The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

  He grabbed Dexter by the hair and jerked his head back.

  Groaning, Dexter came awake.

  “Now what?” Slocum said, turning to me.

  “Now I want to talk to him.”

  “Talk to him,” Slocum said. “Right.”

  He pointed a large hand at Dexter as if he were a master of ceremonies introducing the next act.

  It wasn’t easy, getting up off that couch and going over to him. In a curious way, I was terrified of him. If I pushed him hard enough, he would tell me the exact truth about the night. The truth in detail. What she had looked like and sounded like—her screams as he raped her; her screams as she died—and then I would have my facts…but facts so horrible I would not be able to live with them. How many times—despite myself—I had tried to recreate that night. But there would be no solace in this particular truth; no solace at all.

  I stood over him. “Have you figured out who I am yet?”

  He stared up at me. He started crying. “Hey, man, I never did nothing to you.”

  “You raped and killed a girl named Debbie eleven years ago.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man. Honest. You got the wrong guy.”

  I knew by the way I studied his face—every piece of beard stubble, the green matter collected in the corners of his eyes, the dandruff flaked off at the front of his receding hairline—that I was trying to learn something about him, something that would grant me peace after all these years.

  A madman, this Dexter, and so not quite responsible for what he’d done and perhaps even deserving of pity in my good liberal soul.

  But he didn’t seem insane, at least not insane enough to move me in any way. He was just a cheap trapped frightened animal.

  “Really, man; really I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  “I’ve been tracking you for eleven years now—”

  “Jesus, man; listen—”

  “You’re going to hate prison, Dexter. Or maybe they’ll even execute you. Did you ever read anything about the injections they give? They make it sound so humane but it’s the waiting, Dexter. It’s the waiting—”

  “Please,” he said, “please,” and he writhed against his handcuffs, scraping the table across the floor in the process.

  “Eleven years, Dexter,” I said.

  I could hear my voice, what was happening to it—all my feelings about Dexter were merging into my memories of those defaced centerfolds in his bedroom—and Slocum must have known it too, with his animal wisdom, known at just what moment I would be right for it

  because just then and just so

  the Cobra came into my hands and I

  shot Dexter once in the face and once in the

  chest and I

  5

  Slocum explained to me—though I really wasn’t listening—that they were called by various names (toss guns or throw away guns) but they were carried by police officers in case they wanted to show that the person they’d just killed had been armed.

  From a holster strapped to his ankle, Slocum took a .38, wiped it clean of prints, and set it next to Dexter’s hand.

  Below and to the side of us the apartment house was a frenzy of shouts and cries—fear and panic—and already in the distance sirens exploded red on the soft blue air of the summer day.

  6

  That evening I cried.

  I sat in a good room in a good hotel with the air-conditioning going strong, a fine dinner and many fine drinks in my belly, and I cried.

  Wept, really.

  Whatever had kept me from crying for my daughter and then my wife and then my son was gone now and so I could love and mourn them in a way I’d never been able to. I thought of each of them—their particular ways of laughing, their particular sets of pleasures and dreams, their particular fears and apprehensions—and it was as if they joined me there in that chill antiseptic hotel room, Debbie in her blue sweater and jeans, my wife in her white linen sheath, Jeff in his Kiss T-shirt and chinos—came around in the way the medieval church taught that angels gathered around the bed of a dying person…only I wasn’t dying.

  My family was there to tell me that I was to live again. To seek some sort of peace and normalcy after the forced march of these past eleven years.

  “I love you so much,” I said aloud to each of them, and wept all the more; “I love you so much.”

  And then I slept.

  7

  “I talked to the district attorney,” Slocum said in the coffee shop the following morning. “He says it’s very unlikely there will be any charges.”

  “He really thought Dexter was armed?”

  “Wouldn’t you? A piece of trash like Dexter?”

  I stared at him. “You know something terrible?”

  “What?”

  “I don’t feel guilty.”

  He let go with one of those cigarette-raspy laughs of his. “Good.”

  Then it was his turn to stare at me, there in the hubbub of clattering dishes and good sweet coffee smells and bacon sizzling on the grill. “So what now?”

  “See if I can get my job back.”

  “At the university?”

  “Umm-hmm.”

  He kept staring. “You don’t feel any guilt do you?”

  “No. I mean, I know I should. Whatever else, he was a human being. But—”

  He smiled his hard Old Testament smile. “Now don’t you go giving me any of those mousy little liberal ‘buts,’ all right?”

  “All right.”

  “You just go back and live your life and make it a good one.”

  “I owe you one hell of a lot, Slocum.”

  He put forth a slab of hand and a genuine look of affection in his eyes. “Just make it a good one,” he said. “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  “And no guilt?”

  “No guilt.”

  He grinned. “I knew I could make a man out of you.”

  8

  Her name was Anne Stevens and she was to dominate my first year back at the university. Having met at the faculty picnic—hot August giving way to the fierce melancholy of Indian summer—we began what we both hoped (her divorced; me not quite human yet) would be a pleasant but slow-moving relationship. We were careful to not introduce real passion, for instance, until we both felt certain we could handle it, about the time the first of the Christmas decorations blew in the gray wind of Harcourt Square.

  School itself took some adjusting. First, there was the fact that the students seemed less bright and inquisitive, more conservative than the students I remembered. Second, the faculty had some doubts about me; given my experiences over the past eleven years, they wondered how I would fit into a setting whose goals were at best abstract. I wondered, too…

  After the first time we made love—Anne’s place, unplanned, satisfying if slightly embarrassing—I went home and stared at the photograph of my wife I keep on my bureau. In whispers, I apologized for what I’d done. If I’d been a better husband I would have no guilt now. But I had not, alas, been a better husband at all…

  In the spring, a magazine took a piece on inflation I wrote and the academic dean made a considerable fuss over this fact. Also in the spring Anne and I told each other that we loved each other in a variety of ways, emotionally, sexually, spiritually. We set June 23 as our wedding day.

  It was on May 5 that I saw the item in the state newspaper. For the following three weeks I did my best to forget it, troubling as it was. Anne began to notice a difference in my behavior, and to talk about it. I just kept thinking of the newspaper item and of something Slocum had said that day when I killed Dexter.

  In the middle of a May night—the breeze sweet with the newly blooming world—I typed out a six-page letter to Anne, packed two bags, stopped by a 7-11 and filled the Volvo and dropped Anne’s letter in a mailbox, and then set out on the Interstate.

  Two mornings later, I walked up a dusty flight of stairs inside an apartment house. A Hank
Williams, Jr. record filled the air.

  To be heard above the music, I had to pound.

  I half-expected what would happen, that when the door finally opened a gun would be shoved in my face. It was.

  A Cobra.

  I didn’t say anything. I just handed him the news clipping. He waved me in—he lived in a place not dissimilar from the one Dexter had lived in—read the clipping as he opened an 8:48 A.M. beer.

  Finished reading it, he let it glide to the coffee table that was covered with gun magazines.

  “So?”

  “So I want to help him. I don’t want him to go through what I did.”

  “You know him or something?”

  “No.”

  “Just some guy whose daughter was raped and killed and the suspect hasn’t been apprehended.”

  “Right.”

  “And you want what?”

  “I’ve got money and I’ve got time. I quit my job.”

  “But what do you want?”

  “I want us to go after him. Remember how you said that I’d changed and that I didn’t even know it?”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Well, you were right. I have changed.”

  He stood up and stated laughing, his considerable belly shaking beneath his Valvoline T-shirt. “Well, I’ll be goddamned, Robert. I’ll be goddamned. I did make a man out of you, after all. So how about having a beer with me?”

  At first—it not being nine A.M. yet—I hesitated. But then I nodded my head and said, “Yeah, Slocum. That sounds good. That really sounds good.”

  THE RIGHT THING

  Sully Donlon was working on deck when Kay came up from the cabin and said, “I was washing the windows down there and I noticed there’s some guy up there on the cliff with a pair of binoculars watching you.”

  Donlon wore faded denim cut-offs, no shirt or shoes. She wore the same except for a red cotton halter.

  McKenna’s Cove was part of an island ninety miles north of Chicago. There were three summerhouses on the island, one of them belonging to Donlon and his Woman of The Moment, as one of his more sardonic ex-roomies had described herself.

  Kay was a nurse at a medical clinic. Donlon had met her six weeks ago at a disco on the Gold Coast. She’d been celebrating her divorce from a neurosurgeon she’d help put through med school, her repayment being a case of crabs he’d picked up from one of his numerous girlfriends. She was spending one week of her vacation on Donlon’s island.

  She watched Donlon closely after bringing him the news. He didn’t talk much about his life. All she knew for sure was that he was a wholesale salesman of power yachts. His own craft wasn’t in that esteemed a class. It was a venerable old 19 footer that required a hardy seaman to keep it operating. Donlon’s deep tan and muscular wiry body attested to the hours he put into keeping it in max condition.

  Aware that she was watching him for a response to her news, he smiled and said, “Not me. The rig here. Everybody wants a look at it. Not many of these left.”

  He went back to polishing some of the custom-made stainless steel fittings.

  “You’re not even interested that somebody’s up there watching us?”

  “Nah. Why should I be? Free country, isn’t it?”

  “Well, it kind of spooks me.”

  Donlon grinned. “Flip him off. That’ll get rid of him.”

  Later in the day, when they made love, she noticed how distracted he was. It was as if he’d sent a clone of himself to perform the sex.

  Even in July, the wind off the Lake cooled the harsh temperature. She slept, fanned by a breeze that gave her goosebumps until she covered her nakedness with a thin blanket. Then it was a perfect sleep.

  Once he was sure she was out for a while, he slipped off the bed, went to his ancient Army duffel bag and took out the Glock.

  The forest here ran to hardwood maples. The scent of loam and lake braced him for his search.

  He spent half an hour searching the land around the cabin. Next he went down to the landing where the ferry for visitors docked.

  He was ten feet from the landing when he heard the outhouse door upslope behind him squawk open.

  A voice said: “You looking for me?”

  Amazing what you could forget in ten years. Of course, the man hadn’t been either fat or bald then.

  They moved toward each other. No smiles, no arms open to manly embrace, no words of greeting.

  Dave said, “I didn’t want to come here. I mean, just in case you think I’ve changed my mind about what a sleazy bastard you are.”

  “You better have a damned good reason to be here.”

  The man was a stranger. Even the timbre of his voice was different. So damned strange. His own brother, with whom he’d shared a house for the first sixteen years of his life, utterly lost to him now.

  “Well, it wouldn’t be because of Mom. Because you wouldn’t give a damn.”

  “I don’t have anything against her.”

  “Well, that’s damned nice of you.”

  “Nora?”

  “No. Because you wouldn’t give a damn about her, either.” Donlon said: “Sam.”

  “Yeah. Sam. The son you’ve haven’t contacted since he was four years old.”

  Donlon didn’t have to wait until his brother said the words. Donlon said them for him: “He died?”

  “Yeah. He died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Dave smiled bitterly. “Don’t get me wrong, brother. We’re all very happy you kept your word and didn’t contact him. But I wanted to tell you that he died. I wanted to see your face when I told you.”

  “How’d he die?”

  “I should’ve known that’s the part you’d be interested in. No tears for a young boy. Not good old Sully. I guess when you’re a professional killer that’s the only thing that matters, huh? How he died?” Angry tears; his fat face jiggling with rage. “I helped raise him, Sully. I loved him. I took the wife you lied to and I made her my wife; and I took your son and we made him our son.”

  He was blubbering. Donlon was embarrassed for him. Wind soughing the trees and perfect white clouds sailing the skies and the nearby water embracing the shore—a day to enjoy. Not a day to see a grown man blubber without any pride.

  “I want to know how he died?”

  “What difference does it make, Sully? You didn’t give a damn about him.”

  Donlon shook his handsome head. “Don’t tell me what I think. I thought about him a lot. I paid a neighbor lady on the sly to take pictures of him for me. They’re all over my condo. So don’t tell me what I do or do not think because you don’t know jack shit about it.” He took two threatening steps closer. “What I want to know is how he died.”

  Dave had given up his dramatics. “He was murdered. There’s no other way to say it. And the law isn’t gonna do a damned thing about it.”

  “Why not?”

  Wiping snot from his nose on the back of his shirt sleeve. Smiling and looking ugly doing it. The brains had gone to Dave, the looks to Sully. “Remember all those causes I used to get so caught up in back in high school? And you’d tell me only wimps gave a damn about stuff like that? Well, it was stuff like that, Sully, that got your son—my son—killed, Sully.”

  All Donlon could do was stand there and wonder what the hell his brother—his emotional, do-gooder brother—Dave was talking about.

  “She wants you to fly back with me. The funeral’s tomorrow morning. She says it’s only right that you should be there.”

  “You don’t sound real enthusiastic about that.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, Sully, I wish you would’ve died in the Gulf War. Because something snapped in you over there.” Instead of emotional, he sounded cold, hard. “I wish you would’ve died over there. For everybody’s sake. Including mine.”

  “You done with your little speech?”

  “Fuck yourself, Sully.”

  “I need ten minutes to pack. You wait here.”

 
; The town looked the same except for a few more chain restaurants. An agricultural town of 32,200, a hub of supplies and entertainment pretty much since the first covered wagon stopped here in 1854 and a man set up a business that would later be called a general store.

  Donlon rented a car at the airport and then drove to a motel eight blocks from where his brother and Jeannie lived. Dave had said that they’d see him at the funeral home.

  On the way there he passed the imposing and expanded area where the paint factory sat near the river. It had come here in the late Fifties and had saved the town from virtually disappearing. But it’d brought some other things, too, Donlon thought, his jaw bunching angrily.

  Thomas Prescott, Sr. had passed away from pancreatic cancer three years ago, Donlon was told ten steps inside the bunker-like one story building that stank of too-sweet flowers and too-sweet sentiments contained in plaques along the receiving area walls. The funeral home preferred by Catholics.

  Thomas Prescott, Jr., half again as unctuous as his old man had been, said, “Dad put up a fight to his last breath. He just didn’t want to go. Just didn’t feel like his time had come quite yet.”

  Apparently Jr. saw no irony in this. His old man had died at age ninety-seven. Jr. was in his early seventies. His chin was raw with eczema.

  Sully’d come early so he could slip out before he was forced to stand in the family line and get his hand shaken numb.

  He eased himself down on the kneeler and looked into the casket. His son looked like somebody who hadn’t survived a death camp. Not even make-up could disguise the gray pallor; not even the bulky black suit could hide the skeleton-like body.

  The kid had gotten his mother’s look, that slightly wan look—that quiet terror that something profoundly bad was waiting just around the next corner of existence—that would have been redeemed only by the almost alarming grace of the huge smile.