thumps. “You home?”

A cold wash of panic assaulted Seth like a police cruiser in the rearview on a Saturday night, and he quickly dropped the bottom back into the trunk and pushed it behind the bed.

The knock continued, this time on the door.

“Razz? You home?”

“Nope, no Razz,” Seth called back. “I don’t think he’s coming back.”

“Well of course he’s coming back. He always comes back,” the voice on the other side of the door said, almost to itself. “Open this door.”

The pounding started up again, this time more stridently. Seth imagined a beat, a pattern, and rushed to unlock the door before the drummer called any more attention to him than was necessary.

He opened the door and the mustard cardigan stood with her hands on her hips.

“No one takes Razz’s stuff. We look out for each other, you understand?”

“Look, whoever you are, Razz is not coming back. Razz is dead. That’s why so many visitors, get it?” Seth did his best to be intimidating, but he’d forgotten to pack any intimidation into today’s bag of tricks and the best he could come up with was irritation.

“No way. Razz always comes back. This is book stuff.” Cardigan shuffled, unfazed by irritation.

“What do you know about writing?” he asked, still not giving any ground.

“Always typing, that man, always typing. Laptop this, edit that. All he talks about. Of course he’s coming back. He never leaves for very long without his laptop.”

Seth’s attention-meter pegged at the mention of a laptop, but Cardigan was swaying, moving her weight back and forth from one leg to another, almost pacing in place, waiting for Seth to let her in until finally she pushed him out of the way.

“Hallway’s not safe, dumbass. I’m coming in.”

Surprised, and not a little disappointed in his inability to keep Cardigan at bay, Seth closed the door behind her and locked it. He couldn’t remember seeing a laptop in the room.

“What do you mean, not safe?” he asked. “It’s a freakin’ hallway. It’s not like there’s anything to steal here.”

“They’re always in the hallway.”

“You’re loony,” he muttered to himself. “Look, I rented the room. My name is Seth Coulter.” He extended his hand.

“Audrey,” Cardigan replied, not bothering to shake. Her voice held little modulation, almost a monotone, but not quite. “And you can’t rent the room. Razz rents the room.” A statement of fact.

The beginnings of exasperation crept up on Seth and he decided to try another tack. “Razz told me to watch over things for a few days, Audrey. That OK?”

Audrey turned to look at Seth and he could see the gears turning slowly in her head, the machinery mired in molasses, before she finally agreed. “Yeah, that’s OK. But you gotta put his stuff away where it belongs. You gotta put the trunk back.” Without looking, she waved in the general direction of where the trunk sat behind the bed.

“Don’t worry. I’ll see that everything gets put back.” Seth relaxed a little, realizing that Audrey was harmless, at least so far. “I’ll put it all back before he gets home.”

“He’ll be home. He always comes home.”

“Audrey, how’d you meet Razz?” Seth pulled his notepad out and uncapped his pen.

“Here.”

“Right. But where? In the hallway?”

“In the hallway. I told him to stay out of the hallway. They’re always in the hallway.”

“Who? Who’s always in the hallway?”

“The listeners.”

Full-goose bozo, Seth thought. “OK, Audrey. Do you know where Razz went?” he asked.

“Out. He goes out. Sometimes he stays away for a while.”

“How long? How long does he go out for?”

“A while.”

Seth could see that he was running down a dead end with this conversation.

“How long has Razz been gone this time?” he asked, knowing Rasmussen’s death was nearly a week gone.

“A while.”

“All right.” He capped his pen and put the notepad away. “Do you go out, Audrey?”

“Nope. Don’t have to. It all comes to me here.”

“What does that mean?”

“It all comes to me here. I call and it comes.”

“OK. That’s good.” Seth waited to see what Audrey was going to do and when she did nothing for a full minute, he said, “Audrey, why don’t you go back to your room.”

“Will you watch?” she asked, still not turning around.

“Watch for what?”

“The listeners. Watch for the listeners.”

Seth smiled. “Yes. Yes, I will. Let me take a look for you, then you can go.”

He unbolted the door and made a big deal of peering out into the hall.

“It’s all clear. You can go,” he told her.

After she left, Seth locked the footlocker, checked it twice and returned it to the closet before locking the door and hurrying down the stairwell at the end of the hall that opened onto the street around the corner from the hotel entrance.

Seth rounded the corner onto Rhode Island Avenue, disbelieving what was happening to him and turning his day over inside his head until he nearly ran smack into a man coming the opposite direction.

“Watch it, asshole,” the pedestrian said.

“Sorry,” Seth replied, and kept moving, rapt in his thoughts.