The Collected Ed Gorman Volume 2 - Moving Coffin

by Ed Gorman

  “Not much, “ I said.

  “You’re like her,” he said, and nodded upwards to where his wife lay in her solitary bed. “Very middle-class and judgmental without even understanding what you’re judging.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But I doubt it.”

  I left.

  6

  Clarence started barking at me the minute I pulled into the drive. He was in the breezeway, where he spent a lot of time on these unseasonably warm autumn evenings. Linda came out and calmed him down and then let me in.

  “I guess we should be grateful he barks so much, as a watch dog and all, but sometimes he drives me crazy.”

  Then, apparently out of guilt for saying such a thing, she bent down and patted his head fondly, and said in baby talk, “You drive Mommy crazy, don’t you, Clarence?”

  Susan was in the kitchen setting out placemats on the breakfast nook table.

  “We’re doing Domino’s tonight,” Susan said. “Are you going to join us, Jack?”

  I still couldn’t imagine either of them doing it, cutting her up that way, daughter to one, sister to the other.

  “Pepperoni and green pepper,” Linda said.

  “You convinced me.”

  Susan got beers for her mother and me and a Diet Pepsi for herself. Just as we were sitting down in the nook, Clarence exploded into barks again. The Domino’s man had pulled into the drive.

  “Maybe Clarence needs some tranquilizers,” Susan said.

  “I put a twenty on the counter there, hon,” Linda said to her.

  While Susan was out paying the pizza man, and calming Clarence, Linda said, “Did you talk to them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any impressions?”

  “They’re both good possibilities,” I said. “Especially Meacham. I’ve been learning some things about him. He’s a real creep. His wife has cancer and he’s still running around on her. He thinks he’s the last of the Romantic poets.”

  “Good for him. He’s the one I’d bet on. For doing that to Molly, I mean.”

  Susan came back with the pizza and we ate.

  Halfway through the feast, Linda said, “Tell him about Mark.”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  “Go on. Tell him.”

  Susan shot me a you-know-how-moms-are smile and said, “Mark Feldman asked me to the Homecoming dance.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “Honey, Dwyer doesn’t know who Mark Feldman is. Tell him.”

  “He’s a football player.”

  “Jeeze, honey, you’re not helping Dwyer at all. Mark Feldman just happens to be the best quarterback who ever played in this state. He’s also a very nice looking boy. Much better looking than that creep Paul. And he’s really got the hots for my cute little daughter here.”

  “God, Mom. The ‘hots.’ That sounds like something you’d get from a toilet seat.”

  We all laughed.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “And she was worried that nobody’d want to ask her out anymore, Dwyer. Pretty crazy, huh?”

  A knock on the breezeway door.

  Susan went out to the breezeway to see who was there. She came back in carrying two pans.

  “Bobbi brought your cake pans back, Mom. She said the upside down cake was great and to thank you for the recipe, too.”

  “Thank Gold Medal flour,” Linda said. “The recipe was on the back.”

  I guess it was the silence from the breezeway I noticed. Clarence tended to bark at strangers when they came up to the door and when they were leaving. But he hadn’t barked at all with Bobbi.

  “Why didn’t Clarence bark just now?” I said.

  “Oh, you mean with Bobbi?” Linda said.

  “Right.”

  “He knows her real well. He doesn’t bark with our best friends.”

  Then I remembered something that Susan had said to me back when I’d first met her.

  I said, “He doesn’t bark when Paul comes up, either, does he?”

  “No,” Susan said.

  “The other night, when Molly was cut, you said you heard screams from the breezeway. But did you hear barking?”

  Susan thought a moment. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

  “Would Clarence have barked if Meacham had come up?”

  “Absolutely,” Linda said.

  I tried not to make a big thing of it but they could see what I was thinking. I finished my three slices of pizza and my beer and then said I needed to go and do some work.

  7

  He wasn’t too hard to find. I spent some time in the parking lot with some burglary tools I used on occasion, and then I went inside the mall looking for him.

  He was hanging out with some other boys in front of a music store.

  When he saw me, he started looking nervous. He whispered something to one of his friends.

  Three good-sized boys stepped in front of him, like a shield, as I started approaching.

  They were going to block me as he ran away.

  “Molly wants to see you,” I said over the shoulders of the boys.

  He had just started to turn, ready to make his run, when he heard me and angled his face back toward mine.

  “What?”

  “She wants to see you. She sent me to get you.”

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  I shrugged. “All right. I’ll tell her you didn’t want to come.”

  The boy in the middle, who went two-twenty easy, decided to have a little fun with the old man. He stepped right up to me and said,”You want to rumble, Pops?”

  The other kids laughed. Nothing kids love more than bad dialogue from fifties movies.

  “Like I said, Paul, I’ll tell her you didn’t want to see her.” I looked down at the tough one and said, “If that’s all right with you, Sonny.”

  I hadn’t kicked the shit out of anybody for a long time, but the tough one was giving me ideas.

  “Fuck that ‘Sonny’ bullshit,” the tough one said.

  But Paul had a hand on his shoulder and was turning him back.

  “She really wants to see me?”

  “Yeah,” I lied. “She does.”

  Paul looked at the tough one. “I better go, then, Michael.”

  “With this creep?” Michael said.

  “Yeah.”

  Michael glowered at me. The others did, too, but Michael had done some graduate work in glowering, so he was the most impressive.

  “Nice friends,” I said, as we turned back toward one of the exits. I said it loud enough to get Michael all worked up again. “Especially the dumb one with the big mouth.”

  We sat in an Orange Julius.

  “I thought we were going to Molly’s.”

  “We are.”

  “When?”

  “Soon as you explain this.”

  From my pocket, I took a stained paper sack. “Know what this is, Paul?”

  “You sonofabitch.”

  “There’s a hunting knife in there. A bloody one. I’ll bet the blood is Molly’s.”

  “You sonofabitch.”

  “You said that already.”

  “That’s illegal.”

  “What is?”

  “Getting into my trunk that way.”

  “Wanna go call the cops?”

  “You sonofabitch.”

  “How about calling me a bastard for a while? Breaks the monotony.”

  “It isn’t what you think.”

  “No? You ride around with a bloody knife in your trunk and you don’t have an alibi for the other night and it isn’t what I think? You’re telling me you didn’t cut her?”

  He started crying then, sitting right there in Orange Julius. He put his face in his hands and wept. People watched us. Son and father, they probably figured, with the father being a prime asshole for making his son cry this way. I took out my clean handkerchief and handed it over to him. I felt sorry for him. I shouldn’t have but I did.

  Loving somebody can make you cra
zy. All the fine sane people in the mental health industry tell you that you shouldn’t give into it so hard, but you can’t help it. There was a poet named Charles Bukowski who said that the most dangerous time to know any man is when he’s been spurned in love. And from my years as a cop dealing with domestic abuse cases, Bukowski was absolutely right. So I sat there hating him for what he’d done to poor poor Molly, and feeling sorry for him, too. He’d ended her life, now I was going to make sure that his life was ended, too. He’d be tried as an adult and serve a long, long sentence. The way all men who visit their rages on helpless women should be sentenced.

  He started snuffling then and picked up my handkerchief and blew his nose and said, “You still don’t understand, Dwyer.”

  “Understand what?”

  “What really happened.”

  “Then tell me.”

  So he told me and I said, “Bullshit. I should beat your face in for even saying that.”

  “Let’s go see Molly.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I walked across to the pay phones, keeping my eye on him all the time. It was preposterous, what he’d said.

  When Linda came on, I told her I was bringing Paul over and taking him up to the den to see Molly. I said I couldn’t answer any of her questions. She did not sound happy about that.

  Soft silvered shadows played in the darkness of the den. Molly wore a pair of jeans and white blouse and sat primly in the chair next to the dead TV. There was no question of turning on the lights. Molly had pretty much decided to live her life in darkness.

  Paul and I sat on the edge of the narrow leather couch.

  “He told me something crazy, Molly,” I said. “I just wanted to give you the chance to tell me he’s lying.”

  “I had to tell him, Molly,” Paul said. “I’m sorry.”

  I told her what he’d said and she said, “Paul loves me.”

  “I guess I don’t know what that means, Molly,” I said gently. I was starting to get goosebumps because it appeared that Paul had told me the truth, after all.

  “He loves me. That’s why he did it.”

  “Why he cut you up that way?”

  “Yes.”

  “You wanted him to cut you?”

  “I asked him to. He didn’t want to. But I kept after him till he did it. I just couldn’t take the way people acted around me. My face. It’s why I was having all this trouble with my mother and my sister and my friends. I didn’t ask for my face, Mr. Dwyer. I’d be much happier if I was plain, because then I wouldn’t have to have all these people after me—like I was some sort of prize or something.” Then to Paul: “I finally made you understand, didn’t I, Paul.”

  “Yes,” Paul said.

  “And he said he’d love me just as much if I didn’t have my looks. And he does, don’t you, Paul, even though I’ll never be beautiful again?”

  Even in moon-shadow, his young face looked set and grim. He nodded.

  Then she started sobbing and Paul went over to her and knelt next to her and took her in his arms and held her with a tenderness that moved and shook me. This wasn’t puppy love or lust. This was real and simple and profound, the way his young arms held her young body.

  At that moment he was father and brother and friend and priest, and only coincidentally, lover. I let myself out of the den and went downstairs.

  8

  “I’m having one, too,” Susan said, when her mother asked her to bring us beers.

  She brought three and we sat in the breakfast nook and I told them what had happened.

  Linda cried and Susan held her.

  “You think we should go up there, Jack?” Susan said as her mother wept in her arms.

  “I’d give them a few more minutes.”

  “Do you think she’s sane?” Susan said.

  I shrugged. “I think she probably needs to see a shrink.”

  Linda sat up suddenly. She was angry. “That little prick took advantage of her. That’s why he cut her face that way. He figured if he made her ugly, nobody else would want her. He was just being selfish, that’s why he did it.”

  She made a fist and muttered a curse beneath her breath.

  “You think that’s true, Jack?” Susan said.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe he did it because he really loves her,” Susan said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “I’m not going to sit here and listen to this bullshit,” Linda said. “I’m going up there.”

  And with that, she forced Susan out of the booth.

  “Mother, maybe you’d better stay down here for a little while,” Susan called.

  “She’s my god-damned daughter ,” Linda said, sounding hysterical. “My god-damned daughter.”

  She stormed off to the front of the house and the stairway.

  Susan shook her head. “Maybe he really did do it because he loved her. Isn’t that possible, Jack?”

  She wanted to believe in love and romance, just the same way I wanted to believe in being redeemed by the right woman. There was a good chance we were foolish people. Maybe very foolish.

  Then Linda was screaming and Molly was sobbing and a terrible rage and despair filled the house, like the scent of rain on a sudden chill black wind.

  Susan said, “Could I hold your hand for a minute, Jack? For just a minute.”

  I did my best to smile but I don’t think it was very good. Not very good at all.

  “For just a minute,” I said. “But not much longer.”

  STORY NOTES

  FAMOUS BLUE RAINCOAT

  Been a stone Leonard Cohen fan ever since reading his novel Beautiful Losers back in the mid-Sixties. I like his songs, too. Famous Blue Raincoat always fascinated me because it sort of paralleled something a friend of mine was doing to his marriage—kind of gently urging his wife into having an affair. Played a lot of verbal games in parlors of drug and drinks, pissing her off on purpose. She scared all of us. She was that beautiful and that brilliant. There was one guy in particular he suspected her of liking a little too much and he kept playing on that, like let’s the three of us go up the block and have a few beers at the tavern. Leaving his wife and this raving asshole pretty boy alone. He was so afraid that she’d cheat on him that he just wanted to bring it on and get it over with. She slept with another guy once and told her husband immediately. Their marriage collapsed. While the story doesn’t parallel the song exactly, the spirit is much the same.

  INTENT TO DECEIVE

  I was going to write a novel set in Chicago during WWII. I had all these notes. But then suddenly every other crime writer in the world was writing his homefront book. I wrote this just to get the feel for the territory.

  THE FACE

  Happened to read the journal of a Civil War surgeon. Was just about vaporized by the details, most of which are in the story. This is my most reprinted piece worldwide.

  THE LONG SILENCE AFTER

  I wrote this in response to a very strange TV doctor who said that heterosexuals couldn’t get AIDS when there was all kinds of evidence otherwise. The nudge came when a lawyer friend of mine told me that he still went into some real bad places in Chicago where we’d both worked at one time, and picked up hookers. This was at a time when AIDS rates were soaring. I always felt there was a kind of death wish there.

  ANNA AND THE SNAKE PEOPLE

  Another simple pulp story, though I took the central image of the snake-handlers and used it as the basis for one of my Sam McCain novels.

  RENDER UNTO CAESAR

  This is a somewhat autobiographical about a summer when I worked construction and met the guy who was always beating up his girl friend and the old man who walked the streets looking for dead cats to bury. I don’t know how well it works as a story but it does give readers a taste of what my earlier addict years were like. My model for this was Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, which is a book I placed on my Sacred shelf. Later on I learned that Char
les Willeford, in his early paperback originals, wrote just the way Orwell had in Down and Out.

  STALKER

  The divorce rate among couples who suffer the death of a child— disease or violence—is very high. Friends of ours suffered such a loss and I saw it happen. Thus, this story.

  THE RIGHT THING

  Pretty much speaks for itself, as it should.

  SURROGATE

  Watched on TV a man whose son was constantly being beaten up by bullies. His anger, fear, hopelessness. Wrote the story.

  SECOND MOST POPULAR

  Me at fifteen, back in the days of American Bandstand, Lucky Strikes and not knowing a single freaking thing about girls.

  BLESS US O LORD

  A recording studio where I cut a lot of music tracks for TV commercials was run by this guy who was a junkie. He was great at the console but over the course of two years of him not showing up on time, not sending out tapes on time, not keeping track of union sheets…He was twenty-five and his working class parents had mortgaged their house so he could open the studio and hopefully straighten out addiction takes everybody down, not just the addict.

  FAVOR AND THE PRINCESS

  One of the strangest stories I’ve ever written. It was there one morning waiting for me. Most stories have some kind of subtext (though I hate that word). But this one—I have no idea what this story is about other than its plot.

  THE MOVING COFFIN

  I’ve been stuck twice on elevators, once for two hours. They scare the hell out of me. I was asked to write a story about phobias. Guess which phobia I chose?