Last Call

by Matthew Nunes

  “I have to go,” said Larry, shaking my hand, “and this is too public to talk. I’ll stop by the bar tonight.”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  “Thanks for coming. All of you.” He walked off, looking self-conscious, with all of the cameras. When we walked to my car, Dana was waiting. She was standing next to it, with her arms folded. She was wearing a charcoal gray suit, with her hair up very tightly. She looked stunning in a severe way.

  Marisol walked quickly to her and put her arms around her waist. Dana hugged her back and looked over ‘Sol’s hat at me. The expression was neutral, except for the hurt around her eyes. Despite her careful makeup, I could see the effect of a long night. She looked tired, and I wanted to hold her. When she released Marisol and stood, Mrs. Pina and I were standing in front of her.

  Marisol and Mrs. Pina looked from one to the other of us, and stepped back. It was slow, but we came together, and my arms slipped around her waist, she took my shoulders, but it was like holding a statue. She was careful of my arm, but that wasn’t the problem. While I held her, I could feel that she wanted it to stop. I gave in and released her.

  “Paul, we do need to talk.”

  “You told me everything you need to just now.”

  Mrs. Pina made an odd noise, a kind of click from the back of her throat. We all turned and looked at her.

  “Marisol, please get into the car.” She did and closed the door.

  She stood for a moment, looking at Dana, then she turned towards me. “Stop talking. Stop trying so hard. You think it’s a decision to make. It isn’t; you either have something together, or you don’t.”

  She stepped into the car like a queen and softly closed the door.

  “Paul?” asked Dana quietly.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you sorry you killed him?”

  “I’m sorry that Detective Lacombe is dead.”

  “That isn’t what I asked.”

  “I know. No, I guess I’m not. He drew a gun, shot me, and I shot back, and he’s dead. He had a better chance than I had. He ruined a lot of lives, or helped to ruin them. He threatened my daughter to control me, and he tried to kill me. I don’t think I’m sorry. I’m sick, my head hurts, my arm is giving me fits and I’m having trouble sleeping. But I’ll never be sorry for killing him.”

  “You kept me in the dark. You kept me away from it. I thought I made you understand how important that was. You emerged victorious and unscathed—"

  “You can try to make me into the bad guy, but no matter what, they tried to kill two cops and me. To you, I’m wrong because I didn’t tell you about it; or maybe even because I won. Tough shit.”

  I managed to get the “shit” out before she turned and walked away, with a stride that I admired. There was the hell of it. I wasn’t what she wanted.

  When I got into the car, I was careful to close the door gently and drove out of the cemetery slowly. Neither ‘Sol nor Mrs. Pina spoke, but reproach was clear to see on their faces in the mirror.

  Chapter 24

  Larry DaSilva walked into the bar shortly after nine o’clock. It was a slow night. My left arm was throbbing, and my feet were killing me. Even my ribs felt a little tender. “Evening, Paul.”

  “Evening, Larry,” I answered, sliding a coaster in front of him, and mixing him a whiskey sour without being asked. I added a glass of ice water and poured myself a coke from the gun.

  He picked up his glass, and held it up. “Absent friends.”

  I returned the toast with my coke and we sipped quietly for a moment.

  “Agent Kilroy?” he asked. I shrugged.

  “Beats me, Larry. I don’t know anything about women.”

  He looked at Diane, standing near the wall, leaning hip shot and looking sensual without effort. “Makes two of us I guess.” He held up his glass again. “To women, life’s second greatest mystery.”

  I clicked my glass against his and we drank them both down. “What’s first?” I asked.

  “Hell if I know, but I’ll be damned if I’ll give women first place.”

  I had to go down the bar to a customer. I took his cash and rang it up before I went back to Larry.

  “I’m not ready to talk, I guess,” he said, “can I come by your house tomorrow?”

  “Sure. Another?”

  “No, I have to get home.” He walked out, right past Dennis Pereira walking in.

  Dennis was alone, and came to the bar. He extended his hand to me, and sat down in one of the stools. He picked the one that wobbled a bit. He got up and glared at it, moved down one stool and ordered a Perfect Manhattan.

  He said, after taking one sip, “This is really good. I never had one before. I think it’s my new drink.”

  “Good.”

  “I guess I came to make sure that you’re okay. I know I’m barking up the wrong tree and all.” He’d driven for an hour instead of making a phone call. I took his hand, and gripped it hard. It was painful, but I raised my left hand to hold his elbow with it. Words wouldn’t come.

  We told each other old stories, the ones that we already knew. There were people we talked about, some girls and old friends and enemies. He told me how pretty my daughter looked on TV and said I didn’t look as old in person as I did on camera. The shift passed and he left before closing. All he did was drive down and have a drink. All he did was talk to me like an old friend.

  “So, who was your cute little friend?” Diane was leaning slightly over the bar.

  “An old friend, that’s all.”

  “I’d wrap him up in a handkerchief and take him home. Maybe put him on a shelf or something.”

  “I’ll let him know.”

  “Paul, you don’t sound so hot, are you okay?”

  “Sure.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I’m not going to push, but you’ll figure out a way that it’s your fault. You shouldn’t have that much gray hair, for God’s sake.”

  My ride home gave me some time to think, but I wasted it. I thought aimlessly, circling around how I was feeling. I’d had lots of practice at loss, but somehow I had never gotten to be good at it.

  I was surprised in a way, that when I went to bed, I slept. My jaws and teeth were sore when I woke, so I knew I’d been grinding them.

  Chapter 25

  When I woke up, Marisol had already left for the day, and I was alone. Her note said she had to stay after school and asked me to pick her up there. I made a pot of coffee, and sat down with my legal pads. I listed the people who might have killed the congressman. I made a list of what it would take to do it. It wasn’t a long list; it had “money,” access to information and motive.”

  The killing was personal, the knife in the ear said so. Never listened? Didn’t hear? The equivalent of a stake through the heart? The message could be any or all of them, or none of them at all. The knife was impromptu, with an evil serendipity surrounding it.

  Who’s left? Whoever had the money and the access to information; who had the motive and the trust of a pro.

  When the phone rang, I started, but picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Paul? This is Larry. Larry DaSilva.”

  “Hi, Larry. I was just thinking about you.”

  “That’s nice, Paul, but I won’t play dress up.”

  “Feeling more like yourself?”

  “It’ll be awhile. The good news is that I think I will someday. Yesterday, I had my doubts.”

  “Yeah.”

  “How about you and Dana Kilroy?”

  I was silent.

  “Want to talk about it?” he asked.

  “I already told you that you’re a piss poor cupid.”

  He almost laughed. “Do you still need one?”

  “Screw you, Larry.”

  “On another subject?” he said after a moment, “The Gentleman from Rhode Island?”

  “My phone still tapped?”

  “Hell if I know. I haven’t heard a tape in awhile, but it’s possible.”

  “Was
the house ever bugged other than the phone?”

  “Nope.”

  “Want some coffee?”

  “Did you make it or did Marisol?”

  “Larry, what are you trying to say?”

  He chuckled. “Nothing, nothing. Give me a half hour.”

  “Half an hour.” I put a pot of coffee on while I waited. I was drinking some of it when there was a knock on the door. I made sure my gun was at my waist, at least. Larry DaSilva was at the door, with a box of donuts.

  Leave it to a cop, I thought, noticing that it was from the best place in town. He dropped the box on the kitchen table, grabbed one and ran back out to his car, returning with a file folder, some colored pens, a clipboard and three videocassettes. “I’m on leave, Paul, so this file that I’m holding doesn’t exist. Naturally, I wouldn’t have a file I’m not supposed to.”

  “You sound pissed off.”

  “Damned District Attorney. He’s going to officially close the case by next Friday, unless ‘something else crops up on his radar screen.’”

  “You’d think a lawyer wouldn’t mix his metaphors.”

  “You’d think he’d want to solve the fucking case, too.”

  “Let’s take a look at that file,” I said.

  “Then?”

  “Then we fuck ‘em where they breathe.”

  He smiled.

  Most of the file I’d seen. It had some investigative notes about me, about the murder itself, the M.E’s report and Coroner’s conclusions, references to multiple evidence numbers, and most recently, the DNA evidence showing that Miranda, the call girl had deposited three pubic hairs to mix with the Congressman’s. That cinched that part of it, anyway. There were lots of pages of interviews with the ladies on the tapes from Morley’s cellar. I flipped through them, and then checked the conclusion of each. All of them said, “N.R.A.” at the end. I pointed to one of them, with my eyebrows up.

  “No reportable action,” he said.

  I took out my notes and gave him the qualification list I had come up with. He nodded.

  “Makes sense.”

  “Any of these women fit? Do their families?”

  “We have to check. I have some tapes. I thought you’d like to take a look, so I brought copies.”

  I grabbed a calorie bomb from the donut box and brought the box and the coffees into the living room. I was eating the donut while he sorted them, I was grateful for Marisol. If it hadn’t been for her, the VCR still would be blinking “12:00 Sunday.”

  “I’m going to do this in a particular order, okay?” he said.

  “Works for me.”

  The TV screen went blue, then the little “Play 0:00:00” came up. The sound came up before the picture. It was Camille Morley’s voice. “Dick, I know that you’re in the mood, but you’ve been drinking and you know I don’t like that.”

  A male voice came from right next to the camera. “Look, Camille, it’s been a long time, and I really want you.”

  “Maybe if you could wait until morning?” Her voice sounded frightened. It was nothing like the mistress of her home voice that I had heard not long before.

  The Congressman, demanding as he was when I met him, came back. “I don’t ask you that often and I always manage to rise to the occasion during those ever so rare times when you seem to be interested. I’m sorry about your frigidity, but I do have my own needs.” I felt itchy, but couldn’t put my finger on the reason. It was somewhere between embarrassment and shame.

  He came into view wearing boxer shorts and a tank style sleeveless undershirt. I’d overheard Diane calling them “Beater shirts,” because all of the wife beaters on TV seemed to wear them.

  Morley flipped the sheets and blankets off of his wife, who was wearing pajamas of some shiny fabric. He reached to her waist and pulled them down. She lifted her hips, and he threw them to the foot of the bed. She was looking directly at the camera. I’d seen the expression she wore in a photograph somewhere, but I couldn’t place it.

  She was lying on her back, with her knees up, pressed together. I was looking at a woman, nude from the waist down, but didn’t want to see more. I wanted to close my eyes and block my ears. There was nothing about this that I wanted to know. He knelt so that he was above her, looking down. “Camille, you still look wonderful,” he said, as he reached with both hands to pry her knees apart. Then he mounted her. There was no better way to describe it. It was like watching a stud mounting a dam. I thought of lovemaking, and realized that he behaved like a guy standing at a urinal. There was pressure, and convenient relief.

  She continued to look at the camera with that same lifeless expression. Her hands stayed at her sides. Once he reached and grabbed her hair, pulling her face around to kiss her. As soon as he released her, she turned her head back to stare, seemingly straight at me.

  I felt sweat starting at my hairline and reached for the remote. Larry put his hand out. “No. It doesn’t last much longer.”

  Sure enough, a minute or two later, Morley started bucking with no particular rhythm, “Fuck me back, you frigid bitch, what’s the matter with you?” He started grunting, and she gave a slight lift with her hips. That seemed to be enough for him, and he groaned, and sagged onto her. As he rolled off, he pulled up his shorts.

  “How was it?” he asked.

  “Just fine. Thanks for being so patient with me.” Her voice was lifeless. The picture froze, and I was left looking into her eyes.

  Then I remembered. It hadn’t been a woman in the picture at all. It was an American Marine, standing guard over a row of body bags. Had he not been standing, holding his M-16, he would have looked as dead as his comrades on the ground before him.

  “Is that it, Larry?” My throat was dry, and it came out as a scraping sound. I cleared my throat.

  “Yeah, the rest of the tape is just like that. Him sleeping and her staring right at us, until it runs out.”

  “The others that bad?”

  “One is.”

  The third was different. Morley wasn’t in it, and his wife was a joyful participant. The man’s hair struck a chord, but I couldn’t quite reach a point of recognition.

  Just as they reached for each other, Larry clicked the remote and switched the tape off. I looked at him, a little surprised.

  “This one’s different, Paul. It’s a couple making love. I saw it, and I’m embarrassed about it. If I just said that you never see the man’s face, would you be willing to let it go?”

  I nodded slowly.

  Larry was staring off into the middle distance, and I felt as if I could almost touch his concentration, like a physical manifestation. His fists were clenched, knuckles white, and his brow furrowed, all the way back to his clean, shining scalp.

  I ran my hands over my face. “I shouldn’t even say it out loud, but that is one son of a bitch who needed to die.”

  “Yeah. Now, what else?”

  Larry and I were still sitting in front of the television. The tapes were out of the machine and next to him on the couch. We had emptied the box of donuts. I was pretty proud of myself for switching the coffee maker off. In the past two and a half years, I’d burned out three of them. I had two pages of notes, and he had diagrams in multiple colors. So we knew what we knew. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the bar during that night.

  I never saw anyone who stuck out. There was the guy with his hands all over the woman, and there were the three middle aged couples at the table. One couple was holding hands, under the table. They all looked wealthy and well dressed. There were a few other customers, but that was it. Someone had seen me slicing limes and lemons. Someone saw where the knife went.

  There was a table with three couples. One of the couples was holding hands under the table. From behind, they looked like typical tourists, nothing remarkable. They never let me see their faces. I had been tending bar for quite awhile, and I always tried to see my customers’ faces. They never let me see their faces. They were slim and fit and carried themselve
s as if they were attractive.

  They never let me see their faces. They held hands. “Larry?” Something in my voice got his attention.

  “Yeah?”

  “You and Petersen interviewed everyone who’d been at the bar, right?”

  “Sure, of course. Nobody saw—” he stopped dead. “Somebody did more than see. Aw, shit!”

  Chapter 26

  “Paul?”

  “No question about it.”

  DaSilva was rubbing his eyes as he spoke, “From behind will never hold up in court.”

  “I bet that your interview will ring a bell with them. They gave you names and addresses and phone numbers, right?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Ever try to contact anyone for a follow up?”

  “Not me, I left that and the witness interviews to—oh fuck me.” It came out as a groan.

  “Petersen, right?”

  He was biting his lip. “Yes, that’s drudge work and it always goes to the junior guy.”

  “Petersen might have seen an opportunity.”

  “Oh yeah, that bastard has a nose for nasty shit. He would have switched bosses, right on the spot. Now I have to check all of the interviews. Phone numbers, names and addresses. Get alibis. Break those alibis. If they have an alibi, we know that it’s bullshit. Maybe they came in and out, one day. Minimum exposure. So why would they even be there?”

  “If you hated somebody that much, wouldn’t you want to be sure he was dead?”

  “Using the knife to make some sort of point, I guess. Hell of a risk.”

  “On the other hand, they still might get away with it.”

  “Nope.”

  “Nope?”

  “They aren’t going to get away with it.” His expression was neutral.

  “Larry, we are a long way from anything you can bring to the DA.”

  “I know. But you know what, Paul?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “I’ve been a cop for a long time. My best friend on the job is dead because of them, and if that isn’t enough, they have seriously messed up your life. They killed a call girl, like throwing away a gun or a knife. They play with people, as if we’re tokens in some board game,” he pointed with his chin to the Monopoly set.