The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

  Linda was one of those modern parents. I’m not. My two kids, daughter and son, were raised pretty much the way I was: what your parents don’t know won’t hurt them. One boozy New Year’s Eve I actually heard this teenage girl talking to her mother about how her tenth-grade boyfriend wasn’t any good at oral sex. Linda wasn’t that far gone but she was a lot more liberal with her daughters than I would’ve been. Even when my wife and I split up, we agreed that our kids would be raised properly, at least as we defined “properly.”

  I kept wanting Linda to go to my place to make love, but one night she laughed and said, “But your place is such a pit, Dwyer. I’m afraid I’d have cockroaches walking up my thigh.”

  Linda was three years divorced from a very prosperous insurance executive. She’d gotten the big house and the big car and the big monthly check. She only had to work part-time at a travel agency to make her monthly nut.

  So we made love at her place, and even though we both figured out pretty quickly that we weren’t going to rescue each other, the thing we had was better than nothing. So we kept it up, even though I had the sense that she was vaguely ashamed of herself for liking me. Her previous boyfriends had run to MD’s and shrinks and business executives. Security guard was a long way down the ladder.

  Then one night I went over and she was late getting home from work. And that was the night it happened, with her sixteen-year-old daughter Susan, I mean.

  Started out with an argument in the kitchen between Susan and Molly.

  I was sitting in the living room watching a boxing rerun on ESPN. Linda had just called and said she was running late.

  First I hear screaming. Then I hear cursing. Then I hear a cup or a glass being smashed against the wall. Then screaming again.

  I run out there and find sixteen-year-old Susan slapping fifteen-year-old Molly across the face.

  You have to understand, they were both extremely good-looking girls. But Molly was even more than extremely good-looking. She was probably the single most beautiful person I had ever seen, a Madonna with just a hint of the erotic in her dark and brooding eyes. Her sister Susan had always been jealous of her, and now there was special trouble because Susan’s boyfriend had developed this almost creepy fixation on Molly.

  I got between them.

  “Get the hell out of this kitchen,” Susan said. “You don’t even belong here.”

  “You shouldn’t talk to him like that,” Molly said.

  “Why? Because our sweet mommy is fucking him?”

  Molly shook her head, looked embarrassed, and left the kitchen. In moments, I heard her on the stairs, going up to the second floor.

  Susan pushed past me and opened the refrigerator door. She took out a can of Bud, popped the tab and gunned some down.

  “I’m sure you’ll tell my mother I was drinking this.” Before I could say anything, she said, “By the way, she’s sleeping with this new guy Brad at the travel agency. That’s why she’s late. She’s going to tell you all about it. But she doesn’t want to hurt your feelings.” She smiled at me. “On the other hand, I don’t mind hurting your feelings at all.”

  “So your boyfriend dumped you, huh?” Hell, I was just as petty as she was.

  For the first time, I felt sorry for her. The anger and arrogance were suddenly gone from her face. She just looked sad and lost and painfully young. She even lost some of her sexiness in that moment, tiny sad pink barrette turning her into a little girl again. She was all vulnerability now.

  She went over to the breakfast nook and sat down in the booth.

  “You want a beer, Dwyer?”

  “You gonna tell your mom I took one?”

  She laughed. “I actually like you.”

  “Yeah, I could tell.”

  “I’m sorry I told you about Mom’s new boyfriend.”

  Women know all the secrets in the world. All the important ones, anyway. Men just know all that bullshit that doesn’t matter in the long run.

  “It was bound to happen,” I said.

  “You’re not gonna be heartbroken?”

  “For maybe a week. Or two. Probably more my pride than anything.”

  “He’s sort of an asshole. I mean, I met him a couple of times. Real stuck on himself. But he’s real cute.”

  “I’m happy for him. Maybe I’ll take you up on that beer.”

  I felt betrayed, stunned, pissed, sad and slightly embarrassed. I was more of an interloper than ever in this house. Very soon now, I’d be back to roaming my apartment and talking to imaginary women again.

  I got a beer and sat down.

  “You ever been in love?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “Really in love?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “It’s terrible, isn’t it?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “This is the third one.”

  “Third one?”

  “Yeah, the third boyfriend I’ve had who’s fallen in love with Molly.

  The first one was in sixth grade. His name was Rick. I loved him so much, I’d get the Neiman-Marcus catalog down and look at wedding gowns. Then one day I found a note he’d written her. It took me a year to get over it.” She shrugged. “Or maybe I’ve never gotten over it.”

  “So it happened again.”

  “Yeah, Paul—you met him—he broke up with me six weeks ago and he’s been calling her ever since. She doesn’t encourage him—I mean, its not her fault—but he follows her around all the time. Takes pictures of her, too. He’s the photographer for the high-school paper. Real good with a telephoto lens.” She stared out the window. “He was like part of the family. Mom liked him, even. And she doesn’t like many boys.” She looked over at the sheepdog, Clarence, who was treated like the third child. Now he sprawled on the kitchen floor, watching her. “Clarence wouldn’t bark at him or try to eat him or anything.”

  Reference to Clarence made her smile.

  “If it isn’t Molly’s fault, why’d you hit her?”

  She shrugged. “Because I hate her. At least a part of me does. If she wasn’t so beautiful—” She looked at me. “She’s even got one of her teachers in love with her.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. One day I was afraid my boyfriend was writing her letters, and so I snuck into her room and started looking around and there was this letter from Mr. Meacham, her English teacher. He said he loved her and was willing to leave his wife and daughter for her.”

  “Molly ever encourage him?”

  She shook her head. “Molly is the most virginal person I know. Sometimes I think she’s retarded. I really do. She’s still a little girl in a lot of ways. She gets these crushes on her teachers. This year it’s Mr. Meacham. He’s teaching her the Romantic poets and Molly keeps telling me how much she thinks he looks like Matt Dillon, who’s her favorite movie star. To her, it’s all very innocent. But not to Mr. Meacham.” She hesitated. “I even think she’s started seeing him at nights. Last week I was out at Warner Mall and saw them sitting together in the Orange Julius.”

  “Does your mother know about this?”

  “I haven’t told her. She’s got problems of her own with Molly. Well, with Brad.”

  “The guy at the travel agency?”

  “Uh-huh. He’s been over here a few times and it’s pretty obvious he’s fallen in love with Molly.”

  “You said he was young. How young?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Well, that’s better than Mr. Meacham lately.”

  “He may be the one stalking her.”

  “Someone’s stalking her?”

  “Yeah. Grabbed her the other night in the breezeway. But she got away. And been sending her threatening notes.” She sighed. “I want to be pissed off at her but I can’t. She doesn’t understand the effect she has on men. She really doesn’t.” Then: “I feel like shit. God, I can’t believe I slapped her. I’d better go talk to her.”

  “Good idea. Tell your mom something came up and I had to go.�
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  “Sorry I broke the news to you that way. I mean, about Brad.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Like Mom says, I can be a bitch on wheels when I want to be.” We stood up and she gave me a hard little hug and then I went away. For good.

  2

  So it was back to the streets for me the rest of the summer. I kept thinking about Molly and how beautiful she was and how otherwise sensible men, young and old alike, seemed to take leave of their senses when they were around her. While I wasn’t looking for virginal fifteen-year-olds, I was looking for the same kind of explosive love affair those men were, one that blinds you to all else, the narcotic that no amount of drugs could ever equal. In a few years, I’d be fifty. There weren’t many such love affairs left for me. I’d had three or four of them in my lifetime, and I wanted one more before the darkness. So I went back to the bars, I became infatuated ten times a day in grocery store and discount houses and even gas stations when I’d see the backside of a fetching lady bent slightly to put gas in her tank. But mostly my reality was my solitary bed and moon-shadow, white curtains whipping ghostly in the rain-smelling wind, my lips silent with a thousand vows of undying love.

  The summer ground on. One of the investigators at Allied Security had to have a heart bypass so they shifted me from security (which I like) to working divorce cases (which I hate). While I’ve committed my share of adultery, I can’t say that it’s ever pleasant to think about. Betrayal is not exactly a tribute to the human spirit. The men seemed to take a strange kind of pride in what they were doing. They didn’t seem particularly concerned about being secretive, anyway. But the cheating women were all a little furtive and frantic and even sad, as if they were doing this against their will. Maybe they were paying back cheating husbands. Four weeks of this stuff before the investigator came back to Allied. My advertising daughter came to town just as August was starting to punish us. My son drove in from med-school in the east. Their mother had married again, third time a charm or so she said, a man with some means, apparently, whom they liked much better than husband number two, a bank vice-president with great country club aspirations.

  “You’ve got to find yourself a woman,” my daughter said right before she kissed me goodbye at the airport.

  One night in late September, beautiful Indian Summer, I came home and found Linda sitting in my living room. “Your landlady let me in,” she said. Then: “This is really a depressing place, Dwyer. You think we could go somewhere else?”

  She didn’t like any of the bars I recommended. Too downscale, presumably. We ended up in a place where businessmen yelled and whooped it up a lot about the Hawkeyes. The way they shouted and strutted around, you’d think they owned copper mines down in Brazil, where they could make people work for twenty-five cents an hour.

  “Did you hear what happened to Molly? It was in the news about three weeks ago.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Somebody cut her up.”

  “Cut her up?”

  “Slashed her cheeks. Do you remember a New York model that happened to a few years ago?”

  “Yeah. She wasn’t ever able to work again.”

  Linda’s eyes glistened with tears. “The plastic surgeon said there’s only so much he can do for Molly. She looks terrible.”

  “What’re the police saying?”

  She shook her head, sleek and sexy in a white linen suit, her dark hair recently cut short. “No leads.”

  “Molly didn’t see her assailant?’

  “It was dark. She’d parked her car in the garage and was just walking into the house—through the breezeway, you know—and he was waiting there. I guess this happened before—somebody in the breezeway I mean—but neither Molly nor Susan told me about it. Why should they tell me anything? I’m just their mother.”

  “She’s sure it was a ‘he’?”

  “That’s the assumption everybody’s making. That it was a guy, I mean.”

  “She doesn’t have any sense of who it might have been?”

  Linda sighed. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?”

  She nodded. “I think she knows who it was but won’t say.”

  “Why would she protect somebody?”

  “I’m not sure.” Pause. “I’ve been having terrible thoughts lately.”

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve been thinking that Susan may have done this.”

  “Your daughter?”

  “Yes.” Pause. “She’s very jealous of Molly. Molly—well, a few of Susan’s boyfriends have fallen in love with Molly over the last year or so. About a month ago, Susan made up with this boy, Paul, the one who’d fallen in love with Molly. But then she came home one night and found Paul drunk in the living room putting the moves on Molly.”

  “You really think it’s possible that Susan could do something like this?”

  “She’s been upstaged by Molly all her life. Even as a baby, Molly sort of unhinged people. I mean, she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. And I think I’m being objective about that.”

  “Anybody else who might have done it?”

  “The police are talking to one of Molly’s teachers, this Mr. Meacham. That’s another thing my girls didn’t tell me until after this happened. It seems this Mr. Meacham offered to leave his wife and daughter for Molly. He’s forty-three years old. My God.”

  “Anybody else you can think of?”

  After another drink was set down in front of her, she said, “I have to tell you something. It’s so ridiculous, it pisses me off to even repeat it.”

  I just waited for her to say it.

  “Last night, my dear sweet daughter Susan accused me of slashing Molly’s face.”

  Calmly as I could, I said, “Why would she say something like that?”

  “I’m kind of embarrassed telling you the rest.”

  “Maybe it’ll make you feel better.”

  “I trashed Molly’s room.”

  “When?”

  “Late August, I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “Brad.”

  “The guy from the travel agency?”

  “Uh-huh. He’d started phoning her—Molly, I mean—when I wasn’t there. Then one night he came right out and asked me. I mean, I suspected something was wrong. He hadn’t touched me in two weeks. Then this one night he said, ‘Would it really piss you off if I asked Molly out?’ I didn’t want to let him know how pissed I was, so I just said that I didn’t think that was such a great idea. But I said it in this real calm voice. I told him that technically she wouldn’t reach the age of consent until October, and he said he’d wait. Then after he left—I sat in the den and got really drunk and then I went upstairs and started screaming at Molly. Then I started trashing her room.”

  She started crying. “My own daughter, and I treated her that way.”

  I changed the subject quickly. “You mentioned Susan’s ex-boyfriend.”

  “Paul.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Right. He calls Molly four times a day. He says he doesn’t care about her face being cut up. He loves her. His parents have called me, they’re so worried about him. He went from A’s to D’s last semester. They want him to see a shrink. When Molly won’t come to the phone, he gets furious.”

  “And you think Molly might know who did it?”

  “I think so. Would you talk to her?”

  “It’d probably be easier if you went through the agency. Ask them to assign me to you. I don’t really have much time for any freelance on the side.”

  “Fine. I’ll call them tomorrow. I really appreciate this, Jack.” Then: “Oh God.”

  “What?”

  “It’s almost ten. I’m supposed to meet somebody at ten-fifteen way across town.” She shrugged. “Met somebody new at the agency. He’s a little older than Brad.”

  “Sixteen?”

  She smiled. “Wise ass.” Then: “I really am sorry. You know, about Brad and everything.”

>   “I survived.”

  “I’d always be willing to see you again.”

  “I never take handouts except at Christmas time.”

  What the hell, it never hurts to sound dignified once in a while.

  3

  The next day, she led me up to the den on the second floor. “She sits in the dark. The blinds are drawn and everything, I mean. You’ll get used to the shadows. She doesn’t want anybody to see her. But I convinced her you only wanted to help her.” Then she went away.

  I knocked and a small voice said to come in and I went in and there she sat in a leather recliner by a TV set that was playing a soap opera. Just as I started to sit down in the chair facing her, a commercial came on, the bright colors flashing across the screen illuminating her face.

  He’d done a damned good job. If it was a he. Long deep vertical gashes on both cheeks. The stitches were still on, and that just made her look worse. But even with the stitches gone, her beauty would be forever and profoundly marred.

  “Remember me?”

  She looked at me with solemn eyes and nodded.

  “You think we could turn the TV down a bit?’

  She picked up the remote and brought the volume down to a low number.

  “Your mom wants me to make sure that you told the police everything, Molly. You understand that?”

  Again she nodded. I had the unnerving sense that she’d also been struck mute.

  “She told me what Susan said. About hearing somebody run away right after it happened. Is that true?”

  Again, she nodded.

  “I checked out your breezeway last night, Molly. That’s where it happened, right?”

  She said: “I wish I didn’t have to go through this, Jack.”

  “I wish you didn’t have to either, sweetheart.”

  “I mean your questions.”

  “Oh.”

  “My mom talked to the principal this morning. I’m going to finish my classes at home this year. So I don’t have to see—anybody. You know, at school.”