The Walkaway (23 page)

“You stand real fucking still, you sack of shit,” Tommy yelled, his revolver pointed right at my head. He was thirty-five, maybe forty feet away, and I dropped down to Rory’s level to make us a single target.

As Tommy advanced I took a handkerchief from my shirt pocket, wrapped it around my hand, and took Rory’s service revolver. Behind me was a big galvanized trash can; I dove behind it and a shot went off, plowing right through the trash can, and from the ground I aimed carefully and fired.

Rory’s gun was bigger than I was used to; the power of the report and the kick threw me off a little, but the smell of burnt powder was familiar and oddly comforting, mingling delicately with the slightly electrical odor of the light rain prickling the dusty ground. Tommy yelped in pain and surprise and fired in my general direction, a wild one this time. He sank to his knees but he still held the revolver and I had no way of knowing where I’d hit him or how badly, so I fired again, aiming square at his midsection. This time he screamed.

“Jesus . . . Jesus . . . I’m gutshot . . . Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . . in the office there’s a phone, call an ambulance, Jesus. . . .” The gun was on the ground now and I sauntered over to him.

“You must take me for a fucking moron,” I said, kicking the revolver out of his reach, wincing at the appalling stench of shit and blood that began to emanate from his open gut.

Just a few feet away I examined the front end of the stalled Plymouth. Not pretty, but not too badly damaged. I hadn’t busted the radiator, I didn’t think, since there was no steam escaping. I got in, started her up on the first try and backed up. Tommy was still whimpering and pleading for an ambulance when I passed by him, but Rory was already dead when I stopped to get the key to the padlock. I put the bloodied rebar and coffee can into the trunk and headed back into town. With any luck the junkyard would be closed until Monday.

The rain was coming down good by the time I got back to the Ogden residence. I laughed at the forlorn sight of the squad car parked down the street like a faithful horse waiting for its dead rider to return. Inside the house I swiped a roll of stamps from Sally’s desk and addressed the manila envelope to DeWayne Atwell in care of general delivery in Tucson, Arizona; it was an alias I had papers for but hadn’t used yet. Neither McCowan nor, sadly, my own real name could be safely used any longer, thanks to Tommy and Rory. I stamped the envelopes, going a little over what I thought it would actually come to, though not so much as to attract undue attention, and then drove down to a mailbox in front of Ketteman’s bakery. As soon as I was done with my business here tonight I’d head out for Tucson and wait for the envelopes to arrive. It didn’t add up to what I’d left behind forever in Japan, but it’d be a hell of a grubstake for whatever I ended up doing next.

It was coming down in sheets by the time I got to Elishah’s. I went inside cautiously; my note was still on the table, the house was dark and I saw no sign that anyone had been there since my departure.

“Cocksucker!”

The voice came out of the dark somewhere behind me, harsher and more nasal than usual. By the time I knew it was Beulah she was on my back, her legs wrapped around my hips, raking her nails down my face. I could feel skin peeling off in strips down both cheeks as I stepped backward, and it hurt like a son of a bitch. I spun, trying to knock her off, and finally toppled backward into the kitchen door, smashing her into it. She fell to the floor, rolled away, and rose again, crouching for another attack. In the feeble light from the streetlamp outside I could see her big, flushed, bony face, blood pounding in the temples, those strange little eyes bugging and angry. With her snaggly teeth bared, she looked like something from the Ice Age, not quite human yet. She climbed onto the kitchen table in her stocking feet, and I reached behind me and slipped the knuckles on. As she leapt at me I plunged them straight into her belly, and for just a second my hand was enveloped by cheap rayon and adipose tissue clear up to the wrist; it popped free and she hit the ground.

I turned on the light, and in the bathroom I checked my face, which was bleeding but not as badly as I’d imagined. I put on some Mercurochrome and cleaned it up, hanging slightly out the bathroom door in case she got up again.

“I don’t like getting ganged up on in roadhouses, Beulah.” She didn’t move. “Elishah’s going to have to go without for a couple days.” When she didn’t answer I flicked the light on and went to where she lay, careful not to get too close.

Her eyes were half-open and so was her mouth, and a long trail of saliva reached from its corner to the floor. Her face was a shiny purplish red, and touching her carotid with my thumb I detected no pulse. Beulah was dead, and I had to get out of there before Snuffy Smith got home.

Slinging her over my shoulder I carried her to a door which I correctly assumed led to the basement. I yanked on the chain and the lightbulb came on overhead; I propped Beulah up in a standing position at the top of the stairs with my left hand gripping the back of her neck and my right clenching the material of her dress at the waist. I gave her a good shove, pushing her midsection first. She fell beautifully, smacking her face on the wall with a solid splat as she went down, tumbling violently before finally coming to a rest at the bottom of the stairs with a crack that I took to be vertebrae in her neck breaking. I left the door open a couple of inches; I didn’t think my accidental fall tableau would fool anybody, but you never knew.

Her purse was on the kitchen counter. There was no cash, just a lot of makeup and keys and facial tissues, a checkbook with a driver’s license stuck inside it. There was also a bottle of Dexedrine, with a prescription label made out to Mrs. Elishah Casper, though the driver’s license and the checks indicated that her name was Beulah Mae Vance.

I put everything back but the bottle of pep pills, which I left open on the kitchen countertop. I was beginning to think I might get this classified as an accidental death after all. I was ready to go, abandoning my plans for Elishah and consoling myself with the thought that, inadvertently, I had more than gotten even with him.

Then I heard him coming up the walk. I retreated to the living room as he entered the kitchen and listened to him, mumbling aloud to himself as he read the letter. There was a brief silence, then panic as he ran into the bedroom and started tearing the place up. Thinking he might have an emergency dose stashed somewhere I stepped in and pointed the revolver at his head.

“Sit still, fuckhead.”

He looked up at me, more gaunt than the last time I’d seen him, a sheen of perspiration on his face. I hadn’t dealt that much with junkies—narcotics was a concession I’d mostly parceled out to another outfit—but I knew he was in need.

“Where the hell’s my dose?”

“Some pimp you are,” I said. “Selling your old lady to support your habit and she ends up running the whole show, parceling out your smack every day like she was feeding a goddamn cocker spaniel.”

“I ain’t a fuckin’ pimp,” he said.

“You’re living off Beulah’s tits and ass, which is what I call pimping, whether you’re doing the hard organizational work or not. Where’s your straight job, anyway?”

“Night shift at Murdock Clothes Cleaners,” he said. “Operate a shirt press.”

“Couldn’t get work at the plants ’cause you got a record, is that right?”

He was silent.

“So what’s that pay, a buck an hour?”

“Eighty-three cents,” he said.

“Not enough to cover the rent plus a big, healthy monkey, is it? So every night you send your mule-faced Beulah out to sell that sweet thing she sits on.”

“Don’t talk about Beulah that way.”

“Don’t take it so hard. My wife’s a whore, too. In fact, she’s the one’s got your smack. We’re gonna head out to see her. Come on, get up.”

Passing the kitchen table I grabbed his rig and put it back into its case and handed it to him. “Don’t forget this, you’re going to need it before the night’s over.”

He looked at me sadly, hoping it was true, but said nothing. He didn’t suspect that the truth was even worse; I wasn’t going to let him come home again at all.

Elishah did most of the talking as he drove, though he was distracted by the rain and the fact that I wouldn’t let him slow down to allow for it. He’d met Beulah in Detroit early in the war, where he’d ended up working in war production at Ford. In ’43 they’d headed for Wichita, having heard that the money was better, but before VJ Day they both had arrest records for narcotics, and Elishah had spent nine months in jail in ’47. That was when Beulah kicked it, and also when she started working at the Hitching Post. By the time he got out she was making close to what she would have on the assembly line; it was a touching story of stick-to-itiveness and good old American gumption that made me proud I’d fought for my native land.

We parked by the side of the road and got out. The rain was coming down gently again, and out here it smelled sweet. I left the dead cop’s service revolver in the trunk; it was still loaded and I didn’t intend to hand it to Elishah for his prints until it was empty. I opened the barbed-wire gate and closed it again once we were through.

In the distance was the cop boyfriend, as I’d expected. He sat on the ridge above the quarry in a bright yellow raincoat and hat, too dumb to get out of the rain, with his arms on his knees and his legs crossed at the ankles, probably brooding over the idea of Sally getting fucked by some drunken hull polisher right below him. If we crossed back into the woods directly behind the cabin we’d stay out of his line of sight until the very second we arrived at the door, but that wasn’t good enough; I wanted him out of the way first.

“Come on this way.” I motioned for Elishah to follow me to the east end of the ridge. If we could keep quiet enough I intended to kill my third cop of the evening. “And remember, if you start feeling smarter than me: you don’t know where that dope of yours is and I do.”

Elishah’s eyes were dry and flat like those of a dead trout, but he was listening. He nodded and followed.

We were getting close to the cop, and I had the .38 out and ready to blow him into the next world when he turned and looked right at me, his round face beaming cretinously under the yellow rain hat.

“Howdy, Mister McCowan,” he said. It was Carswell, the idiot farmer and would-be pornographer.

A moment later I felt the barrel of a gun at the base of my skull. “Drop it,” a voice said, and I obeyed. Elishah stood there, smiling faintly and serenely.

“You’re in a shitload of trouble,” the cop said. He cuffed my right wrist and yanked me to my feet, smashing me across the nose with the barrel of the revolver. I felt warm blood running down my face again as he brought my left arm around a young tree about eight inches in diameter and cuffed it so that I stood facing the trunk. Then he did the same thing to a docile Elishah a few feet away. When he was done he picked up my .38 and handed it to Carswell, who grinned moronically at me.

“Either one of these sons of bitches so much as looks crossways at you before I get back, shoot their dicks off,” the cop said, and then he went down toward the cabin.

I called out to him as he walked away. “Am I to assume we’re under arrest, Officer?” He didn’t answer. He had himself a dilemma; he wasn’t there in an official capacity.

I smiled at Carswell. “Your friend got the wrong idea about us. You want to see those proofs? They’re out in the car.”

“Proofs?”

“The pictures I took.”

“I thought you was shittin’ me, the way you left like that.”

“I wouldn’t shit you. Those pictures are hot.”

“How come you bringin’ proofs over this late of a Friday night?” He grinned, proud of himself for figuring that one out.

“Well, hell, I thought I’d take a look at the whore activity down there,” I said. “Thought maybe I’d get some shots through the windows for you, but then the cop spotted us and went nuts.”

“How’d you know he’s a cop?”

“You told me the other day. Or maybe it was Amos Culligan, I don’t know.”

He looked at me for a long time. “How come you took off the other day?”

“I ran out of film and I wanted to get to the lab. I thought you and Missy might be a while longer, the way you were going at it. You sure gave it to her good.”

“Right up her rear. You get some shots of that?”

“Sure did. Some good ones, too.”

Lester seemed pleased at that, thinking back on his exploits. “Maybe we can get some more in a couple weeks with Lynn.”

“You bet,” I said. We heard a car’s engine turn over, followed shortly by another. “So Lester, you got a hacksaw?”

He looked at the ground, furrowing his brow like he was thinking real hard.

“No, I ain’t. Not for you.” He walked off, and Elishah managed a low chuckle, despite his pain.

I made fists so tight I could feel my nails digging into my palms, and that’s when I remembered the nail clippers. They were in my lefthand pants pocket; if I could reach them, I had myself a file.

19

Dot sat at the kitchen table in her bathrobe, drinking coffee. Ed Dieterle sat across from her, Tricia to her right.

“That money came from somewhere. It wasn’t the pensions, and I know you didn’t have much in the way of savings.” Dieterle’s patient manner with her had begun a perceptible shift toward the interrogatory.

Dot snorted. “Savings all went on the down for this house and that damn RV.”

“Where’d the rest of it come from?”

She sat there, looking like she hadn’t heard.

Dieterle sat back. “Let him die, then.”

Tricia was shocked, but again Dot’s face was blank and she said nothing.

“What do you mean let him die?” Tricia asked.

“He’s been at large what, thirty-five hours? Not many nursing home elopements last that long without ending up bad. He’s in that place for a reason, honey.”

“But what do you mean let him die? It’s not her fault if they haven’t found him.”

“It sure is if she knows where he is and won’t say.”

“Moomaw, is that true?”

Dot’s expression didn’t change.

“I think Gunther’s out looking for some money he thinks he hid somewhere.” He turned his attention to Tricia. “What were you looking for on that map?”

“A rock quarry,” Tricia said.

Dieterle got up. “Thank you, Tricia.” He kissed her on the top of the head. “You know what, sweetheart? This might be a little easier on your grandma if you weren’t in earshot.”

“Oh,” she said. She stood. “I need to go to the store anyway.”

A minute later Ed heard her car start, and he thought how funny it was that a woman her age, and about to start med school at that, hadn’t objected to being treated like a child.

“He thinks that money’s still hid out there,” Dot finally allowed. “He doesn’t remember it went into the bank.”

“What else is out there at the quarry?”

“Nothing.”

“There’s something out there that scares the bejesus out of you, or you would have told me about it first thing this afternoon. I’m going to find out what it is eventually, and you might as well save us both some grief and tell me now.”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“You want to hear what I think? I think there’s a dead man by the name of Cavanaugh, and I think it was Gunther that put him there.”

She was quiet for a few seconds, and she looked away from him. “That wasn’t it. It started with an A. He was a lawyer, I know that much. He had a Bar Association card in his wallet.”

“So it’s true. I didn’t really think it was.” Ed looked nauseous. “He killed a man for the money he was carrying?”

Dot stood up and slapped him across the face, then sat back down again. “Shame on you for even thinking that. It was an accident.”

“How come he didn’t report it?”

“Why do you think? Shit. Big bag full of dirty money and there we were, up to our asses in debt. Plus Gunther could’ve lost his license, running a man over like that.”

Ed nodded. “Can I have a look at that map?” His throat sounded tight.

She got it off the kitchen counter and handed it to him. As he spread it out on the table he touched his cheek where she’d hit him, and she reached out and touched it, too, for just a second.

“Well, Jesus, Ed, I’m sorry I slapped you, but how the hell could you even think Gunther’d do something as wrong as that on purpose?”

“Just lost my head for a second.” He grabbed a ballpoint pen and leaned down a couple of inches from the map, trying to remember how to get to that quarry. “Pullwell was the town . . .”

Eric walked out of Sally’s kitchen door with the directions to the old quarry in his shirt pocket. She watched him go with something close to affection, and for a second he looked just like his son Tate. Same jumpy gait, same slouch, same way of tilting his head to the side when he walked. For a moment she worried about the boy, coming from this lout on the one side and from herself and Wayne a generation back on the other. Then she remembered that she used to think the same thing about Loretta, and she’d turned out pretty much okay.

It didn’t occur to her until he was already out of sight that the engine she heard turning over was her own. She ran outside, appearing in front of the house just as he was shifting out of reverse and heading up the street.

“You son of a bitch, you bring that back here!” she yelled, but he just stuck his hand out the window and waved. When he was finally out of sight she smashed her highball glass onto the asphalt, accompanying the attendant crash with a loud “Fuck!” She marched back inside, not caring who’d heard.

He might at least have asked, she thought, pulling down another glass and filling it. Poor dumbass is going to drive all that way out there and find the burnt foundation of the cabin and jack shit else, be lucky if he doesn’t kill himself.

She wondered about what he’d said, about Gunther coming over looking for a little action. But Gunther was married now, and he never was one to mess around behind your back. Course he was senile, so who knew if he even remembered he had a wife.

Twenty years earlier, when she heard Gunther had finally married Dot McCallum, she’d stewed for days. It figured, though; the whole time he was with Sally she knew he still had a thing for Dot, who didn’t have half her looks. Dot held on to him by virtue of having broken his heart, and Sally had come along too late for that.

She’d written him a few times after the move to Cottonwood, and he’d answered faithfully. When things got really bad once or twice and she’d broken down and asked him for money, he sent it immediately and refused repayment. But he never came to visit, and a few years later when she wrote to tell him she was about to marry Donald, offering him one last chance, he didn’t answer. There was no getting around the fact that without Gunther she’d likely have been put in jail. She would have lost Loretta to a foster family or the Children’s Home, maybe for good, but it was going to be a long fucking time before she stopped being pissed off at him.

The Volvo’s engine had cooled by the time Jack and Gunther finished shooting pool. Jack had been more than willing to reminisce about the old days, but he’d never been to the quarry himself and was no help with the directions, other than pointing him in the direction of the turnpike.

As he swung around the curve in the river with both front windows lowered, warm breeze flowing through the front seat, he tried to remember Jack’s directions, reflecting that he probably would have had better luck with cars if he’d been driving an automatic all those years. He had it in D now, as Jack had suggested, and the damned thing seemed to be running okay. Cut over to Kellogg and then east all the way out of town, where the on-ramp was; it was a waste of time since he was going to be heading west, but damned if Jack knew anymore where another turnpike on-ramp was. He passed through downtown and then south until he hit Kellogg.

The street had changed a lot since Gunther had last driven it; he wasn’t even certain he had the right road until Calvary cemetery rose up on his right. Albert Vance was buried there, and Gunther gave him a little wave as he passed it. “Don’t take any wooden nickels, Al.”

Vance was buried on a cold morning in November of ’64 with a deep blue sky and hardly any wind. He was a popular guy, and it was a well-attended burial service. Gunther saw it now, cops in uniform and in dark suits and overcoats, and a fair number of their wives, and he could have named all the attendees if he’d been asked. The grass was almost white and crackled underfoot like straw, and the atmosphere was surprisingly light among the dead man’s colleagues, if not their wives or the other women present. Al had died screwing one of his numerous girlfriends, several of whom were present and eyeing each other nastily, jockeying for position as the Official Paramour of the Deceased.

On reflection he could think of four other cops and two of their wives who were buried there, and off the top of his head he found that he could name seven local cemeteries and their street addresses, and at least two or three people he knew buried in each. His father and mother were in Hillcrest, farther north. His other mother, his real mother, was buried in a tiny cemetery a few miles outside Cottonwood. He hadn’t visited since shortly before his first marriage, and the thought filled him with remorse. He resolved to go there before he turned himself back in at the home. Who knew if they’d ever let him out again, even for a last, short trip to his mutti’s grave.

He was off the highway part of Kellogg now, passing through a residential district on one side and a row of motels and used car lots on the other. On his left was Eastborough pond, a park with a tiny man-made lake where one night in 1969 a man had been arrested for screwing a duck. The story made it into the next afternoon’s
Beacon
, a tiny item on page three that nonetheless contained the phrase “unlawful sodomy with a duck,” a first for a family newspaper as far as he knew. The perpetrator’s name had kindly been left out of the story, and Gunther couldn’t quite call it up now. He remembered the man’s face, though, one of the scaredest guys he’d ever seen booked.

He wasn’t far from Lake Vista now, and he grunted at the sight of it in the distance. Maybe they’d get their security down tighter now; God knew lots of those old people couldn’t survive outside the place.

On his left was a big discount store, its lights still burning and cars in the lot. There was a traffic signal ahead and he pulled into the lefthand lane and signaled. He’d be spending the night at the quarry; he’d need a tent and a bedroll, and now that he thought of it a shovel.

He parked near the entrance, and stepping inside he thought he’d gone into the wrong place. The store had been there thirty years and he’d been in hundreds of times since then, once or twice for official reasons, but nothing about the cavernous, brilliantly lit building he found himself in was familiar. There was advertising everywhere, on the walls and on the shelves and even over the loudspeaker; where before there had been only a live clerk reading off what the hourly special was, professionally produced radio ads now alternated with hysterical, overwrought singing.

Wandering toward where the sporting goods section used to be, he found instead a couple of dozen standing racks with brassieres of various colors, textures, and sizes hanging above matching panties. He reached out automatically to feel the leghole of one pair that reminded him of Sally’s, high-waisted, white, and satiny in texture. He rubbed the fabric between his thumb and forefinger. Sometimes she wore black and sometimes white, never red, gray sometimes, he thought, and sometimes a very light brownish color. His first wife Imogene had liked nice lingerie but tended to come home lacking the bottom half of a matching set. Jean, his second wife, wore nice underwear only on special occasions like his birthday and New Year’s Eve; the rest of the time it was plain cotton, purely functional and arousing as tent canvas. Number three, Mildred, habitually wore bra, panties, garter belt, and stockings to bed—sometimes a gartered girdle instead of the belt— under a nightgown. He found that titillating until he realized she didn’t mean it to be; they were married for nearly three years and in that time he never once saw her completely naked. Once he blundered into the bathroom and found her sitting in the bathtub wearing her brassiere, and it began to dawn on him that he was married to a madwoman.

Then there was Dot. He tried to think what she wore underneath but couldn’t picture it. In fact, he couldn’t picture Dot at all for the moment, which troubled him.

He was still enjoying the smooth feel of the garment on his fingertips and was considering bringing it up to his face when he heard the pleasing sound of girlish laughter behind him.

“Can we help you find anything, sir?” asked one of two giggling shopgirls. They wore identical green vests and neither one looked older than twelve.

“Bivouac.”

“What?” asked the other, and they both erupted in a giggling fit. He waited for it to subside before answering.

“Need bivouacking gear.”

The first one started laughing again but the second worked hard to maintain her composure. “We don’t stock those. You might try Frederick’s of Hollywood, down at the mall, though.”

He had only a vague idea what that was but he knew it couldn’t be right, so he simplified the request. “I need a tent and a bedroll. And a shovel.”

“A bedroll? You mean like a sleeping bag?”

“Yeah. Tent, sleeping bag, shovel.”

“Oh. Sporting goods for the first two, hardware for the shovel.”

“Where’s that?”

“Way down in the corner,” she said.

Gunther no longer heard the giggling when he got to sporting goods, though he sensed it was still going on. He took the cheapest sleeping bag they had at thirty-five dollars. Tents started at seventyfive and he decided he didn’t need one, but as long as he was in sporting goods he picked up a seven-dollar jackknife and put it into his pocket, intending to pull it out and pay for it when the time came. The shovel was only ten, and when he checked out the woman at the register gave him an odd look, trying to place him. She didn’t say anything, though, and he got out to the car without incident and loaded his purchases in the backseat; the jackknife was still in his pocket, forgotten and unpaid for.

Gil Stratmeyer, thirty-nine years old, he thought as he closed the door and started the engine. Lived at 1136 Lasserman. Wife’s name was Lorraine. That was the guy with the duck, and twenty years later he could call it up just like that. The name had a joke attached to it. Someone had asked if the duck was a drake or a hen, and Ed piped up without hesitation:

“Shit, it was a hen. Nothin’ queer about Gil Stratmeyer,” he’d said, and even the poor depraved duckfucker laughed a little.

I’m sharp as a tack. There’s no way in hell I belong in the old folks’ home, Gunther thought as he got back onto East Kellogg, and a minute later he pulled onto the turnpike.

Eric swung Sally’s Grand Am into a space in front of the Chimneysweep. Above the door was an old plastic sign with a crude rendering of a deranged-looking man in a top hat, his head and a wildly bristled brush sticking out of a chimney on a rooftop. There were only six cars in the lot, which seemed like a poor tally for a Friday night. When he pushed his way through the door, though, he found it smoky, packed, and loud. Either the drunks were carpooling or the surrounding neighborhood supplied a large portion of the Chimneysweep’s customer base.