by Ed Gorman
Before going inside, I sat in the Toyota reading through the page-one story about the man found dead out on Siwash Road last night. His name had been Brian Ingram, he was thirty-eight, a chemist, husband of a Sally N. Ingram, and father of two children. The body had been discovered when police responded to an anonymous phone call around eleven P.M. He had been killed by gunshot and at this time police were "considering several leads." Right.
The Ardmore lobby was small and filled with cheap furniture. After speaking to the receptionist, I sat in a wobbly armchair and looked through a three-year-old issue of Parents magazine. Don't laugh. It was better than the other choices—two Chamber of Commerce brochures on the splendors of our city and a numismatics magazine. At least Parents had photographs of pretty young mothers.
"Mr. Dwyer?"
He was early forties, potbellied behind a blue vest that matched the rest of his suit, and tired behind rimless spectacles.
I stood up. His handshake was strong but damp.
"I'm Bevins. Charles Bevins. The owner."
I felt self-conscious. Were we going to have our talk out in the reception area? The secretary pretended to be typing, but you could see that she was listening, too.
"I wondered if we could talk about Brian Ingram a little bit."
His full lips pursed. "Poor Brian. Poor Sally. Poor kids."
"I'm sorry about it."
"This city. This city." He shook his head, apparently feeling restrained from saying what he wanted to about this city. "When I was growing up here, you could go anywhere. Anywhere. And nobody would bother you."
Apparently Charles Bevins had grown up near the golf course of the city's biggest country club because other than that there were a lot of places you couldn't go back in the good old days we've all invented. Especially if you happened to be black or Hispanic.
"I wondered—"
"I'm afraid I'm very busy, Mr. Dwyer."
"Five minutes."
He glanced at his receptionist and gave her one of those tiny looks that are really code for Why is this jerk pestering me today of all days?
"Well, I have to check over a packaging machine's operation. If you don't mind tagging along, I can give you a few minutes."
"Fine."
He looked back at the receptionist again. "Sheila, hold my calls for half an hour, would you please? We'll be back in the packaging room."
Ardmore proved to be much larger than it appeared from the outside, a maze of corridors leading to various tiny offices and production departments. All the employees looked casual, slacks or jeans. You could see that some of the women had been beautiful once but had now slipped into indifference and glum age. Most of the men just looked defeated and weary in socially acceptable ways—resignation but no rage.
The odor of different chemical solutions varied from department to department. We passed through a lunchroom that looked like a monument to vending machines. People were on their morning coffee break. Two or three of the women had been crying recently. You could safely assume the subject had been Brian Ingram. In a company this small, the violent death of an employee would hold the fascination of scandal. Past the lunchroom, I saw a large production facility where big nipples dispensed chemical solutions of various colors—yellow, green, amber—and various consistencies into various sizes of bottles. When filled, the bottles jiggled down a long, looping production belt that carried them through a wide opening in the east wall. It was the other side of this wall where we stopped, at a window through which you could see the jiggling chemical bottles lifted by automated steel hands and placed surely into slots inside cardboard boxes.
"Five hundred boxes an hour," Charles Bevins said. He sounded like a parent telling you that his son had just made the honor roll. "Had it installed last week." He nodded to the people loading the cardboard boxes on the start track of the assembly belt. "Someday, we won't need people for even that." He seemed pleased with this prospect—the ideal world: no people.
He watched the assembly line a few more minutes and then turned to me.
"So you want to talk about Brian."
"If we could."
"Do you mind if I ask why you want to talk about Brian?"
"I'm a private investigator, Mr. Bevins."
"I see. And why would a private investigator be involved in case such as this?"
"I'm not sure."
"Now that's an interesting answer, Mr. Dwyer. You drive out here and bother me when I'm very busy, yet when it comes right down to it you're not sure why you want to see me."
Most of us plain folk have to eat a one-pound bag of shit a day to survive. Charles Bevins was handing me mine.
"I'm interested in his background."
"In Brian's background?"
"Yes. I'm investigating another case and his name came up."
"In what context did his name come up?"
"No particular context. His name just came up."
Bevins turned his gaze back to the assembly belt. It seemed to reassure him in some way. "You have no way of knowing this, but I'm the godfather of Brian's children."
"No, I wasn't aware of that."
"My wife is also a very good friend of Sally."
"Oh."
He turned his eyes back to me. "It's been good for our employees to see that just because I'm the president doesn't mean that I'm aloof. That's just good management technique. Don't you think?"
"It's great management technique."
He couldn't quite tell if I was mocking him or not. Neither could I.
"I always told Brian that his problems were my problems. He knew that my office door was always open."
"Ah."
"And whenever he had a problem, he'd come in and see me."
"What sort of problems did Brian have?"
His eyes narrowed. "The sort you'd expect a respectable, hard-working, middle-class family man to have. Making ends meet. Setting up a college fund for the girls. Finding the right retirement plan to supplement the generous one we offer here."
His tone challenged me to argue with any of this, particularly with his characterization of his retirement plan as "generous."
"He wasn't a chaser, then?"
"I'm going to pretend you didn't say that."
"And he didn't have a drinking problem."
"No, Mr. Dwyer, and he wasn't a child molester or a transvestite, either. Just a respectable, hard-working, middle-class family man. In fact, I often used him as an example in my column."
"Your column?"
"I publish a little newsletter for my employees. You know, pictures of my family and our dog and the new house we've built and all the family things we've been up to. My wife Caroline is very active in the Junior League and the employees just love to read about all the things Caroline and her League friends do."
"I bet."
He looked me over for any signs of sarcasm again.
"In other words, Mr. Dwyer. You've been misled. Poor Brian was just what he seemed to be."
"A respectable, hard-working, middle-class family man."
"Exactly."
I put out my hand. We shook. His was pretty wet again. Maybe his wife Buffy or whatever her name was would get him some hand towels for Christmas and maybe they could do a story about that for the employee newsletter. I wondered how you got on the mailing list.
"Would you like me to see you out, Mr. Dwyer?"
"I think I can find my way."
He turned back to the automated assembly line. "Good. Then I'll just stand here and watch this." He smiled to himself. "Five hundred boxes an hour."
"That's what you said."
The faces had changed in the lunchroom. There were three new overweight women over in a corner eating from brown lunch sacks. One of them was crying pretty hard while she chomped on a cookie. The other two women on either side of her patted her shoulder as if she were a big sad dog.
In the reception area I started out the door, not paying much attention to the receptionist,
when she said, "Mr. Dwyer?"
"Yes?"
"It's my lunch hour."
I turned back, not sure why she'd told me this.
"I eat at Smitty's down the street. They have wonderful roast beef sandwiches."
I still said nothing.
"I know you were asking about Brian. I—" And here she glanced around anxiously. "I'd be happy to talk to you about him."
Smitty's was a working-class restaurant where for two dollars and fifty cents you could get a decent cut of meat, mashed potatoes that were the real thing, green beans that still had a little crisp in them, and a piece of peach pie I'd have eaten two of if I'd been alone. Ordering two pieces of pie in front of somebody else is sort of like making her privy to your darkest sexual secrets. That's right, ma'am, I really enjoy making love to muskrats and I always have two pieces of pie.
"He was a swinger," she told me.
I glanced up from my potatoes. I was kind of mashing them up with the green beans. I really should eat alone. "Beg pardon?"
"Brian." She stared at the mess I'd made of my food.
"A swinger?" I hadn't heard that word since the days of bell-bottoms and tie-dyed T-shirts.
"Absolutely."
She'd already told me her name, which was Sheila, and how long she'd been with the company, twelve years. She was too round by half and worn-looking and given the span of her hips should not have been wearing a yellow sweater and matching skirt. She had a mole riding on her right nostril and the kind of pores that in daylight look like minor craters. I felt guilty that I could sit here and think these things about somebody who was probably a very nice woman.
"You knew that for a fact?"
The way she averted her brown eyes when I said this told me more than she'd wanted to reveal. Probably it had been at an office party, Brian Ingram's wife at home with the flu or a sick kid, and there'd been a lot of drinking, and certainly a few Americana speeches from his employer Bevins, and then—a ride home, perhaps—sex of the sort that nobody ever feels very good about afterward.
"We were friends."
"I see."
"He needed somebody to kind of, well, mother him. You know." Her voice was as bleak as her eyes.
"Right."
"He always told me everything. What happened to him on the road, things like that."
"What did he do there?"
She nodded. "He started out as a chemist but the last five years, he developed a small territory for himself and started selling our products. He liked sales much better. He hated to be in an office all day. I knitted him a special sweater for his first day on the road. That was five years ago." She looked out at the parking lot. Guys scraped their windows and swooshed snow off back windows and gave other guys pushes when back tires got stuck. It had been snowing for the past hour or so. The plate-glass window next to my elbow was freezing cold. In places the crusty window ice had started to melt from the heat inside and there were little puddles on the glass every few feet or so. "He'd listen to me and I'd listen to him. That's why we were such good friends."
"Did he seem depressed or anxious about anything lately?"
"Yes."
"Do you know why?"
"He thought maybe his wife had found out."
"Found out?"
"You know, that he had somebody on the side."
"Did he have somebody on the side?"
She thought a moment. "Not very often and not for very long. Basically, he loved his wife and girls."
"But every once in a while—"
"He was very fat as a boy."
"I see."
"So it was kind of like he had to prove it to himself."
"Prove what?"
"That women found him desirable."
She looked me over. "You don't seem the type. You seem very secure."
"I'm not."
"Really?"
"Uh-huh. I think I'm just as ugly and unseemly as the next guy."
She giggled. "You're funny. In a good way, I mean."
I paused. "So he was afraid his wife had found out."
"He met some old flame."
"When was this?"
"A few weeks ago."
"He told you this?"
"Sure. We had drinks several times a month. He was fun to get drunk with because he'd get so silly. He really liked to have a good time. It was very . . . innocent." She sounded just a hair forlorn about that; and again I sensed the wound of her loneliness.
"So did it heat up again with this old flame?"
"That's the funny thing."
"What?"
"That was one of the few times he got secretive around me. Me. Imagine."
"Did you prod him at all?"
"I just asked him if anything was wrong."
"And he said what?"
"He said that he'd better not talk about it."
"But he seemed nervous?"
She looked out the window again. "Yes. I guess that'd be a fair word. Nervous."
"But he didn't give you any hint about what at all?"
"Just that maybe he was in over his head."
"He said that?"
"Those were his exact words."
"That he was in over his head?"
"Yes."
"You assumed he was talking about the woman?"
She looked at me curiously. "What else would he have been talking about?"
"I'm not sure."
"Was he in trouble?"
"Not that I know of."
"You just told me a lie," she said.
"What?"
"I'm very good at reading faces. Very good. And I could see that you just told me a lie. Your whole body language. You were very uncomfortable."
"You really think he was in trouble, don't you?"
"I guess I think it was a possibility."
I sipped some coffee and stared outside at the whipping snow.
After a time, she said, "Poor Brian."
A man who was pushing the backside of a Pontiac Firebird tripped when the car pulled free. He fell face forward like a Keystone Kop.
I said, "Do you remember anything at all he said about the woman?"
"Not really."
"No name, no address, no occupation?"
"Oh. Yes. One thing. High school."
"High school?"
"They went to high school together. Is that any help?"
"That could be a great deal of help. Thank you."
"Poor Brian."
"He's probably not 'poor Brian' anymore. He probably has other considerations now."
"Heaven?"
"Something like that."
"Do you really believe in heaven?"
"I try to."
"I wish I could. I was raised Lutheran and all." She looked down at her plump white fingers. "Mr. Coleman says if there was a heaven we'd be able to prove it."
"Mr. Coleman?"
"He's the man who lives down the hall from me. Sometimes we go out and have dinner or take in a movie. I think he's gay. He sells shoe appliances. That's always sounded weird to me. 'Shoe appliances.' Doesn't it sound weird to you?"
"Shoe appliances. Very weird indeed."
"I can tell you want to go."
"Really?"
"Body language. You're squirming like a little boy in church. Not that I blame you. You want to find out about the woman he was seeing. His high school flame and all. And anyway, I'm not very good company."
"You're wonderful company."
"I'm wonderful company for people like Mr. Coleman maybe. But not for people like you and Brian."
For the first time, tears stood in her eyes. I was filled with a sense of her quiet loneliness and I wished I weren't so shallow and could ask her out despite the fact that she'd elicit no whistles in singles bars.
I reached out and covered her hand in mine. She cried even more but silently, just big wet silver tears, and then she put her other hand over mine and said, "I really did love him."
"I know."
&n
bsp; She sort of laughed then. "I'll bet you're embarrassed sitting here with me crying. The middle of the day in a public place."
"I'm not embarrassed at all."
"Whoever gets you is a lucky woman," she said.
I smiled. "She might not agree with that."
"It's all right if you go, Mr. Dwyer. I've still got twenty minutes so I wouldn't mind just relaxing." She tamped her purse. "Anyway, it's time for one of my two cigarettes."
"Two a day, huh?"
"It's been that way for twenty years. Brian always laughed about it. Said I should just give them up." She stared up at me and daubed at a single silver tear with the tip of a plump finger. "But sometimes that's all the pleasure we get. Just a little bit."
I leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. "Take care of yourself." I picked up the check to pay it on my way out.
She patted my hand. When I went outside and scraped off the window, I could see her watching. I waved goodbye. She waved goodbye back.
Chapter 20
At the office I went through three stacks of pink phone slips, making two piles of them, one that needed to be dealt with right away, one that could be put off until the real boss returned. By midafternoon, I had addressed the worst of the problems and was just starting to dial Brian Ingram's number when the intercom announced that it was a phone call for me.
"Who is it?" I asked Bobby Lee.
"He wouldn't say. He don't sound real polished, if you know what I mean."
I picked up the receiver. "Dwyer."
"I seen you at St. Mark's. You didn't see me, though."
"All right."
"When you was here the other day."
"Right."
"Talking to Miss—"
"I remember the day, my friend. How can I help you?"
"I, uh, have some information you might be interested in."
"Oh?"
"Uh-huh. But I couldn't give it to you free."
"Why not?"
"You don't think I need money? I ain't stayin' in St. Mark's all my life."
"I guess that makes sense. How much money are we talking about?"
"Couple hundred."
"That could be done."
"And somethin' else, too."
