The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

“How did she feel about you being here?”

  “Better than I’d hoped. She was resentful at first. She was pretending to be this adult. I was a pretty good reminder that she wasn’t. But we had a few good talks. I could see that deep down she wanted to go back. This has got to be a scary place for a girl her age. She was very sheltered back home.”

  Delancy slid out of the booth, left a dime for coffee, a nickel for a tip. “Because I’m not a ‘real cop,’ I can’t officially make you stay in town for at least another day. But I can get a real cop out here fast if I need to.”

  “I’d planned on leaving tomorrow, actually.”

  “Make it the day after.”

  His blue gaze assessed Delancy with no pleasure at all. “I suppose you get a lot of sympathy from that leg. War heroes are very popular these days.”

  “So are guys who sleep with the wives of their best friends.”

  7

  Laura took a quick, late lunch. When she got back to her office in the shelter she found a sheet of plain paper folded over and sitting in the center of her desk.

  After glancing at it, recognizing the scrawled penmanship and taking note of the message, she walked over to the stairs and climbed to the second floor.

  The kids would be back from school or work soon. She wouldn’t have long for her search.

  The residents had no private space except their bunkbeds. Therefore, the item in question had to be somewhere on or under the bed. If the note was accurate, anyway.

  She found it quickly. A long slit had been opened up on the underside of the mattress and then clumsily sewn back together. Before she tore the item free, she felt the shape of what she was looking for.

  It took less than a minute to free the object the note had told her was somewhere in the shelter.

  It took her less than two minutes to get back downstairs and to put in a call to Nick Delancy’s office.

  8

  It was said that old Cyrus Banning, Justice of the Peace in the area known as the Zone, had broken more laws than existed in the county code.

  At sixty-eight, he weighed some three hundred pounds, was said to smell so bad that most folks could pick up the stench from a hundred feet away, wore the same pair of bib overalls and stained white shirt he’d been seen in for at least twenty years. He was partially blind.

  Because of his blindness he had his nephew, who resembled a malevolent beaver, do all the chores that required sight. His nephew was forty-three and had never married. He got the girls gratis at the bawdy house old Cyrus was said to own down the street. The madame there had a Demerit blackboard, upon which was noted even the slightest bit of irritation she’d received from any of the girls. On Wednesday morning, the madame tallied up the demerits. Whichever girl had the most had to sleep with old Cyrus’ nephew who was said to smell almost as bad as his uncle and have a gas problem as well.

  Nephew, in his own bib overalls and own white shirt, answered the door. The green fuzz on his buck teeth looked a little darker than usual. Knowing that he would have to go inside, Delancy gulped and steeled his stomach for the worst.

  The word was that at one time—while his wife, who died under mysterious circumstances (i.e., the police believed Cyrus killed her but couldn’t prove it) was alive—Cyrus had let her run an antiques store out of their house. But after she died, Cyrus just begun to accumulate piles, stashes, mountains of God-alone-knew-what. A Shirley Temple lamp sat atop a stack of musty Harper’s magazines from the 1880s; an upside-down German helmet from WWI was stuffed with a coin collection; fine china, busted Tom Mix drinking glasses, bustles, books on treating ringworm, a signed copy of an H. Rider Haggard novel—somewhere in the piles that filled all rooms but three (the tiny living room where an enormous RCA radio console stood; the dining room where he married people; the toilet where none but the fool-hardy would venture)—somewhere in this ungodly tornado-ravaged heap lay treasures unimaginable.

  Nephew said, “You got a warrant?”

  “No, but I’ve got this.” Delancy kicked Nephew hard in the shin bone. Nephew shouted and fell back.

  Delancy walked straight to the dining room where old Cyrus was applying dirty and sausage-like fingers to an adding machine.

  “Just think how much money the government would have if you ever paid taxes on what you made, Cyrus.”

  Delancy and Cyrus were ancient enemies. Like every other Prescott cop not on Cyrus’ payroll, Delancy had spent his street days trying to bust Cyrus on anything he could.

  Cyrus looked up, his eyes ringed with some kind of rash. “My least favorite cop. You know how sorry I am about your leg.”

  “Uh-huh. I want to know about a girl who died a few days ago. Sarah Hewitt. I’m hearing that she worked as an Annie. And that means she worked with you.”

  “Allotment Annies” were girls and women who married soldiers about to be shipped overseas. The Annies would then get the soldiers’ $50 a month check that the government sent wives and widows. It was a system begging for corruption and corrupt it was. The record holder thus far was a New York City Annie who’d married thirty-six soldiers and was getting a substantial monthly income.

  Locally, Cyrus ran the Annies much the way pimps ran prostitutes. Girls who tried to be Annies on their own were soon visited by Nephew. For every drunken scared soldier (he knew he might be dead in a month; the idea of having a little woman waiting for him back here gave him great comfort, the poor sad dumb slob), Cyrus gave the girl $25 that night and then had her fill out all the necessary papers so that the monthly checks came to various addresses he used as drop boxes.

  “The name doesn’t sound familiar,” Cyrus wheezed.

  “What if I told you I had two eyewitnesses who saw her come here the night she was murdered?”

  Cyrus laughed. “You hear that, nephew? Two eyewitnesses? He lost his leg but he sure didn’t lose his bullshit.”

  “He’s gonna get his someday. You see how he kicked me in the shin?”

  “I’ll tell you what,” Cyrus said, “beings how you give up your leg for this country of ours. I’m gonna lay it out for you because I don’t want to be involved in no murder investigation. Them Army bastards are tryin’ to get my JP license lifted because a couple of Annies worked here for a few nights.”

  “You going to tell me Sarah Hewitt was an Annie?”

  “Don’t tell him nothing, Uncle Cyrus.”

  “You got yourself an enemy, Delancy.”

  “I’ll manage to live with the shame. Now what about the girl?”

  “She needed money. I offered her a berth in the crib but she didn’t want it. Then I told her about how I arranged for Annies. We worked out deal where she got $100 for all three and then signed everything over to me and one of my drop boxes.”

  “She was a fast worker.”

  “You ever see her, Delancy? She was one of them little dreamy ones. Scared young boys gonna be shipped overseas—you bet they wanted to marry her. I even had a photographer out here, took a couple wedding shots so the boys could have them in their wallets. But it had to be a fast playoff. They get back to base and started showing them pictures around—comparin’ notes and everything before they shipped out—well, pretty obvious ain’t it?”

  “What is?”

  “Whoever killed her. Had to be one of them soldier boys who found out she was an Annie. One of them caught on to her and killed her.”

  “I want their names.”

  “Two of them already shipped out.”

  “What about the third one?”

  “He wasn’t no soldier,” Nephew said.

  “You be quiet.” Shook his outsize head, wheezed. “Nephew thinks she met some civilian who wanted to marry her.”

  “I asked him about them guns they use in the Army,” Nephew said. “He didn’t know diddly squat.”

  “I keep tellin’ you he was an officer.”

  “He’d still know about guns, Uncle Cyrus.”

  An invading force landed on the front porch, a forc
e of drunken laughter, a bottle of some kind that dropped and smashed, and somebody who was trying hard to play the Wedding March on an harmonica: “You don’ think I can play it do ya, Shirley?”

  Pounding on the door. A girl’s voice: “Open up in there. We wanna get married!”

  “Yeah, an’ I’m gonna play the wedding march on this here harmonica.”

  They fell against the door.

  Nephew said, “Sounds like Shirley’s got a live one. She’s one Annie who’s gonna make a lot of money.”

  “Not around here, she ain’t,” Cyrus said. “Four husbands in three weeks. She’s pressin’ her luck. You get her that bus ticket like I told ya to?”

  “I sure did, Uncle Cyrus.”

  “Good. ‘Cause this is her last one. The others got shipped to four different bases for overseas. She lucked out. But her luck can’t last much longer.”

  More laughter. A few strains of the Wedding March. Falling against the door again.

  Nephew opened the door and the happy couple damned near fell through.

  For the next few minutes all Delancy did was watch. Shirley turned out to be a bottle redhead with long nice legs in a short black dress and a goofy hat with a birdcage on it. The soldier’s uniform was soaked with what was probably booze and he was so drunk he had to keep refocusing his eyes. She wasn’t much good at pretending to be drunk but the soldier was so drunk he couldn’t figure it out. She looked at Cyrus and winked a couple of times. Nephew helped drag the shorn recruit with the soft downstate drawl into the living room where he— after dropping his harmonica—bellowed: “Ain’t she the most beautiful thing you ever seen?”

  No sense sticking around for this farce of a wedding. Nor any sense reporting it. Cyrus knew way too much about too many powerful officials. He would laugh at any charges that Delancy helped to bring against him.

  He said to Cyrus, “I’ll call you later tonight. I want the name of the one who didn’t get shipped off.”

  “I appreciate that, Delancy. But right now we need to get on with the sacred ceremony of marriage.”

  At which point, the poor soldier started to fall over backwards. Shirley and Nephew propped him up. He returned the favor by vomiting all over himself.

  Delancy decided that this would probably be a good time to leave. He needed fresh air. Lots of it. And fast.

  9

  It was nearly nine o’clock by the time Delancy and Laura caught up with each other in a downtown coffee shop named Kilroy’s. The place was crowded with shift workers on dinner break. They ordered hamburgers and coffee and took them outside to sit and eat on a bus bench.

  Delancy was nervous. Being with her he had to face his terrible truth all over again—that he was half-assed in love with her. Just the way he doted on her face in profile—it had happened without him even being aware of it. He’d seen her three times and there it was. His fate. He loved her and hated himself for loving her. She was a married woman with a husband fighting overseas. He was the kind of man all combat soldiers hated even more than the krauts and nips—the bird dog. Thank God she wouldn’t reciprocate. She was saving him from himself.

  “It’s such a beautiful night,” she said. She raised her elegant head to take in the scents of the Indian summer evening, the thick heady smell of leaves burning, the tang of the clean breeze, the oddly pleasant smell of bus fumes. A lazy round prairie moon only added to the allure of the moment.

  Then she turned to him and said: “I need to get back, Nick. We’ve got two new residents and I really need to work with one of them. I haven’t even had time to look through the diary.” She reached into her coat pocket and lifted out a small red diary with a broken lock. It was a cheap little Woolworth’s item and for some reason that gave it an endearing quality.

  He slid the diary into his own coat pocket and said, “I want to apologize again for the other night.”

  She stared at him. Her expression was unfathomable. His heart pounded against his chest. Even with the noise of passing traffic, he was sure she could hear it.

  “I’m going to be honest with you, Nick.”

  “All right.”

  “My marriage wasn’t all that good for either of us. We’d talked about divorcing. I think Don enlisted as a way of getting away from me. We both come from prominent families and both of them would have been angry if we embarrassed them by my divorcing my husband.” She hesitated. “You know I’m attracted to you. Or you should, anyway. But I’m still married and I’m going to remain faithful. If something should happen to him over there—I owe him being true to our marriage vows.”

  She stood up. “So no more afterwork drinks, all right? Strictly business and I’m serious. Very serious. All right?”

  She turned to walk back to her De Soto coupe. Then she glanced back at him: “I hope that diary helps you.”

  10

  Delancy walked down the street to a telephone box. He looked up Cyrus’ number in the phone book. He dropped a nickel in the slot and dialed Cyrus’ number.

  Nephew answered. “He’s marryin’ somebody. Number three for the night. And she ain’t no Annie, either.”

  “You can help me, then.”

  “What if I don’t want to help you?”

  “Then I’ll drive out there and beat your face in.”

  “You think you’re pretty hot stuff just ‘cause the krauts shot your leg off.”

  Delancy laughed. “I was in the Pacific. That would make them Japs.”

  “Oh.”

  “You said you didn’t think the third man Sarah Hewitt married was military. Why not?”

  Nephew hesitated. “Well, he wasn’t wearin’ no uniform, for one thing.”

  “Do they all wear uniforms?”

  “Well, no, I guess not. A lot of them wear civvies.”

  “Anything else about him that didn’t strike you as military?”

  “Well, he wasn’t in great shape. And he was older.”

  “How old would you guess?”

  “Forties, prob’ly.”

  And then good old Nephew said it, delivered the one essential fact that set Delancy on the right path.

  “Never seen no military man drivin’ a red Packard.”

  11

  Delancy had to knock three times before he got an answer. When Ted Carlson opened his hotel room door, he was dressed in a blue silk robe that was a tad fancy.

  Delancy didn’t wait for an invitation. He pushed past the taller man and stepped into a room that was warm from the glow of small table lamp. Dance music played faintly on a table model radio. Glenn Miller.

  Delancy went over and dropped into a chair. Carlson seated himself on the edge of the small sofa. The furnishings were tasteful if a bit dull.

  “I’m sure you’re going to tell me why you’re here.”

  “First of all, because you’re a dumb sonofabitch. You couldn’t even see that she was using you. And if anybody wanted to push it, you probably could’ve gone to prison for sleeping with a seventeen-year-old.”

  “That’s what you’re here about? That I married Sarah? I’m not ashamed of it. And what we did is perfectly legal.”

  “I’ve got her diary, Carlson. She was paying her mother back. She didn’t love you. She thought you were kind’ve stupid, the way teenagers always think older people are stupid.”

  Carlson inhaled raggedly, as if he’d just been hit hard in the stomach. He opened the teak cigarette box on the coffee table in front of him and then closed it again without taking a cigarette. He was trembling.

  For the first time, he glanced at the bathroom door. It was closed. He looked back at Delancy. “I know that, too. Now. She told me on our wedding night. When she wouldn’t sleep with me. She knew I was in love with her, as foolish as that sounds. She tried to sound happy about it. She got drunk and kept saying that she’d paid both of us back. I wasn’t in love with her mother any longer. And now I was in love with somebody I couldn’t have—just the way her father was with her mother.” This time he too
k out a cigarette and lighted it with a stick match. “I actually felt sorry for her—hated her for how she’d led me on—but now that she’d pulled it off she was miserable. That’s the terrible thing about vengeance—it’s rarely as satisfying as we hope it’ll be. She broke down and just wept for a good twenty minutes. I set her on the bed and covered her up. I pulled a chair up and held her hand until she finally fell asleep.”

  The second time Carlson looked at the bathroom door, Delancy took his gun from his shoulder holster and pointed it at a spot right above the doorknob.

  “Come out of there right now.”

  “Go easy on her, Delancy. She’s been through hell.”

  Delancy knew who it would be. Beth Hewitt emerged from the dark rectangle of doorway. She wore white silk pajamas. Her mussed blonde hair Harlow-erotic.

  She said nothing. Crossed the room to the sofa. Sat down. Picked up a cigarette from the box. Got it lighted and then sank back in the couch.

  “Just get it over with, Mr. Delancy. Then you can call the police and they can charge me. I killed my daughter.”

  Carlson snapped, “Be quiet, Beth. You know damned well I killed her.”

  She had started to cry and he slid his arm around her and brought her to him. “Beth came to town. She’d figured out that I was seeing Sarah. She found Sarah, who was only too glad to tell her all about it.”

  He leaned forward to stub out his cigarette. “Sarah called and said she wanted to meet me by the river. She was insane that night and I mean that medically. She attacked me, slapping me and kicking me and spitting in my face. She kept screaming that if I hadn’t seduced her mother, she’d still have both of her parents. I tried to leave but she jumped at me from behind. She missed me and smashed her head against a stone pillar. She was dead in less than a minute.”

  Even from across the room, Delancy could see the tears in Carlson’s eyes. “She’s dead, my best friend committed suicide, and I betrayed the woman I was supposed to love.”