by Ed Gorman
It was somehow melancholy seeing this creature of myth—this preening, diabolical, indomitable Renard—reduced to death inside the body and clothes of a worn-out old man. Evil existed, true, but it was rarely as romantic as we liked to envision it. It was frequently housed in the most mundane of minds and bodies and circumstances. We wanted the romantic evil because it kept the real truth from us. The truth of the grave, and rot and extinction.
The cat was back. An orange tabby. Edge of the living room. Watching me.
I went upstairs.
Their voices were muffled but I could hear them: they seemed to be part of the wall itself, the voices, muffled and ancient with their arguing and pain, as if they'd been entombed alive within the walls of this old house. I touched the walls and imagined I could actually feel them, the voices. One was shrieking, the other pleading softly, thrumming on the tips of my fingers.
A window at the far end of the dormlike second floor had been left open. The bottom part of the curtain was soaked with rain. The whipping, whistling wind chilled the entire room. The twin beds would be nice to slide into. Cold sheets to be warmed by a human body. Even with the window open, sleep would come.
I pushed on.
Up the short stairs to the attic, the attic door open, as if awaiting me.
The room was surprisingly spare.
Bed, bureau, portable TV, sink, toilet, stove, two small book-cases, one overburdened with paperbacks, the other with small framed photographs. Some would be of Claire and her parents, but others would be of Claire's daughter Susan.
Throw rugs on the bare wood floor. Insulated wallboard on the walls. A couple of space heaters for winter, and a large window air conditioner for summer.
The smell was terrible. Fresh air was unknown in this room. And so was life. The pretty but gaunt middle-aged woman who sat in the rocking chair, her weeping daughter's head in her lap, had not been alive for a very long time. This was not a room that would permit life. It suffocated you, like a time capsule.
She said, "Susan has been a bad girl and she's very sorry."
She wore a housedress faded to white, reaching to the middle of her calves. Her shoes were cheap, ugly sandals made from old tires. Her graying hair was tied back in a surprisingly cute and vital ponytail that relieved the dead gray quality of her face.
But it was the eyes that held you. Mad dark eyes; eyes that had felt and seen things that had destroyed its mind long, long ago. She was the only woman I'd ever seen whose face reminded me of Christ.
And then Susan looked up at me from her mother's lap—her lovely body stretched out at her mother's hip as if in supplication—and I saw the same eyes. The same madness.
And she said, "I can stay here with my mother, Robert. Nobody ever has to know. I'll live up here in this attic with her. And I'll never leave. Not even on sunny days when I want to be outside in the park or up at Thornton Hill at those old Indian burial sites."
She eased away from her mother. "I am very sorry, Robert. I just couldn't let anybody find out who my father was. I wouldn't have had any career then."
"The infant Tandy found buried by the trestle bridge—"
"My twin sister. She died very soon after she was born."
"And Kibbe—"
She shook her head. "He confronted me. Knew who I really was. He was going to blackmail me. I'm a peace officer. As if I have a lot of money."
So her story about having a judge for a father was a fabrication.
Claire reached out and started gently, fondly stroking her daughter's hair. "She got a straight four-point in high school and college both, Mr. Payne. She's always been a very bright girl." She said this hopefully, as if it would somehow brush aside Susan's murders.
"But I don't care about that anymore, any of it," Susan said. "I just want to be here with my mother."
She might be insane, but she wasn't stupid. A part of her understood that she'd killed people and would be held responsible for it. No wonder she wanted to stay here.
"Susan," I said softly, out of deference to this strange room and these two strange, sad women. "I need you to come with me."
"My mother was so ashamed of me," Claire said, "when I told her that I was in love with Paul. And then when I told her that I was pregnant by him, she slapped me, really beat me up. Even kicked me a few times. I'd never seen my mother like that. It wasn't till later that I realized he was sleeping with her, too. Here we were, both nurses at the asylum, and a patient was sleeping with both of us. I couldn't blame her, though. If you'd known Paul when he was a young man, he was so beautiful, so seductive."
I just kept thinking of the dumpy little man dead in the chair downstairs.
"When he came back fifteen years ago, she took him right in.
She'd never married since my real father died when I was six. She'd just waited for Paul. You couldn't recognize him. He'd had his face worked on and lost his hair and gained a lot of weight. But she didn't care. She still loved him. And so they got married. I had a breakdown right after I had Susan and my mother put me in an asylum. I'm schizophrenic. It can be controlled with medication. But I still have times when—" She shook her head wearily. "And then she decided I'd be better off here, in the attic. She was afraid I'd tell people who Susan really was. She was still in touch with Paul. She was afraid if I said anything, the police would start trying to make a connection between her and Paul. So I stayed up here. Susan knew who I was, of course, and came up here all the time."
She leaned over and kissed her daughter's head.
Susan clung to her mother, a child. "Please don't make me go, Mother."
"I'm afraid you have to, honey. They won't hurt you." She looked at me. "Will they, Mr. Payne?"
The rain rattled against the attic windows.
Susan said, barely audible above the wind and rain, "The older I got, Robert, the more comfortable I was up here. I wanted to be governor—but at the same time I wanted to live up here, too. The attic. With my mother."
And then she produced her service revolver. She'd hidden it under her right side, so I couldn't see it.
"No!" her mother screamed. "No!"
But it was too late.
In the movies, the detective would have tried a fancy shot. Knocked the weapon out of her hand. Saved her.
But I wasn't a movie detective. Nor a fancy shot.
All I could do was start uselessly forward, unable to take my eyes off the grisly sight before me.
The service revolver being raised. Reaching her temple. Her finger squeezing back on the trigger.
It wasn't as dramatic as it would have been in the movies, either.
No geyser of blood. Not that I could see in the shadows of this old attic, anyway. No violent jerk of the entire body, just the head sort of jumping rightward and then slumping to the shoulder. Not even a scream. Just dead. Animal dead. Human dead. Not movie dead.
Just weeping.
Just Claire weeping.
Just Claire in her rocking chair weeping.
Fuller was there in five minutes.
The first thing he said, seeing Susan dead on the floor, was, "Believe it or not, Payne, I really liked her. She was a straight shooter."
The cops were going to have another long night. So were the boys and girls from the state bureau.
"I guess you're the chief."
He said, surprising me, "That's what a shit I am."
"Oh?"
"That's the first thing I thought of when you called about Susan being dead. That I'd be acting chief and that the town council would probably appoint me chief full-time. I'm a selfish sonofabitch."
"We're all selfish sonsofbitches. It's our nature." I thought of how sanctimonious I'd been, at least in my thoughts, about Tandy. Celebrity had made her feel a little better about herself for not being as beautiful or bright as Laura. So who was I to judge her for that?
"I really did like her."
"Yeah," I said. "So did I."
As more and more officials ca
me up the stairs, I led Claire downstairs. At one point, she whispered to me that she hadn't been down here in more than ten years, the last time for a Christmas Eve party.
We sat in the kitchen. I made us instant coffee. She said she was cold. I found her a sweater.
She sipped the coffee and said, "I don't know what happened to her."
"There's never any real explanation for anything like this, Claire."
"I watch a lot of TV up in the attic. Every time something tragic happens, there's always people on the tube explaining it."
I smiled. "Keeps them off the streets."
"I just keep seeing her when she was a little girl."
"She was beautiful. I saw those photos."
"She was sweet, too. She'd sit in my lap and I'd tell her stories for hours. She always smelled so warm and nice."
She started crying again.
I didn't even try to stop her.
EPILOGUE
The state people had a lot of questions, and since I had a few of the answers, I was asked to stay around for a while.
For all the gore of the past few days, the town was surprisingly sympathetic to Susan Charles. They seemed to feel that it probably wasn't her fault. What could you expect with the chill blood of Paul Renard in your veins?
Nobody knew why Renard had decided to come back here, and I doubted they ever would. The handsome heartbreaker of his youth had ended up a parody of low-rent sitcom grouch. Go figure.
I read a Brian Garfield western and a John D. MacDonald mystery and spent most of my time lying on my bed in the room. The rain was relentless.
I tried getting hold of Tandy, of course. But things were moving "very quickly," according to my favorite PR flack, Courtney-from-Chicago.
"Meaning what, exactly?"
"Well, meaning People magazine. Meaning Dateline NBC. Meaning Jay Leno."
Things were moving quickly indeed. And moving most quickly of all was Tandy. Away from me. I didn't expect, or probably even want, any of those long promises with short intentions one makes after being especially intimate with someone for a few furious days. We were both too pragmatic for that.
But I did want to hold her next to me and smell her hair and hear that little-girl laugh of hers. Maybe it wasn't love, but it was a nearly terminal case of like. I had fallen under her messy, self-conscious, insecure sway.
The phone rang just after I dozed off.
"Remember me?"
"Hey, I thought maybe Courtney baby had written me out of the script entirely."
"No way, Robert. Let's have dinner tonight."
"Great."
"In town."
"Great."
"I'll call you back to confirm." Then she cupped the phone and said, "Courtney says there's a call from the cable network I need to take."
I was elated. I lay back on the bed feeling sixteen again, all that sweet youthful promise, that best drug of all.
And indeed she did call back. A few minutes to six. I'd already showered and shaved.
And said: "Oh, shit, Robert. Dateline flew a producer out here already. He wasn't supposed to be here until morning. Courtney says I have to spend time with him."
"Oh."
"I know you're pissed."
I didn't answer.
"Hurt, then."
"I'm something. But I'm not sure it's hurt and I'm not sure it's pissed."
"Well, somewhere between them, then. How about lunch?"
"Great."
"See, you can't even say 'great' with any enthusiasm, and I don't blame you."
"Lunch would be great. Around eleven-thirty."
"Fantastic. God, Robert, please don't be pissed."
"Just do what you need to, Tandy."
I slept pretty well. I crawled all the way back in the dark warm cave of sleep and cuddled up in a ball and visited a variety of dreamscapes.
The call came at ten A.M.
"Now the People people are here, too. And Courtney says that I absolutely have to talk with them."
"It's all right. The local gendarmes are going to cut me loose after one more interview. Then I'm flying on home."
"To Cedar Rapids?"
"No. To the old house."
"The married house?"
"Yeah. Her birthday's coming up. I thought I'd spend it there."
"You know what? You're such a sweet, dear person that I'm going to schedule dinner with you tonight, and whatever Courtney says, I'm going to tell her no deal, I'm spending the night with Robert."
"You really think you've got the nerve?"
"Just watch me, Robert. Just watch me. I'll call you back mid-afternoon." I heard Courtney calling her name in the background.
I never did hear from Tandy that afternoon. I got in my rickety biplane and flew to the small town where I'd lived with my wife. The widowed woman who house-sat for me showed me the card-box box filled with my mail, and then tiptoed me down the hall to show me where our three cats were sleeping on the double bed.
Two months later, at Christmastime, I got a card from Tandy. It was pure gush. Show was ranked at number one again in the syndication ratings. Her book was almost finished (she liked the woman writing it for her). And she missed me a great deal, and could I ever forgive her for not calling me back that afternoon?
Oh, and I shouldn't forget to watch her for the second time on 60 Minutes the first week in January.
I wasn't sure what to make of any of it except that Tandy was happier. All her life she'd wanted approval. And now she had the approval of millions.
I felt empty, and then idiotically sorry for myself, and then I felt embarrassed for being such a child.
I built a fire, and picked up a collection of mystery stories, and let the cats throw my ancient and venerable house slippers around.
