The Deadline (11 page)

She slid Morgan’s ticket under his coffee saucer as she took his empty plate away.

“I’ll make a deal with you.  If you’re gonna keep working so damn hard, I’ll let you know if I hear anything you could print,” she said.  “Deal?”

“Sure,” he said, shaking her hand, still damp from the bar rag she used to wipe down the counter on both sides of him.  It never occurred that she might feel sorry for him more than he felt sorry for her.  “Deal.”

He left five one-dollar bills on the counter and left.  The sun was just beginning to spill its orange light on Main Street’s east-facing shops as he walked toward
The Bullet
.

It was the last day of July and it was already hot.  It would get hotter, Morgan knew.

The paper was late again.  More than an hour.

The guys at the Post Office hooted and jostled one another when Cal Nussbaum brought nearly four thousand papers to the back door.  It was just before seven o’clock, two hours past closing.

“Six forty-eight,” one of them said.  “Who had six forty-eight?”

“Clem was closest,” said another.  “Clem, dammit.  I had eight-forty.”

Clement Judy, one of the front-desk mail clerks, had won the postmen’s pool on how late
The Bullet
would be this week. The papers arrived thirteen minutes before he said they would, but his guess was still good enough to take the pot.

Cal Nussbaum was angry and more than a little humiliated.  A butt-sprung postal worker had won sixteen bucks and two of the paper’s bribery beers for betting on
The Bullet’
s tardiness.  He’d always hated them because they hid behind their union rules and sniveled about working harder than they ever did.  Cal had worked all his life at
The Bullet
, working twice as hard and earning half as much as any of them.  Now they were laughing at him.

Without saying a word, he dropped a twelve-pack of Michelob on a mail-sorting table and cursed to himself all the way back to the delivery van.

A fuckin’ postal worker, goddammit.  Ain’t they got nothin’ better to do?

Steamed, Cal threw the van into reverse.  Gravel spewed beneath the salt-corroded underbelly of the old Chevy wreck.

Things got to be pretty fuckin’ piss-poor when even the psycho geeks down at the Post Office think you’ve screwed the pooch.  Can’t deliver the goddam mail in less than three days, but they can hoot about the paper being a couple hours late.  Motherfuckers.

Cal jammed the brakes hard, spun around and horsed the wheel toward the street.  A few postal workers watched him from the loading dock, drinking beer and guffawing like light-blue, stripe-legged crows.  The van jolted over the curb, scraping its bottom on the sidewalk and leaving a rusty slash that pointed in the general direction of the Four Aces saloon. 

Fuck ‘em all, goddammit.

CHAPTER EIGHT

T
he Teepee Motor Lodge was a roadside relic, a cheap fleabag on the western edge of Winchester where the crumbling brown stucco looked like a peeling scab.

The neon “Vacancy” light on the tipi-shaped sign in the parking lot had long ago flamed out, probably because most of the dump’s twenty dollar-a-night cubby holes had been available around the clock for a decade.

Morgan drove past the motel office, where an unnozzled hose was propped on some white-washed rocks, bubbling into a frowzy patch of crabgrass no bigger than a twin blanket.  It was late morning on a summer Thursday, an hour before check-out time, but no cars were parked in the unpaved lot.  Renegade ragweed poked through the hardpan and scattered gravel, and thrived beneath the rooms’ blinded windows, where condensation dripped off rust-flecked air conditioners.

The place was empty.

Morgan circled behind the long row of rooms to the rear, where a jungle of thistle and quackgrass, broken hoses, unidentifiable reddish-brown machine parts and grasshoppers flourished.  The body of a wrecked pickup, its tires crapped out long ago, nestled in a snarl of tumbleweeds.  A faded bumper sticker was peeling off a piece of cockeyed chrome:

Lord, please grant us another boom.

We won’t piss it away this time.

In those salad days of the oil boom, the trailers out back were rented to freelance hookers who, the roughnecks joked, pumped more barrels than any rig.  The law generally looked the other way because the girls’ presence gave oilfield workers an outlet for both their white-hot urges and wads of money that would otherwise be spent on drinking, speed and dog fights.  Prostitution was the least of worries for the overworked and outnumbered deputies of Perry County.

But now, ten years later, the trailers were rented out to too-lost and too-thrifty tourist families who invariably complained about the big bugs in the tiny shower stalls and the cratered mattresses that once gave so much pleasure.  Of course, the traveler paid a little more for these “deluxe” accommodations:  Twenty-five dollars a night, no charge for the bug spray.

The bent aluminum screen door on Number Eight was propped open with a rusty pipe, though Morgan wondered why:  The screen itself was gone and the closing spring dangled from a rusty chain.  The trailer rested on four sunken piles of cinder blocks and the crawlspace underneath was partially hidden by weathered scraps of plywood cut in irregular shapes.

Morgan knocked.  All the shades were drawn, but he heard creaking footsteps inside, slow and painful, the floor moaning churlishly beneath each one.

Gilmartin cracked open the door and some of the sour air inside escaped.  He stood there in a soiled tee-shirt and blue, prison-issue boxer shorts.  His legs were painfully emaciated, hairless and webbed with blue veins.  A cigarette dangled from his pale, thin lips.

“Looky who’s here,” he rasped in his sandpapery, sarcastic voice, “it’s the paper boy.  Sorry, sonny, I cancelled my subscription.  You’re too fuckin’ late.”

“Mr. Gilmartin, did you get my message?  I told the clerk to tell you I was coming today.”

“It’s been a week, goddammit.”

The old convict’s abraded voice was weaker, if not gentler, and his face was pallid.  His white hair was matted to his skull.  But his eyes were searing.

Morgan shoved his hands in his pockets, feeling suddenly uneasy and unwelcome.

“I’m sorry, but I told you I had to check out your story and I had other obligations at the paper.  I came as soon as I could.  I think we ...”

“I don’t give a fuck about your other obligations.  Got that?  I haven’t got time for your newspaper bullshit.”

Gilmartin flicked his half-smoked cigarette out the door and retreated back into the trailer’s foul darkness, leaving the door open.  After a moment standing alone outside, watching a filament of thin blue smoke rise from the dry weeds then disappear, Morgan followed him, certain it was the only invitation he’d get.

The trailer’s one long room was squalid.  Flies clustered around something rotting in the sink, undaunted by the ceaseless trickle of water from the leaky tap.  A dozen prescription bottles lay open on the unwashed counter, loose pills scattered among half-eaten pizza crusts and puddles of spilled water.  Van Johnson was on the television in an old World War II movie, but the sound was turned down.

While Morgan surveyed the mess around him, the swamp cooler rattled to life, awakened from its algae-encrusted metallic dreams.  It clacked and sputtered as if someone had started an ancient truck engine inside the trailer. 

Morgan saw a few crumpled fast-food bags and unopened ketchup packets on the linoleum floor.  Some empty soup cans and dirty spoons were stuck to the top of the dented electric stove.  And unfiltered cigarette butts were snubbed out on plastic dinner plates on a card table in front of the TV.  Gilmartin wasn’t eating well.

The old man sagged into a shabby couch a few feet from the screen and lit another cigarette, a butt-clogged ashtray within easy reach.  A
Hustler
magazine was draped across the sofa’s armrest.  The fly of Gilmartin’s wrinkled boxer shorts gapped immodestly, but if he knew it, he didn’t care.

Morgan took the only other seat, a steel dinette chair with no back, ornamented with smelly socks.

For an uncomfortable moment, they simply watched each other.  Then Morgan spoke.

“Well, Mr. Gilmartin, I’ve looked into your case.  I know you’ve been waiting to hear back from me.  I don’t know where to begin.  There’s just not much to go on.  A few newspaper stories, the court file, what you’ve already told me ...”

“No shit, Sherlock,” Gilmartin growled.

A silent war raged on the television and the old man’s eyes strayed to it as he spoke, as if Morgan’s presence meant less to him than Van Johnson’s.

“I thought you were supposed to be some hotshot crime reporter.  You’re gonna have to do more than read all the fuckin’ lies they told about me.  They wanted to fry my ass.  Do you think they’re gonna give me a break?  Do you think anybody was gonna tell my side of the story?”

Morgan got a notebook and pencil from his shirt pocket.  He flipped the pages until he found a blank one.

“Okay, let’s start there.  What
is
your side of the story, Mr. Gilmartin?”

“I didn’t do it,” the old man said.  “That’s my side of the story, paper boy.  Period.  End of fuckin’ story.”

By being prickly and feigning indifference, Gilmartin made it difficult to be sympathetic.  If Gilmartin was testing his limits, he’d gone far enough.  Morgan suppressed his impatience, barely, and spoke a language Gilmartin understood. 

“That’s not good enough, and you know it.  You came to me, remember?  If you want my help, you’re going to have to be totally honest with me, or I’m out of here.  You’ve got to answer a lot of questions.  I’ve got better things to do with my time that be dicked around by some asshole con man who hates the world.”

Gilmartin’s attention suddenly shifted away from the television.  He fixed his gaze on Morgan, his eyes like black ice.

Morgan knew there was a time when he could not have talked to the former millworker like that without a thrashing.  In a way, he’d be relieved now if the old man threw him out.  He could get on with his life, while Gilmartin got on with his death.

“You ask the questions,” Gilmartin said finally.  The hatred had drained from his voice, and his eyes warmed, albeit only by a degree or two.  The old con would respect him only if he demanded it.  “I’ll tell you what I know.  And I’ll tell you what I don’t know.  But it all starts the same:  I didn’t do it.”

“But you pleaded guilty.  That’s the thing I can’t get out of my mind.  Forty-eight years ago, you admitted you did it.  If you didn’t kill Aimee, why did you plead guilty?”

“I was fucked seven ways to sundown, see?” Gilmartin said.  A Camel cigarette was clamped between his fingers, a long ash ready to fall in his lap.  “They gave me a faggot lawyer who couldn’t find his ass with both hands.  He was scared shitless.  They said they had witnesses who would say I threatened that girl’s daddy.  The paper got everybody whipped up so I never stood a chance with a jury.  I was fucked, just fucked.”

“Why didn’t you have an alibi?  You could have helped yourself more than you did.  You only had to tell them where you were when it happened.”

Gilmartin turned his eyes away, back to the television.  He took a long, thoughtful draw on his cigarette, then tapped his ash onto the haggard carpet.

“They busted me two weeks after that girl disappeared.  How the fuck do I know where I was?  I was out of work and hadn’t worked in a month.  I was living in the bars, whorin’ around and stealin’ cows to make a few bucks so I could drink and whore some more.  Most of the time, I was drunk on my ass.  Whacked out, you know?  I don’t know exactly where I was when it happened, that’s the truth, but I wasn’t bein’ a Boy Scout, I’m pretty sure of that.”

Clearly, the subject of an alibi — perhaps the single, elusive memory that meant the difference between a man’s death and his freedom — had consumed Gilmartin for most of his life, but Morgan pressed him further.

“You have no idea whatsoever where you were?  That’s hard to believe, even now.  If my life depended on it, I think I could remember what I had for breakfast on this day last year.”

Sinewy muscles pulsed under the paper-thin skin that stretched across Gilmartin’s jaw, but he looked squarely into Morgan’s eyes when he spoke.

“You wasn’t me, paper boy.  And it’s a good chance that wherever I was I didn’t want anybody to know.  Partners fuck you up every time.  That’s the God’s honest truth.  I’ve had near fifty years to think about it, but I’ll be goddamned if I can recall.  When you ain’t got no point in life, and I didn’t, what the fuck is there to remember?  But they told me to keep my mouth shut anyhow.”

“Who told you?”

“The lawyer, Fenwick.  Said I was better to say I didn’t remember than to risk lookin’ like a liar.  Said they’d have to prove their case.  Innocent ‘til proven guilty and all that shit.  So I kept my trap closed until things looked real bad for me, and then it was too goddamned late.”

For all his inexperience, Fenwick appeared to have given his client at least one good bit of advice.  Morgan had once seen an enormous largemouth bass mounted on the wall of a famous criminal defense lawyer’s Chicago law office, with a brass plaque beneath it that said:  “He’d be free today if he’d only kept his mouth shut.”

“Did Fenwick tell you to plead guilty, too?”

The wet end of Gilmartin’s Camel was beginning to dissolve into soggy paper and bits of tobacco.  He pursed his lips like he was blowing a trumpet, spitting a tiny brown fleck toward the TV.

“No.  That was my idea.  All I could think about was dyin’ in that fuckin’ chair.  It sort of throttled me.  I couldn’t breathe.  Then I lost my fuckin’ nerve.  It was the only way I could save my own ass.  No jury was gonna look at me and say I was innocent.  No fuckin’ way.  And when I thought about dyin’ in that chair ...”

Gilmartin paused for a long time, his lips stiffening as he swallowed the ache in the back of his throat.

“I made a deal to save my life.  I didn’t want to be cooked alive.  I knew what that was like.”

“How could you be so sure you’d be convicted?” Morgan asked.

“Are you fuckin’ kidding me?  No way I was gonna get a fair shake.  The paper said I was guilty and everybody believed it.”

Morgan let it ride.  Most cons were congenitally incapable of taking responsibility for their actions.  They always blamed somebody or something else, nurture, nature, society, grade school teachers, parents, their own lawyers, even the press.  Gilmartin was no different. 
The Bullet
had pursued the story aggressively, Morgan knew from reading the back issues, but short of interviewing Gilmartin himself, the coverage had been fair.

“I read the old papers, Mr. Gilmartin,” he said.  “But I never saw anything like that.”

Gilmartin snapped back, pointing at Morgan angrily with the stubby cigarette.

“It was there, goddammit.  In black and white.  Said I done killed that little girl.  Printed a picture to make me look like I done it, too.  They come out and said I done it.”

“No, I’m sorry, but it didn’t say that.”

In the angry silence between them, Morgan remembered the typed confession in Gilmartin’s court jacket.  It bore no signature, just an X where Gilmartin should have signed.

“Can you read, Mr. Gilmartin?” he asked.

“What the fuck do you mean by that?”

“You signed your own confession with an ‘X.’  I need to know if you can read and write.”

“I can read as good as you, you arrogant prick.  I read lots of books in the joint.”

Morgan wouldn’t let it go.

“So why didn’t you sign your name?  Why do you think the newspaper printed something it never printed?  Mr. Gilmartin, you promised me you’d be honest.”

“Fuck you,” Gilmartin said, relenting.  “I learned to read in the joint after that, but I know what the papers said about me.  They said I was a killer.  I saw the fuckin’ pictures.  Everybody saw the fuckin’ pictures.  The paper didn’t need to say it right out.  They had it in for me.”

For the first time, Morgan felt sorry for the old man.  He was clearly ashamed of his inability to read or write.  But he was right about one thing:  Anybody who saw his jailhouse photo in
The Bullet
, with his malevolent smile and “TERROR” tattooed on his arm, would have presumed his guilt.

“Did you know Charlie Little Spotted Horse before the murder?  Did you threaten him?”

“I saw him around, sometimes we played cards.  Yeah, we scrapped once over some money, maybe ten bucks, but I was drunk and I don’t recollect what happened.  Maybe I said some stuff, but it ended there.  Anyhow, I didn’t know nothin’ about no daughter or anything like that.  I didn’t give a shit about no damn Indian, not like to kill some innocent little girl over ten lousy bucks.”

“But you threatened him?”

“Open your ears up, boy,” Gilmartin barked, poking a bony finger in his right ear.  “I said maybe so.  But I said lots of shit worse in my life.  Didn’t make no matter if it was a Indian or a gook or a nigger or a white guy.  It didn’t mean nothin’.  Just words.”

Just then, somebody knocked on the door.

“Goddam maid,” Gilmartin said.  Then he yelled loud enough for her to hear outside, “
Mañana
.”

Another knock rattled the metal door, its detached chain rattling against it like a discordant chime.  Whoever waited outside wasn’t leaving.

“
Mañana
, goddammit!” Gilmartin cursed loudly.

Three insistent knocks followed.

Morgan got up and opened the door.  A fat Mexican woman stood on the wooden step, her pudgy chestnut face shiny with sweat.  She was surprised to see him in the doorway, and her wide, dark eyes looked spooked, as if she might run.  She wore a maid’s uniform but she had no cart or towels.  A greasy lunch bag dangled from her sausage-like fingers.

“
Por señor
,” she said nervously, holding the bag out in front of her.  “
Merienda.  Hamburguesa
.”

“Give her ten bucks,” Gilmartin yelled from the couch.  “Wallet’s behind the toilet tank.”

Morgan squeezed into the trailer’s rancid lavatory and groped behind the cool porcelain tank, which trickled constantly somewhere inside.  Gilmartin’s thick, leather billfold was jammed between the tank and the wall.  It was stuffed with money, mostly hundreds and fifties.  Morgan found a ten among them and handed it to the maid, who lingered expectantly on the porch, smiling lewdly.