Mourn The Living (20 page)

“When . . . when did you know?”

“Tonight in bed I figured it. But I must’ve suspected all along. You couldn’t resist calling me Nolan, could you? You had to play a game with me.”

“It wasn’t really a game,” she said, beginning to regain control. “I did idolize you, Nolan, as a child and a teenager and even now. But since I was playing Vicki Trask, I couldn’t recognize you first-hand.”

“Why, Irene? Why did you play Vicki Trask? Why does everyone who knows you in Chelsey know you as Vicki Trask? Why did everyone in Chelsey think the real Vicki Trask was Irene Tisor? And why is the false-Irene/real-Vicki dead?”

The tears began again, and Nolan waited for them to stop. Then he said, “Tell it, Irene.”

She nodded, swallowing the hard lump in her throat and rubbing her red eyes with balled fists.

She said, “Before I left home for college, my father had one of his infrequent heart-to-heart talks with me. He told me . . . told me that before he’d retired, he’d been involved with organized crime. Our whole family was, on my mother’s side. That he had been involved for more than twenty years.”

She stopped and Nolan said, “So?”

“I was . . . was ashamed. Oh, I know, I should have guessed what kind of business he was in. If from nothing else, from the kind of people who showed up now and then at the house. People like you, Nolan. But . . . but he was such a mild man, a gentle person . . . it really threw me to find out he’d been a . . . a criminal. I’d always thought of him as so upright . . . it suddenly disgusted, revolted me . . . with him, myself, my whole life!”

She hesitated again, but Nolan prodded her and she resumed.

“I wanted to be respectable. It made me feel . . . feel dirty,
somehow. A dirt I
had
to wash off. He was my parent, my only parent, since my mother died when I was born. And now, I . . . I just wanted to start over. So I decided to go to Chelsey and on the bus I struck up an acquaintance with a girl, a girl who was headed for Chelsey herself. Vicki Trask.”

“Go on.”

“Vicki looked something like me, and we had similar interests. She wanted to go to college and study art, but her parents were both dead and left her without a penny. And her grades weren’t strong enough to get her a scholarship. I . . . I didn’t care about college any more . . . I just wanted an anonymous life, away from my father. But I still wanted my father’s monthly allowance—I felt he owed me that much. It was Vicki who got the idea . . . the idea to switch names and everything. She could go to college, and I could keep getting checks from daddy to underwrite my college-girl existence. It sounded like it might work, and if it didn’t, the worst that could happen was she could be kicked out of a school and I could be fired from a job. Well, it did work. We made a pact. We set it up together, got this apartment and all and traded identities. It took some doing, but we managed to shuffle some papers around and fix some documents and . . . and just swap places.”

Nolan stabbed out the cigarette. “Why didn’t you just get married if you wanted to change your goddamn name?”

“It . . . it was a
mental
thing with me . . . and I wasn’t ready for a man in my life. Nolan, you were the first man I’d been with since I came to Chelsey.”

Nolan shook his head, said, “Okay. Go ahead and tell the rest.”

“Well, everything worked out pretty well. It wasn’t hard for me to get a job in a small town like this without anybody checking the references too close. Though I was kind of scared, since it was a bank I’d applied to, and I figured they might be careful about who they hired. But they didn’t spot anything false in my references and I’ve been working there ever since.”

Nolan said, “Yeah, I can believe it.” He knew a lot of banks picked girls on a basis of looks and personality; he just hoped they were more cautious in the banks
his
money was stored in. He said, “Keep talking.”

She stared at the floor, avoiding Nolan’s eyes. “And . . . and my father . . . I loved him so much, once . . . respected him . . . but the love was transformed into hate, when I found out what he
really
was.”

“Cover some new ground,” he told her, seeing the first light of the sun coming in through the loft windows above them.

“What. . . what’s left to tell?”

“Quit stalling. How did your roommate die?”

She tried to speak but her throat caught. The tears began again, in a violent rush. Nolan grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her. “How? How did it happen? Did you kill her?”

She bit the ends of her fingers. “I . . . I don’t know . . . I don’t suppose I’ll ever know.”

Nolan released her. “Calm down and tell me about it.”

She leaned forward. “Remember what I told you about Irene Tisor? The false one, I mean, before you knew? How she was getting wild the last few months? That was true, even though I was talking about the other Irene. She started to abuse our agreement, feeling a strange sort of freedom, I guess, from living under another person’s name. I began to feel . . . to feel I had to end the farce . . . take the name back and forget my pride and leave Chelsey, go somewhere, anywhere else! Anywhere but Chelsey! As long as these pseudo-hippie friends of Irene’s weren’t around.” She laughed. “I get confused, even now. Who’s Vicki? Who’s Irene? Which am I?”

“What happened?”

“She wanted to try LSD. Grass wasn’t enough for her, yet she was afraid of anything stronger. Except LSD. She read a lot of books, magazine articles on it . . . some of her weird friends were urging her to give it a try. When she finally got the nerve, she got this little sugar cube, from that Broome character, she said. It was wrapped in cellophane, like a piece of candy. She brought it to the apartment and told me about how she was going to try it and said she needed my help. Either I gave her a hand with it, or she’d call my father on the phone and expose me. What she needed was a guide, a person to be with her when she was on the stuff who would make sure nothing . . . nothing bad happened . . . while she was on the trip, you know? I said I’d do it.”

Nolan sat down next to her, steadied her with a hand on her shoulder.

Her voice trembled; it was soft, distant, as she recalled an evening she’d tried to forget.

“We started out in the apartment,” she said. “She ran around the room looking at things, feeling, eating, tasting, touching. She was an animal, writhing on the floor, a serpent, utterly stripped of any inhibitions she’d ever felt. She told me it was wonderful, she could feel and taste and hear and see all at once, never as before. She . . . she seemed almost insane, and it got worse ... worse as she went along. Then she sat in a chair... that chair, the chair right across from us now . . . and had a conversation with someone only she could see. Claimed it . . . it was her soul. Then she sprang out of the chair and ran down the steps. I followed her . . . I didn’t try to stop her, there was no reasoning with her . . . it was late and no one was around to bother us.”

She hesitated, buried her eyes in her hands and said, “She came to . . . to that building. Twill Building. She pulled down a fire escape and she climbed it . . . climbed up, up to the top . . . and I followed her. She said . . . said she wanted to taste the stars, feel the sky. She got on the roof-top and . . . and she ran . . . ran around like a crazy woman . . . and chattered about God, how she was meeting God . . . and I snapped. I couldn’t stand it any more. I grabbed her, tried to shake her, shake her out of it . . . but no use. No use. She was strong . . . she fought me . . . we scuffled around . . . tumbled . . . rolled . . . and suddenly the edge of the building was there and we kept struggling and . . . and she just . . . she just went over. She went over, that’s all.”

There was silence in the room for a moment, then she said, “I got away without a single person seeing me. I came back here and went to bed, but I didn’t sleep. The next day, Irene Tisor was dead. When I saw the word would get back to my father that his daughter was dead . . . I let it ride. I let it ride.”

Nolan stood up. “I see.”

She reached out for him, her eyes dry but still bloodshot. “I don’t think I . . . I pushed her, Nolan, but . . . I don’t know.”

“Sure.”

“What . . . what will you tell my father?”

He shrugged. “The truth, maybe. Or perhaps that his daughter is dead and to forget it. I don’t know yet.”

“Do you think I . . . I killed her? On purpose, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” Nolan said. “Maybe I don’t even give a damn. But any way you spell it, I can’t scrape up much pity for you.”

“Nolan . . .”

“You condemned your father for being a criminal, then turned around and made a lie of your own life. You slept with me, a thief, a killer ten times over. And maybe you even killed somebody yourself.”

The tears were back again. Funny how Nolan had told Sid Tisor when the thing began that it was the living to feel sorry for, and not the dead. Sid had mourned the living all along.

“Your father worked for the Outfit, all right,” he said. “But he was a pencil jockey, a book man. Maybe just being a part of the Outfit makes you a criminal, but Sid sure didn’t share any love for his bosses. Helping me like he did proves that.”

She kept crying but Nolan didn’t pay any attention.

“You took the good life on a platter from him,” Nolan said, “kept it, and threw him away.”

“What can I do, Nolan?”

“That’s your problem.”

“But Nolan . . .”

“My debt’s paid. Kiss Chelsey goodbye for me.”

“Don’t leave! Tell me what to do! What should I do, Nolan, tell me!”

“You should probably go to hell,” he said. “But you want my advice so bad, I’ll give it. Become Irene Tisor again. Drop the Vicki Trask tag and start over. But quietly, or they’ll trace you back to the death of your roommate.”

“But they’ll find out, won’t they?”

“I don’t think so. The death of Irene Tisor is a closed case. It’s marked probable suicide in a file. But stick around Chelsey and your chances aren’t so good. The easy days in this town are over what with the Boys not having an operation here anymore and the on-the-take police chief dead.”

“How? How can I do it?”

Nolan reached in his pocket and dangled the keys of the Lincoln in front of her. “These keys fit the car I been driving around Chelsey. It’s rented in your father’s name. The car, with the keys in it, will be waiting at the bottom of the steps for you. When you’re ready, drive it back to Peoria.”

Her eyes were red, wet circles. “What do you mean?”

“I mean go back to your father. Go back where they know you and you can explain your ‘death’ by saying it was a mix- up and they’ll believe you. Your father’s a lonely old guy. Just be careful you don’t give him a heart attack when you show up. He’ll be so happy to find you alive he won’t give a damn about what an ungrateful little bitch you’ve been.”

“Go back to him?”

“If he’ll have you.”

“But . . .”

Nolan turned and walked to the door. “Give Sid my regards. And tell him we’re even.”

She swallowed and said, “Maybe I’ll . . . I’ll do that.”

He opened the door. “So long, Vicki . . . or Irene.” His lips formed the humorless line she’d come to know as his smile. “Maybe I’ll stop by Peoria in a year or so,” he said. “And see who you are.”

He closed the door and left her.

6

IT WAS
a red Plymouth that was dirty as hell and hadn’t been new for twelve years. Lyn Parks was sitting behind the wheel, her long blonde hair hanging down over the shoulders of Nolan’s parka, which she still wore. The Plymouth’s engine was running, the muffler sounding as if it had seconds to live.