by Dan Flanigan
“If all that made you feel better, Sheriff, fine. But now let’s cut the shit. Either charge him and let him make bail, or let him go.”
“Maybe I think this puke killed them himself.”
“Then charge him, Sheriff. Right now. But if you don’t either charge him or let him go, right now, then I’m goin’ across the street for a writ of habeas corpus. And I’ll tell you what else I’m gonna do, Sheriff. I’m gonna sue you for violating Mr. O’Keefe’s civil rights.”
The Sheriff’s neck and head lunged forward, and he seemed to be having a hard time keeping his body from following. For a second O’Keefe thought the lawman would leap over the table and grab Harrigan by the scruff of the neck with his teeth and shake him quickly to death like a dog kills a rat. But the Sheriff may have suddenly thought of his pension, of ending his life as a security guard trudging around dark office buildings all night for five dollars an hour.
“You scumbag lawyers just fuck up the world, you know that?”
He turned to his deputy. “Book this puke on two counts of failing to report a crime. That’s a felony, ain’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Just a minute, Sheriff,” said Harrigan. “Maybe you ought to talk to the county attorney first, since I guarantee you I’m gonna sue you for malicious prosecution if you don’t make those charges stick. Have you looked at your liability insurance lately? How much does it cover you for if you ruin Mr. O’Keefe’s reputation and therefore his business? And it will ruin him, Sheriff. And it’s a thriving business, I assure you. Or maybe this county doesn’t even have any liability insurance on you, Sheriff. Is that possible?”
The Sheriff looked as if this was not only possible but quite probable. “Come here,” he said to his deputy who followed him out of the room.
“He’s not stupid,” Harrigan said. “If he goes off half-cocked and charges you himself, he’s got exposure. If he gives it to the county attorney, the county attorney goes to the grand jury and gets an indictment. Everybody’s immune from my lawsuit then. I may not be able to stop the indictment, but I’ve got a lot better chance of talking sense to the county attorney than to this guy.”
O’Keefe wasn’t sure that he cared. Let them throw him in a cell if they wanted as long as there was a bed in there. He just wanted to crawl off to a dark place somewhere and die like a dog. They had kept him awake, not even letting him doze in his chair. He remembered his first night in the Marine Corps, when the drill instructors had marched him and the other new recruits around all night on the parade ground as the Southern California monsoon dumped rain on them incessantly, and he had been disappointed at how easily his spirit could be broken.
Harrigan observed O’Keefe closely. “Well, you’re about the sorriest looking thing I’ve seen in a while,” said Harrigan, “except maybe in my shaving mirror in the morning.”
O’Keefe forced a smile, but he would rather have cried. He thought about what the Sheriff had said. The Sheriff was right. He made a mental note to read something about the process of intoxication turning into hangover. He had always been asleep before. Now he was, so to speak, an eyewitness. He had watched it all night, a transformation something like Lon Chaney turning into the Wolf Man. His heart worked furiously, pumping his polluted blood into his throat and face and temples. He had a hard time breathing, and when he did breathe, it just made him want to throw up. His hands shook as he lit what seemed like his millionth cigarette. He bent over and gagged. There had been a time when he could just throw up and feel immediately better but not anymore. Was that a signpost on the low road of creeping alcoholism? He stubbed out the cigarette in the dingy metal ashtray already chock full of other partly-smoked butts. He didn’t need another cigarette. What he needed was another drink.
When the country mouse returned, he smiled at the city mouse and said, “Mr. Harrigan, I’ve taken your suggestion to heart. Mr. O’Keefe, someone’ll be knockin’ at your door real soon with a piece of paper from the grand jury, so you’d better get your bail money ready.”
Not asking for permission, Harrigan said, “Let’s go, Pete,” and walked out of the room. But O’Keefe hesitated, waiting for the Sheriff to give his frowning blessing to their departure, which the Sheriff did with a rude jerk of his head. O’Keefe stood up and almost fell back down again. The Sheriff expelled a snort of a laugh from his nose.
“Hey, O’Keefe,” he said. “I don’t know if we’ll make that indictment stick or not, but I’ve got friends up at the state capital, and no matter what, I’m gonna have your license revoked. So, how do you like that shit, Mr. Private Eye Puke?”
Harrigan’s style was to cover his fear with anger. O’Keefe knew an instant before Harrigan did it that Harrigan would now move his head backward and tuck his chin into his throat like a turtle ducking into his shell, but this was a snapping turtle with the fiercest of eyes and the sharpest of tongues. “Deputy,” he said, “I want you to remember what your boss said just now, because real soon I’m gonna be asking you to repeat it under oath in a courtroom. You just fucked up, Sheriff. You just fucked up real bad.”
Harrigan whirled on his heel and headed for the door. The cross-examination was closed. “You always need to end the cross-examination on a high point,” Harrigan had once told him. “Take whatever victory you can hold onto and get the fuck out of there.”
“Pukes!” yelled the Sheriff at their departing backs.
As they walked across the parking lot to the van, O’Keefe said, “I haven’t been called a ‘puke’ since I was in the Marines.” Harrigan laughed and patted him on the shoulder, an attempt at reassurance and solidarity.
In the van O’Keefe asked, “You want me to drop you off at the airport?”
“Not so easy, my man. I’m riding back with you. Maybe we’ll have time enough that way for me to figure out why you turned into such a fuckup all of a sudden.”
On the way out of town they stopped at a motel and rented a room. Harrigan changed into the same kind of clothes that O’Keefe wore—Levis and sweater and topsiders, the uniform of the aging preppie. O’Keefe took a long shower that did not make him feel clean. Bending over the toilet, he crammed his fingers down his throat, but he could force nothing up except a long, quivering rope of yellow bile.
O’Keefe admitted he was in no shape to drive. When they stopped for gas, they bought a case of beer and iced it down in the big built-in cooler that also served as a console between the two front seats. O’Keefe popped a top and chugged half of his first beer even before the gas tank had filled up. Inside him the beer lapped gently at his despair, nudging his dried-out, throbbing cells, smoothing them out a little, perking them up a little. He remembered the advertisement for the hangover medicine, the song of triumph: “Oh, what a relief it is!”
“Hair of the dog, huh?” said Harrigan, and he said nothing else for many miles, and his silence constituted an accusation.
Finally, O’Keefe could not stand the silence any longer. “I gotta stop drinking, Mike. I lose my head.” As if to emphasize this statement, O’Keefe took a long drink of his beer. “I feel like the world’s a mortal sin and that I’m the one who committed it.”
Harrigan laughed. A forgiveness. “Pete, you might be the only guy in the world that a guy paid to take his daughter to bed.” He paused for a few seconds, waiting for this barb to sink in all the way. He was pure-blooded Irish, which had bestowed upon him a three-fold birthright—a poet’s tongue, a drunkard’s heart, and an unerring ability to shrivel his victim with shame. “Was she that good? That she could make you turn into such a dumb shit all of a sudden?”
“Look who’s talking. ”
“Not on duty. Never on duty. First things first.”
“What ‘first things’ are those? Chasing deadbeats and scumbags? Injunctions and bankruptcies? Playing the badass with whoever your opponent happens to be at the time? ‘Every man for himself and God against everybody’? Is that what’s important to you now? Is that what’s first in you
r life? What happened to you? What happened to us?”
It was Harrigan’s turn to be ashamed now, for O’Keefe was Irish too.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I wish I knew.”
“It’s real simple. You can’t swim in garbage every day without having some of it stick on you.”
O’Keefe took another long drink.
“I think I fell in love with that girl back there.”
“Come on. The Sheriff was right. You’re thinking with your shranz.”
“No. She was the one. The long-haired girl.”
“You mean the one we were always looking for? The answer to our question? The one who never showed up? The one who was always at the next party or the next bar?”
“You got it. Her. I had her, the very one, for just a minute, and then she was gone.”
“Well, you can bet those Keystone Cops back there aren’t going to find her. They couldn’t find their ass with both hands.”
“Can you believe they didn’t even search the van?”
“You got that M-16 in here?”
“Sure do. And some other little things that are even worse.”
“What?”
“Grenades.”
“You’re kidding.”
O’Keefe shook his head.
“Get rid of those things. You can’t afford more charges if they catch you with those. Those illegal weapons are gonna cook you someday. Get rid of them. You think you’re Rambo or what?”
O’Keefe did not answer. He did not know what he thought he was.
“Are those grenades stable?” Harrigan asked, looking around nervously, as if he expected the van to explode any second.
“So what’s your prediction? Am I gonna be serving time on that indictment soon? Can he get my license?”
Harrigan looked at him, and O’Keefe knew the look. Harrigan was trying to decide whether to be entirely honest with him. As always, at least always with his old friend O’Keefe, Harrigan opted for honesty.
“At best it’s a tossup. You did call them. You took a long time, but you did call them. And you did give them your name when you called. The problem is that the criminal laws of this country are so damned broad that the prosecutors can get damn near anything to a jury. If it gets to the jury, who knows? You never know with a jury. But the bottom line, my friend, is that this is the deepest shit you’ve ever been in.”
The van climbed the low mountains and glided down through the valleys, but the marvels of nature that had so moved O’Keefe only a day before, at the beginning of this fiasco, failed to move him now. This splendor had been created for someone else, Harrigan perhaps, but not for him. Yet the more beer he drank, the better he felt. They were both half-drunk before they were halfway home. And it was in their nature to linger. Back in the city there was only frenzy and duty. The city was a machine made to make money change hands, and they both well knew they were just slogging grunts in the machine’s army of tenders, easily expendable, easily replaced. But here was a river, not far off the road, a pleasant walk back through the woods, where they sat on a cliff, legs dangling over the side, and watched the stream course below them, the only thing in the world that seemed to be going anywhere worth getting to. O’Keefe resisted the urge to hurl his empty beer can out over the cliff and watch it sail down into the river below.
“Mike, I don’t think those killers were just a couple of angry investors. They were pros. But I can’t figure out what the underworld would be doing in a pissant deal like this mink farm. I mean, here we’ve got this Mickey Mouse hustler Lenny Parker. I just can’t see him moving in those circles. But then there’s this ‘Mr. Canada.’ Whoever killed those people was after the books and records and eliminating anyone who knew anything about the money going through there. You think the underworld could have been using that mink farm to launder money somehow?”
“That’s not so farfetched. I could see them trapping Lenny boy that way. At first they’re just another investor. Then, all of a sudden, they’ve got their claws wrapped around his neck.”
Harrigan paused to carefully insert the remainder of his cigarette into the top of his empty beer can. Harrigan the environmentalist, O’Keefe thought. That’s what Harrigan should do with the rest of his life. Find a foundation somewhere dedicated to saving the environment and start suing the world, do what he could to stop the world from devouring itself.
“But I’ll tell you what,” Harrigan continued. “I’ll never know the answer to your question, because this is where I stop. The retainer’s all used up. There’s no money to feed the minks. The bank’s got a lock on everything. It’s time for the cops now, not me. And not you either.”
“What about my long-haired girl?”
“If she was ever there at all, she’s long gone now. Forget her if you can.”
A cold wind blew through the trees, announcing the coming of winter, and O’Keefe remembered that he had not done his exercises today.
WHILE THE TWO men talked in the woods, in the city two other men were talking.
“You want a pizza?” Mr. Canada asked Karl who was just sitting down across the table from him. Karl looked tired and worried and shook his head.
“So you didn’t find my good friend Lenny Parker?”
Karl shook his head again.
“And the wife neither?”
“Lost her too.”
“Nothin’ to show for one dead soldier and two dead civilians. Nothin’ to show for all that risk and all that blood.”
“I got the books and records.”
“It’s Lenny we need. And the wife in case she knows anything. And what about the guy in the van? He owes us a life.”
“A private detective named Peter O’Keefe. Local guy. I can deal with him tonight if you want.”
“Not yet. If he and Parker’s wife got the hots for each other, maybe she’ll come to him. Or maybe he’ll lead us to her. And Lenny too. You can bet they’re together. The shit’s too deep for either of them to go it alone now. So then we’ll have all three of ’em in a bag together, and then we’ll drop a big fuckin’ rock right on their fuckin’ heads.”
Mr. Canada stuffed half a piece of pizza into his mouth. His mother had taught him no manners. He talked with his mouth full.
“So watch him. Follow him. After a while, if it looks like he ain’t gonna help us find the Parkers, Si-yo-na-ra.”
Mr. Canada’s jowls wriggled as he chewed the pizza, reminding Karl of Otto, who had so lately departed from this world of tears. Then he was confronted again with a mouthful of half-chewed pizza. “You fuck up again,” the mouthful of pizza told him, “there just might be consequences.”
ALL THAT NIGHT and the next day he thought about just killing the Boss. Who did that bloated-up old windbag think he was? We’ll see who suffers consequences from whom. We’ll see who’s really the muscle in this operation. It would be the simplest thing in the world to do away with the fool, and everybody in town, including the Boss’s wife, would only thank him for it. Yet he was neither a hasty nor an ambitious man. Killing the old souse might provoke a nasty little war of succession. The cops could put you in jail, but those other guys wanted to hack you into pieces while you were still conscious and then stuff you into the trunk of a car. Let the Boss talk tough and make all the foolish, idle threats he wanted. No muscle there anymore, just fat, a fat mouth stuffed with gummed-up gunk from fast-food pizza joints.
The old man was slipping. Bringing Otto in on the job was more than sufficient evidence of that. He had lied to the old pizza face about Otto, telling him that O’Keefe’s bullet had punctured Otto’s lung and that Otto had died in the back seat of the car before they had reached the farmhouse. But the truth was a little different.
Otto was hurt all right, but not fatally. All the way back to the farmhouse Karl had to listen to the little sweathog moan in the back seat and wondered what he was going to do with him. You couldn’t exactly take him to the emergency room of the local hospital. So Otto had becom
e a question mark, and it did not take Karl long to think of the answer, especially after he recalled finding Otto earlier in the day standing with his pants down over that woman. Anybody as miserable as that didn’t really want to live anyway.
“I need a doctor,” Otto grunted as the car eased to a stop inside the barn next to the pickup truck. There were no neighbors within a quarter of a mile. Still, use the flashlight, don’t turn on the overhead bulb, you never can be too cautious.
“Where you goin’?” Otto gasped when Karl left him in the back seat and headed for the house.
When Karl returned to the barn with a blanket, Otto had struggled up onto one elbow. His eyes looked like a cow’s eyes must look just before they conk it in the head with the sledgehammer.
“What you doin’?” Otto asked.
Questions. Always questions. He wrapped the blanket carefully around Otto so no blood would drip on the floor when he carried him out of the barn. The little man’s fear turned into gratitude then, but Otto was always missing the point. Otto started getting the point again when Karl hoisted him over his shoulder and headed not for the house but for the field behind the barn. Otto tried to struggle, but he had lost too much blood to do much more than whimper and kick a little bit. In the middle of the field Karl laid down his burden, back first, on the ground.
He shined the flashlight on Otto’s face. They weren’t cow’s eyes at all. They were toad’s eyes.
“Any questions, Otto?”
Otto had no more questions, and life had no purpose when you stopped asking questions. “Don’t,” Otto whispered to the pistol in front of his nose. The pistol jumped in Karl’s hand, and he saw the toad’s eyes no more. He returned to the barn for a shovel. It took him a long time to dig a deep-enough hole, and it was almost dawn by the time he finished. He rolled Otto in and heard him thud on the bottom.
