Cold Night (Jack Paine Mysteries)

by Al Sarrantonio

  "Like peeling potatoes? Not much."

  Tom fiddled with the radio resting on a tree stump. He glided through channels until he found a station playing loud rock and roll.

  "What the hell band is that?" Jack asked, indicating the music that was on.

  "Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young."

  "Didn't they used to be in different bands?"

  "Now they're playing together. Like it?"

  Jack nodded. "I haven't heard much of anything the last six months."

  Tom put the chain saw he was oiling down. "You think you'll end up over there?"

  "They say it'll be over by next summer."

  "If Nixon wins in the fall. I know they're holding up those peace talks till after the election."

  "I don't think about it anymore. The news is we won't end up in Nam even if it doesn't end. They're pulling so many guys out now they wouldn't have anybody for us to relieve. I'll probably end up at Fort Bragg. Maybe in Germany." He looked at the head of the axe, then put it down on the tree stump next to the radio. "You want to hear some real news? I've got a girlfriend."

  Tom grinned. "You're kidding."

  "I'm serious."

  "You must be. You never told me about any of the others."

  "This one is for real."

  "How long have you known her?"

  "I met her three weeks ago."

  "Three weeks! Christ, you hardly know her."

  "I've got a good feeling about her, Tommy. We've talked about getting married."

  "Jesus!"

  "Her name is Ginny. I'll bring her around." Jack picked up the axe and swung it into the wood.

  They piled the cut logs and covered the pile with a tarp. Then Tom pointed to the sky. "Better get going before it gets dark. I'm tired, anyway."

  "Give me one minute," Jack said, sitting on a stump. "I wanted to ask you about Dad."

  "What's to say?"

  "He looked like shit when I saw him yesterday down at the house. Doesn't he do anything?"

  Tom made himself busy packing the chain saw and its gas. "No."

  "Does he give you any trouble?"

  "He sits and watches TV, or stares at the walls."

  "What the hell did they do to him in that place?"

  His brother looked at him with annoyance. "Haven't you ever thought about it? What do you think they did to him? They kept him in there. All his problems are in his own head. That's what the trouble is." He turned back to the chain saw, snapped it into its case.

  "I think about him all the time," Jack said.

  "He talks about you. You're all he talks about."

  "What does he say?"

  "What do you fucking think he says? He talks about what happened to you. He talks about what he did."

  "Isn't there any way to make him forget?"

  "How? He shot his own fucking brother in the head—and he thinks you hate him for it. How are you going to make him forget that? Did you forget it?"

  They walked back to the house. They stacked some wood against the wall and went in.

  The phone rang, and Jack picked it up.

  "Jack," his father said. It was a stranger's voice. It was as if pain itself was talking, using the old man's voice. "Dad, what is it?"

  "I'm going," his father said.

  "Da—"

  "Mizar and Alcor, Mizar and Alcor in the handle of the Big Dipper. Two stars, Jack. Brother and brother."

  "Dad, what the hell's wrong?"

  "Forgive me, Jack. Love your own brother. Oh, Jesus—"

  There was a sound over the phone that was louder than anything he had ever heard. His mind went on fire. For a moment he thought the phone had exploded in his hand. Then he knew what the sound was—he had heard it in the Army. He had heard it that day in the police station, when his father had raised his hand—

  He screamed "No!" into the phone, and then he kept on screaming.

  "Oh, Jesus."

  He sat up on the couch. He had sweated right through his shirt and jacket. There was a dull ache behind his eyes; it was as if the projector was still on and the pictures he had seen were still there after the lights had gone up. His palms were wet.

  He rose and went to the window. It was still midday. There was some sun but mostly there was just gray where he looked down toward the street. Gray sunlight.

  He wished he had Rebecca Meyer with him. But the thought turned sour in him immediately. He was glad she wasn't with him.

  Gray sun. The day would go on and then the world would darken to gray night. Tomorrow the sun would come up and the world would be gray again.

  He went to the kitchen and filled a glass with water. It went down his throat like bile, sticking to the roof of his mouth instead of washing down the bile that was already there. He nearly threw the glass but instead placed it very gently on the counter. He walked to the bedroom.

  The closet was still open. He saw that there was a dress that Ginny had left. It was white and black, white with large black dots on it. He didn't recognize it. He could not remember ever seeing her in it. Had he ever really looked at her in anything? He couldn't remember. There was that one sweater, the one a little like the one that girl on the bus was wearing, a shade of rose that was neither red nor pink. It was the first time he had looked at Ginny's breasts. The sweater wasn't tight but still it showed her breasts off through the wool. That was the second time he had seen her. What had she worn the first time? He didn't know.

  He turned from the closet and sat on the bed for a moment, his hands heavy on his knees. Then he moved one hand to the small table beside the bed. There was a long drawer, and he slid it open, pulling it all the way out until the weight of what was in it started to push the drawer down and threatened to pull it out of the table.

  There was only one thing in the drawer. He took the gun out and let it sit in his hand. It had the weight of a dead bird. It was cold and blue, the blue of metal. He closed his eyes and it still felt like a bird in his hand.

  He remembered a time when he was drunk, before he had given up drinking. He had been at it all night, had started after getting off duty. This night it had done nothing but sharpen what was in his head. He had taken in so much Scotch that it meant nothing to his body. The one part of his mind that he wanted the liquor to kill had become sharp and bright as lightning. Bobby Petty had driven him home and then left. He knew that Petty hadn't been drunk because Petty never got drunk, and because he had started to get on him for drinking so much.

  After Petty left, he sat at the kitchen table, waiting for the lightning in his head to go away. It stayed bright. He sat there for a long time. Then he looked down and his gun was in his hand. There were bullets scattered over the kitchen table. He had taken the bullets out of the gun, but there was still one in it.

  It was then that he closed the cylinder and spun it, and put the gun to his temple. He felt nothing. Suddenly the lightning in his head flashed out and all he could feel was his finger on the trigger of the gun. No other part of him was alive. He felt the pressure on his finger, nothing else. His finger was alive, filled with electricity; the rest of him was dead storm. He felt the pressure against the finger grow. The finger was living for him, a lightning bolt, doing everything for him. No other part of him had to think, or eat, or breathe.

  Then something (his finger?) made him look up. Ginny was standing in the doorway to the kitchen in her bathrobe. Her eyes were not wide because he had caught her at the exact moment when her eyes first made contact with him. None of the things that should be were in her eyes, the disbelief, the screams, the pleading for him to stop. Nothing was there but her first pure reaction, which was—get it over with. There was relief in her eyes in that unadulterated, frozen moment—relief that it would happen now and not some other night, or day, not while he was on duty or in a bar or by himself in a hotel room with a razor in front of a fogged mirror, with only silver and white the colors of the world, the white and silver of the bathroom and the white of his undershirt and u
nderwear, staring at his own face while the silver razor did the job, and she would have to go somewhere to look at his body with all that blood on it. They wouldn't clean the blood off, and his undershirt would be caked with it, and his face would have the lusterless pallor of a stranger. Let it happen now, her eyes said. Get it over with.

  In that moment he knew he didn't love her, if ever he had. There was no possibility of loving her because she did not love him.

  Then suddenly his finger gave up its life to him. The storm ended. He felt everything again.

  She walked to him and put her hand on the gun and pressed it to the kitchen table. She held it against the Formica. "I'll get you a cup of coffee," she said.

  She made coffee, and he drank some, and while she was putting the cups in the sink he opened the cylinder of the .38 and saw the single bullet stare up at him from the chamber that would have fired.

  He sat on the bed in the gray afternoon and looked at the gun in his hand now. There was no more alcohol and no more Ginny. But the same numbness was there that was always there, without the alcohol or with it. It had never gone away. That was what had put the gun in his hand, not the beer or scotch, or the fact that his wife didn't love him, or that his father had killed himself. There was still the fact that it was his own choice. When his finger was doing the job that night, the finger was him. His mind could produce all the metaphors it wanted, confuse them, change them around, but it would still be him. He knew that. But it made no difference because the numbness was still there.

  He felt the weight of the gun in his hand. He slipped his fingers around the butt in a smooth motion and put his finger onto the trigger, feeling where it should go. Then he put the barrel to his temple and pulled the trigger.

  "Bang," he said.

  The gun said click.

  He took the barrel away from his head and turned the gun over and put it slowly back into the drawer, more carefully than he had handled the water glass in the kitchen, and he closed the drawer, and then he changed his shirt and jacket and went out into the gray world of sun.

  TWELVE

  In the gray jail cell, Mary Wagner looked shorter than she had standing with Les Paterna outside Bravura Enterprises. That was because Les Paterna had probably been shorter than he had looked behind his desk. Another businessman with deceptive interior decorating.

  He would have to ask Barker if there was a listing in the Yellow Pages for magic furniture that turned creeps into big shots.

  "How did you get in?" Mary Wagner asked him. She had been crying. Her mascara was smeared all around her eyes, giving them a haunted look. Up close, her hair coloring was apparent, the soft red locks giving way to mousy brown at the roots. Altogether, she didn't look as New York professional as he had thought. Trick lighting, no doubt.

  "I told them I was your lawyer. The guard barely looked at me. He was arguing with his wife on the phone."

  She looked at him and didn't even pretend to smile.

  "Do you have a lawyer?" he asked her.

  "I've got one," she said. "He's the Bravura Enterprises lawyer, Henry Kopiak." She was making nervous motions with the fingers of her right hand; the nicotine-stained place between her middle and forefinger was empty and she was obviously not used to that.

  "Sorry, I don't have a cigarette," he said.

  Abruptly, she began to cry.

  "I had a fight with him," she sobbed, the way people do when they wish they had done one little thing differently which would have saved them from a big hole they had fallen into. "That was all. He was a pain in the ass sometimes, and last night he just got on my nerves. He picked me up at nine, we had a couple of drinks, then we went back to my apartment. He started to bother me, so I kicked him out." She wiped her hand across one eye, showing Paine the technique she had used to smear her mascara.

  "Did you call him later?"

  She gave him a look as if he really was a lawyer.

  Paine waited.

  "Yes," she said.

  "What time?"

  She hesitated. "I'm pretty sure it was around one-thirty."

  "Pretty sure?"

  "I kicked him out around midnight. I gave him time to get home, and a little more time to steam. I called him because I didn't want him mad at me."

  "Because he was your boss?"

  She looked at him, and a sob came.

  "Do you think he killed himself?" Paine asked.

  Again she smeared her mascara. "Oh, God, I don't know. I don't think so. He never talked that way. But I didn't know him all that well. He didn't tell me everything . . ."

  "Did he tell you anything about the Grumbachs?"

  "Only the business things. He never talked about much of anything."

  "Did he ever talk about what he did before Bravura Enterprises?"

  "He used to talk about it sometimes. But I got the impression he didn't like to. Like it was something to forget."

  Paine took the two envelopes of photos from his pocket. He took the photographs out and handed them to her. She stopped at one of the three Dolores Grumbach had left for him, of a thin-faced man in his mid-forties with receding hair and long sideburns.

  "That's Lucas Druckman; Les used to talk about him."

  "Did you ever meet him?"

  "No. Les kept a picture of him. He showed it to me once, after he'd had a few drinks. He told me that if I ever saw Lucas Druckman I should run the other way. He thought it was funny. He said it a couple of times."

  "He thought it was funny?"

  "He thought it was hilarious. He'd had a lot to drink . . ." She looked as though sobs were on the way again.

  "Where did he have this picture?"

  "He took it out of his desk." She moved her hand in front of her, remembering. "It was under the hanging files in the file drawer. I remember him pushing a bunch of them back to get at it. It was in a brown folder."

  "Was there anything else in the folder?"

  "I remember seeing some papers, maybe another picture."

  Paine took the photos back from her and showed her the ones from the other envelope. They drew a blank. He took the photos back and then he called out through the cell bars, waiting for the jailer with the nagging wife to let him out.

  "I don't think you have anything to worry about," he said to Mary Wagner. "If this lawyer Kopiak is any good, you'll be out in an hour. If he isn't any good, you'll be out in two hours."

  A little light rose in her eyes; that was all she wanted to hear. Already she was beginning to realize how messy she looked; and Paine knew that after he left she would straighten her face and comb her hair. Pretty soon she'd be back out in the big bad world, and it would be time to be hired by some other middle-aged bozo who wanted a secretary who wouldn't mind looking up at him with round brown eyes, and show just enough leg to promise that leg led to thigh. And if her hair wasn't really red but mouse-brown, so what, it looked just fine in night light and that's all she needed. By the time the jailor arrived she was almost smiling.

  Paine ate at the diner on Broadway and 250th Street, then he had more coffee and read the paper and waited for it to get very dark. When it got very dark he paid his check and left.

  He parked three blocks from Bravura Enterprises and scouted carefully for the blue Chrysler or red Toyota. Neither was there. The door to the building was locked but it was an easy lock.

  Once inside, he went past Mary Wagner's desk and down the hail to Paterna's office. He closed the door behind him. The blinds were already drawn so he turned on the desk light.

  The file drawer in the desk had a lock on it, but that broke with only a penknife. Paterna's furniture wasn't so magical after all. Paine pushed back the blue hanging file folders and saw nothing. He rammed the folders back farther, and there, pushed to the back edge of the file, was a brown folder.

  As he slid it forward and pulled it out, it slipped from his fingers and fell onto the rug, flipping open to show an empty interior.

  "Shit," Paine said.

 
He picked the folder up and slid his fingernail along the edges. There was no split where something had been hidden. He tore the folder down the middle, telling himself that doing so was not frustration but a final check for a hiding place.

  The folder turned into a ripped folder.

  Paine threw the pieces into the trash can next to the desk. He started to push the file drawer closed, then stopped. He pushed the hanging folders back again, straining his fingers to the back of the drawer, sliding them from side to side. At first there was just smooth cool metal. Then his fingers found a slip of paper and he pulled it out.

  One side was empty; on the other was scrawled the name Izzy, the number 33,000 and a Los Angeles phone number.

  Paine put the slip of paper in his pocket and left the office. He turned out the light behind him.

  THIRTEEN

  Outside Paine's door someone moved in the shadows. He turned, ready, but it was Rebecca Meyer. "You didn't answer your phone," she said.

  "I wasn't home," Paine said. He opened the door for her and she went in. As she passed, something stirred in him, deep down. It was something primal, animal, but it wasn't only sexual. It both frightened and elated him.

  She took off her coat. Her hair was more feminine today, brushed back from a center part. She looked older. She was wearing makeup. Her tennis togs were gone, replaced by slacks and a loose cotton blouse that didn't hide the fact that she was not wearing a bra. Paine thought of Ginny, the sweater she had worn, the one that had shown off her breasts.

  He decided he had a thing about breasts.

  "Do you have anything to drink?" she asked, sitting in one of the armchairs that had held Ginny's bags the day before.

  "Ginger ale," he said, turning to get her one from the kitchen before she could say that's not what she meant.

  When he turned from the refrigerator with the can, she was standing in front of him. She moved closer. Her face was flushed, through her makeup, as if she had played hard tennis and enjoyed it. Her eyes were filled with intelligence that had been sublimated by something more basic, a human drive that was the basis of life itself.