Bad Moon Rising (20 page)

I wanted to give myself up to the Cubs game that was just getting started on the radio. Misery loves company and nothing is more miserable than listening to the Cubs blow another season. But this was pregame yak and so I was left to the dying day.

It would have been nice to send my mind on vacation so that I could just sit here and be one with my surroundings but I was restless. I kept thinking about the night of the murder. None of the lovers Van had thrown over would have had a difficult time getting into that barn—there was easy access through the thin line of forest in the back. Anybody who'd followed her to the commune would have been able to swing wide and enter the barn without being seen.

I also thought about the effect Eve had had upon the girls. Imagine if you'd grown up with a sweet, attentive, understanding mother who died and was replaced by a stunning but vapid swinger. And even worse, that your father became a swinger, too. Hey, one Frank Sinatra is enough for this planet, man. Had Eve taken her vengeance out on Van?

Victor started purring when the back door opened, which meant his mistress and patroness had come home. She carried her drink on a blue cloth coaster over to Victor's chair and nudged him aside so that she could sit down. He went unwillingly. As soon as she was seated he jumped on her lap.

“Feeling any better?”

“Not really. So much up in the air.”

“I ran into Mike Potter at the supermarket. I bought us some red snapper we can put on the grill tonight.”

“He tell you I'm crazy?”

“More or less. And he's worried that you could get in serious trouble with the state if you keep pushing this.”

“I just want to make sure we get the truth.”

“I said that to him. He said, ‘If Sam wants to waste his time it's up to him.' But he smiled when he said it.”

“That was nice of him.”

“How about a back rub on the bed?”

“Are you trying to seduce me?”

“Maybe. Or maybe I'm just trying to distract you. You need to take a break.”

We fit just about perfectly as lovers. And when we finished, Victor was squatting on the bureau and watching us in the darkness scented with Wendy's perfumes and sachets and creams. We'd had an audience.

“I never did get that back rub.”

“Too late, buddy. I'm going to grill us some red snapper. And you're going to set the table.”

“This is just like the National Guard I go to once a month. Too many orders.”

“Don't say that. They're talking about drafting you guys. I saw it in the paper this morning. You must've seen it.”

“I'll start setting the table.”

“So you're not going to talk about it?”

“They've been predicting that for two years now. I'll set the table.”

I went inside and started grabbing plates, glasses, silverware, and napkins. I was careful to limit myself to the second-best of everything. The plates had tiny chips and the shine was off the silverware. I didn't blame her. Her only real asset was this house she owned. She basically lived on the income from the trust her husband had left for her. It had been the largesse of a decent but guilty man. Not his fault that he'd fallen in love with one of the girls his bully-boy father would never have approved of. He'd married Wendy because he was fond of her and because his family approved of her family. The trouble was that Wendy had been in love with him and had come undone when he'd been killed in Nam.

And Nam was on my mind now, as well. Not only because I opposed the savage, meaningless war—Ike's “military-industrial complex” warning coming true in spades—but also because our post commander at the guard had given us notice that we might be called up. I'd lied to Wendy. Nam was in the offing. A number of guard units had already been sent there. At the rate our troops were being killed, the great dark god that was slaughtering the lives of soldiers and innocents alike was ever hungrier. It wanted more flesh and blood, and many of the men in the guard were at the right age for making patriotic sacrifices the chickenshit politicians could prattle about when reelection time came around again.

But talking about it with Wendy was difficult. Her husband had died over there. And that's what worried her, the cheap irony of losing her first husband and then her husband-to-be in the same war. I didn't blame her for the dread she faced in her nightmares but I also couldn't do anything about it. Maybe we'd luck out. Maybe we wouldn't be called up. But as General Westmoreland told more and more lies, and more and more of our troops died, I didn't know how we would be spared.

She came in and opened the refrigerator. She slapped two pieces of red snapper on the counter and started preparing them for cooking. She was fast and efficient and fun to watch. She didn't say anything.

“You not speaking?”

“No, because if I do speak you know what I'll speak
about
and then neither of us'll feel like eating. You know how worried I've been about it. The story in the paper just made it official.”

“Maybe it won't happen.”

“Just let me prepare this fish and not think about anything else.”

A good meal and two glasses of wine later we both felt momentarily invincible and loving. We sat in chairs on the screened-in back porch and held hands like high schoolers. Victor appeared and sat on Wendy's lap. The only music was the night itself: the breeze and the faint passage of cars and the even more distant sounds of airplanes approaching Cedar Rapids for landing. I felt old and logy and I didn't mind it at all. I even considered the possibility—combine alcohol and fatigue and you can come up with the damnedest thoughts—that maybe, just maybe, things were exactly as they appeared. Neil Cameron killed Vanessa Mainwaring because he felt betrayed by her. And then he killed himself. Judge Whitney wouldn't be happy with this because Cliffie would have won one. And even one would be too much for Judge Whitney. The Sykes clan represented all things evil to her.

“How about helping me clean up and then we go to bed?”

“Fine. As long as you can help me drag myself up from this chair.”

“You were supposed to help
me
, Sam.” She laughed. “God, we sound like we're eighty years old.”

“Speak for yourself. I don't feel a day over seventy-five.”

“I love this so much. It's so comfortable with you.”

“Is that another word for boring?”

“What an ego. You just want a compliment.”

“I love you so much because you're so ‘comfortable.' Not exactly inspiring.”

She giggled. “And because you're so exciting to be with and such a stud in bed and because all my girlfriends are jealous that I've been able to keep a heartbreaker like you interested in little ol' me.”

“Much better.”

“
Now
will you help me clean up?”

I concentrated on the grill and she worked on the dishes. When I came inside she was just loading the dishwasher. “See, that didn't take long.” She tossed me a towel. “How about I wash and you dry? I've still got these pots and pans to take care of.”

The kinds of relationships I'd had with women in the past had been all sex and tension. Lots of breakups and makeups. There hadn't been time in all the groping and battling to get domestic in any way. Wendy and I were already married in an informal sort of way. But sometimes I got scared it would all end for some terrible reason.

She jabbed me in the ribs. “You haven't seemed to notice but there aren't any more pots or pans to dry. You've been standing there with that last one for a couple of minutes now. You must be thinking of something really fascinating.”

“I'm just hoping this doesn't come to an end any time soon.”

“You keep asking me to marry you and you say something like that?” She smiled and kissed me. “Look, Sam, I worry about the same thing. And that's why I just want to wait a little while. We're crazy about each other. I want to spend my life with you. But I just want to be careful about it.” She took pan and towel from me and set them on the counter. “Maybe we'd better discuss this in the bedroom.”

By the time we finished making love, neither of us had enough energy left for discussing anything. She fell asleep against my outstretched arm. The aroma of her clean hair was innocently erotic.

The call came at 3:26.

The phone was located on the nightstand on Wendy's side of the bed—as was only right; it was
her
bed—and before I was completely aware of what was going on, she had the phone to her ear and was talking. She'd told me once that all the while her husband was in Nam, where he eventually died on his second tour, she had nightmares about the phone ringing in the middle of the night and a cold military voice telling her that her husband was dead. She told me that she woke up several nights to find the phone in her hand, a dial tone loud in her ear. She'd incorporated the nightmare into reality.

“It's Mike,” she said, lifting up the Princess-style phone and planting it on my stomach. I took the receiver and listened. I asked him to repeat what he'd said, so he went through it once more. He said he was at the crime scene and that if I wanted to join him it would be all right. He said that Cliffie wouldn't be there; he'd called the chief but the chief felt that Potter could handle it. I could sense Potter's smile when he quoted Cliffie: “I think you've learned a lot from me since you've been here and I've let you handle a number of other things already. You just keep me posted—the morning's soon enough.” This was the first time I'd heard Potter draw down on Cliffie. But it was late and the scene he was at had to be a true bummer.

“What's going on?” Wendy whispered. Since I was still talking to Potter, I held up my hand to wave her off.

“I'm on my way, Mike.”

Wendy had slipped into the bathroom. I heard her pee and then start brushing her teeth. If the National Dental Society or whatever it was called wanted to give a trophy (a big shining jewel carved into a tooth) to the person who brushed her teeth the most times a day, Wendy would be their choice. Seven, eight times a day and that doesn't count flossing.

I got a light switched on and dressed. I used one of her hairbrushes to batten down my own dark mess. I was lighting a cigarette when she came out wearing a ragged old robe she liked. She managed to look tousled, sweet, and very sexy.

She came over and took my cigarette from me. She inhaled deeply, exhaled in a blast. She held up a finger. “One more.” After she finally gave me my smoke back, she said, “Mike sounded shaky. What's going on?”

“Tommy Delaney,” I said, “hanged himself earlier tonight.”

20

C
ue the rain.

Halfway to the Delaney residence a hot, dirty summer rain shower started pelting my car. I had the radio turned up to KOMA in Oklahoma, still my favorite station. In the middle of the night this way the signal was stronger than during the day. A bitter anti-war song seemed right for this moment. I kept lighting one cigarette from another. I resented all the snug people in their dark snug houses as I passed street after street.

All the natural questions came to me. What had Tommy Delaney wanted to tell me and then backed away from? Was this going to be another murder disguised as a suicide? Had he left a note explaining everything?

The Hills had never looked better, the darkness a mercy to the crumbling houses and sad metal monsters parked curbside, all cracked windshields and rusted parts and political bumper stickers for men who had only contempt for the owners. The closer I got to the Delaney place the more lights I saw in the small houses. The people inside would have heard the sirens and seen the blood splash of emergency lights pitched across the sky. Most would have stayed inside; after all, it was raining now, and who wanted to get wet? But the vampires among them would have shrugged on raincoats and trudged out. Pain, misery, and death awaited them, and this was a tasty brew that would give them a fix of the life force they sought.

The local press was already there. The cops had shunted them to a corner of the action. A beefy part-time deputy stood next to them to make sure they didn't stray. I parked next to the ambulance and walked over to where Mike Potter was giving orders to another part-time deputy. The crowd numbered somewhere around thirty, not a sell-out crowd but not bad for a rainy four a.m. show that wasn't in 3-D or Cinemascope.

The air smelled of wet earth, exhaust fumes from all the vehicles, and a cancer ward's worth of cigarette smoke, my own contribution included. Two squad cars sat together shining their headlights on the front of the garage. The door was down so all I could see was the blank white wood with rust snaking down from the roof. Above the door was the basketball hoop where I'd seen Tommy Delaney shooting baskets that day.

As I approached Potter I heard a scream from inside the house. The piercing agony of it stopped me as I think it stopped everybody who heard it. I'd been surveying the scene the way an investigator would. The scream forced me to survey it now as a simple human being. No doubt one or both of the parents had found their son hanging from a crossbeam in the garage. A madness would set in. They would blame themselves, they would blame him and they would blame existence itself, a ramble scramble of rage and grief and even more rage. I'd worked with enough social workers to know how suicides like this played out.

Potter said, “I'd stay away from his folks if I was you.”

“They mentioned me?”

Rain pattered on his police cap. “According to her, her son was a nice, easygoing kid until you started pestering him about the Mainwaring girl.”

“That's bullshit.”

He had a flashlight the size of a kid's baseball bat in his hand. “C'mon, I'll take you into the garage.”

On the way in, I said, “Did you hear me? What she said is bullshit. I came out here twice. Twice. That's hardly ‘pestering' him or whatever she said. In fact, I'm pretty sure he wanted to talk to me about something.”