The Last Dead Girl

by Harry Dolan

  Washburn stirred in his sleep, rolled onto his side.

  K listened to Washburn’s breathing, watched the thread of smoke. He got an idea. He crouched down by slow degrees, an inch at a time, until he was on one knee beside the mattress. He laid the broom handle on the floor without a sound. He reached for the smoldering cigarette with his gloved hand, then thought better of it because the black leather would be too clumsy. He stripped off the glove and dug his handkerchief from his pocket.

  With the handkerchief he picked up the cigarette, leaving the ash in the tray. He brought the tip of the cigarette into contact with one of the tissues on the floor. He held it there patiently and nothing happened, and he waited, and at last the tissue began to smolder.

  He bent down over it, let his breath fall on the charred black edge until he saw an orange glow, and then a flame.

  He placed the cigarette on the floor, returned the handkerchief to his pocket. He picked up his discarded glove and used it to nudge the burning tissue into another. The second tissue caught fire.

  K put the glove back on and opened one of the girlie magazines—last October’s issue. He folded out the centerfold until one corner of the page touched the burning tissues.

  The flames spread. They consumed Miss October.

  He opened another magazine. Miss July. A blonde. July, like Jolene. She made an excellent bridge between Miss October and the curtains.

  The curtains must have been made of some kind of synthetic. They burned greedily and gave off a plastic smell.

  K picked up the broom handle and rose to his feet. Washburn was still snoring on the mattress. K looked at the ceiling. No smoke detector. He didn’t remember seeing one in the hall either. He closed the bedroom door on his way out.

  Down the stairs, out through the front room. He turned the lock in the knob and pulled the door shut after him. He left the broom handle propped on the porch where he’d found it.

  Calmly he crossed the street. No need to hurry. He dropped his gloves on the passenger seat, started the car. This worked out well, he thought. Better than stabbing Washburn or beating him with the broom handle. That would have been a mess. And K knew that Washburn could be connected to Jana Fletcher. Both of them dying in the space of two days—better that one should look like an accident. Napoleon Washburn goes out to a bar, comes home drunk, falls asleep smoking.

  K watched the upstairs window. The curtains had burned away; the flames would have moved on now to the walls. In the weak lamplight he could see smoke building along the ceiling, working its way down. Time to leave.

  As he drove along the unpaved street he saw something that made him touch his brakes and curse out loud. He wanted to stop, but he kept going. What he saw was David Malone’s pickup truck.

  • • •

  When I found Poe Washburn’s house, it was on fire.

  I didn’t realize it at first. I was looking for the address, and the numbers were hard to see in the night. I parked the truck on the street in front of one of Washburn’s neighbors, went up onto the neighbor’s porch, and turned around when I realized my mistake.

  But there it was, one house over. When I approached the steps I heard a burst of glass. The heat of the fire had shattered an upstairs window. Shards of glass slid down the roof of the porch and rained down into a flower bed beside me.

  I looked up at the broken window and saw smoke. Called 911 on my cell phone. The woman who answered was all business. Nature of the emergency. Name and address. Is there anyone in the house? I told her I didn’t know.

  “Firefighters are on their way,” she said. “Don’t go back in the house.”

  “I was never in there to start with,” I told her.

  “Don’t go in.”

  I closed the phone. In the gravel driveway alongside the porch was a rusted pickup, just the sort of thing Washburn might drive. He could be in the house.

  It would be stupid to go in.

  I went up the cinder-block steps and tried the door. Locked. I threw my shoulder into it halfheartedly, which did about as much good as you’d expect. Then I went back to the steps and hefted one of the cinder blocks.

  One blow from the block and the door crashed open. The front room was empty of life and eerily calm. I could smell smoke but I couldn’t see any, not here. I dropped the block on the porch and went in.

  I found the stairs and stood at the bottom looking up at a mass of gray smoke. It was gathering there, getting ready to come down.

  “Washburn?” I yelled. “Poe? Anybody there?”

  No answer.

  It would be really stupid to go up the stairs.

  I dashed through the front room to the kitchen, ran water in the sink. Couldn’t find a towel. Rifled through drawers until I had one. Soaked it in water. Held it over my nose and mouth and breathed, just to see how it would work.

  When I turned back to the front room I heard coughing. Washburn must have crawled down the stairs headfirst. He struggled to his feet at the bottom, tall and lanky, eyes blinking, a mess of dark hair. His left hand held a pair of boots; his right hand hitched up his pants, tried unsuccessfully to buckle his belt.

  Suddenly he noticed me. I tossed the towel away and said, “Poe?”

  His face twisted and his eyes blinked, and he took two steps toward me and threw a kick that sent a white milk crate flying in my direction. There was an ashtray on the crate and it spun through the air and broke against the wall in a litter of spent cigarettes. I batted the crate away but Washburn came in behind it, leading with his right shoulder, sending me sprawling on the kitchen floor.

  He landed on top of me and scrambled to his knees, straddling me. He still had a boot in his left hand. He drew it back and slammed it into the side of my head.

  “What the fuck are you doin’ in my house?”

  I watched his face go in and out of focus. The world spun slowly.

  “I’m trying to help you,” I said.

  Washburn coughed and spat on the floor and shifted the boot to his right hand. His left hand gripped the collar of my shirt.

  “Yeah, you’re a big fuckin’ help,” he said, pushing his fist into my neck. “You want to help? Here’s how you can help. Are you payin’ attention?”

  I started to say yes and he hit me again with the boot.

  “Now you’re payin’ attention,” he said. “Tell him I got it. I got the message. Tell him he doesn’t have to worry about me.”

  “Tell who?”

  A whiff of booze as his face moved closer to mine.

  “Tell him he didn’t have to burn my fuckin’ house down. I’m not gonna talk. I never wanted to talk in the first place. That’s what you tell him. You got that?”

  I nodded because it seemed the thing to do. His fist bore down on my neck and the world spun and part of the world was his hand with the boot in it. I saw a halo of light and for some reason the light smelled like smoke, and the boot swung down and crashed into my temple.

  14

  For the next little while I was awake and asleep. When I was awake I saw faces above me. The faces had lips and the lips moved, but nothing they said made any sense. Sometimes I saw hands and the hands held pinpoints of light. And somehow the pinpoints got to be as big as suns. And all the suns smelled like smoke.

  Once I felt someone holding my hand. I saw a face above me, the face of a bald man with bristly eyebrows. His lips moved and what came out was like someone practicing birdcalls through a long cardboard tube. A light passed in front of my eyes—not a sun but a very bright star. It flicked out and the sky went dark.

  When I finally woke up for real it was in the room with the white-tile walls. But without the chairs and the table, without Moretti. Without the tiles either.

  I woke in a white room with someone holding my hand. The walls were curtains. The bald doctor was there with his bristly eyebrows. He h
eld a light in his fist. He asked me my name.

  My lips felt dry. I tried to wet them with my tongue, but my tongue was dry too. I didn’t tell the doctor my name. Instead I let him in on a secret.

  “Normally I wouldn’t hold hands with you like this.”

  His right hand clicked off the light. His left hand came into my field of vision and made a peace sign. “How many fingers am I holding up?” he asked.

  “How many hands do you have?” I countered.

  His eyebrows went up and he looked to his left. Someone moved there and another face came toward me. Hair brushed my cheek. It smelled sweet. Not at all like smoke.

  “It’s my hand you’re holding, jackass,” Sophie Emerson said.

  • • •

  I woke up again to find the bald doctor gone and Sophie reading in a chair by my bed.

  “What time is it?” I asked her.

  She closed her book. “Almost five.”

  “In the morning?”

  “Yes, in the morning. Don’t get any ideas. You’re not going anywhere.”

  When I sat up I thought she would try to stop me. She helped instead. She fiddled with the controls on the bed, then held a cup of water so I could drink. Pretty soon I was holding it on my own.

  “My name is Dave,” I said.

  She smiled. “Yeah, you’re brilliant. You’re still not going anywhere. You’ve had a concussion.”

  “Like drums?”

  “That’s percussion,” she said. “A concussion is a traumatic brain injury. A percussion is what you call a concussion when you’ve had a concussion. How do you feel?”

  “Like someone used my head as a drum.”

  She tapped her own temple. “You opened that cut up again. I told you to stop letting people shove you into walls.”

  I reached up, felt a bandage. “He used a boot,” I said. “Did they catch him? Poe Washburn?”

  Sophie shook her head. “You were the only one they found in the house.”

  “He must have slipped away.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe you could ask the police about him. One of them came to visit you while you were sleeping. A Detective Moretti.”

  “Oh.”

  “He’s an interesting man,” she said. “When he couldn’t talk to you, he asked to talk to me.”

  “About what?”

  “About where I was the other night.”

  The other night. She meant the night Jana died.

  “I was here at the hospital,” Sophie said. “We had a motorcyclist come in. Bad accident. Had to take out his spleen. There are about a dozen people who can vouch for me, in case you were wondering.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Detective Moretti seemed satisfied. He said he never really suspected me, but he had to rule me out.”

  “I think that’s true,” I said. “He has another suspect.”

  “Not you, I hope.”

  “Not me. A man named Simon Lanik. Jana’s landlady’s grandson.”

  “That’s good then,” Sophie said. “But you should watch out for Moretti. He’s not happy about last night. The fire. I think he wants to charge you with arson.”

  “He doesn’t appreciate me.”

  “Fortunately it’s not his call. I gather the police have an arson specialist, and the specialist thinks the fire was an accident. Someone smoking in bed.”

  It wasn’t an accident, I thought. The timing was too convenient. Poe Washburn believed someone had set the fire to send him a message. I could imagine another possibility: someone had tried to kill him before I could talk to him. (A grandiose thought. I heard Moretti’s voice in my head: Yeah, you’re just that important.) But either way, it was no accident.

  I kept these thoughts to myself. I asked Sophie, “When can I leave here?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed. “If you insisted, they’d probably discharge you now. But I’m holding out for a CT scan.”

  • • •

  I left the hospital five hours later, after a CT scan and a lot of paperwork and a wretched breakfast. I walked out into bright daylight, at ten o’clock in the morning.

  Sophie drove me home. The scan showed no bleeding in my brain, so my concussion was just a concussion. The prescription was rest and Tylenol. I napped for a while, got up, wandered as far as the sofa, clicked on the television. Sophie appeared and covered me with a blanket. She made me soup. I asked if she would take me to get my truck. “That wouldn’t be resting,” she said.

  I read the paper when it came in the afternoon. The Rome Sentinel. It had a front-page story about the fire. Neighbors had seen Washburn leaving the house, slipping into his boots on the porch, driving away just as the fire trucks arrived. The police wanted to talk to him.

  The story mentioned me by name and said that I’d been injured. Roger Tolliver saw it and called to see if I was all right and if I needed anything. I told him I’d let him know if I did.

  There was no mention in the paper of any connection between Poe Washburn and Jana Fletcher. A separate story on Jana’s murder said that the police were still following leads. It noted that they were looking for Simon Lanik. They wouldn’t come out and say he was a suspect, but that was the clear implication.

  Frank Moretti stopped by the apartment twice that afternoon. The first time, Sophie told him I was sleeping. The second time, she told him that if he wanted to talk to me he could work it out with my lawyer. She gave him Roger Tolliver’s phone number and sent him away.

  Tolliver spoke to him and agreed that we could meet the next day—not at the police station but at Tolliver’s office at the law school.

  • • •

  The law school at Bellamy University occupies a fine old building with a broad front lawn shaded by willow trees. Tolliver had an office on the second floor: lots of bookcases and two casement windows and a sleek modern desk with a glass top.

  When Moretti arrived, he had cooled down a little: he had dropped the idea of charging me with arson. But I wasn’t in the clear.

  “Obstructing a murder investigation—how does that sound?” he said to me. “I specifically told you not to talk to Poe Washburn.” Which wasn’t quite true: he’d told me in general not to talk to anyone about Jana’s murder.

  I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. Roger Tolliver was already mounting my defense.

  “In the first place, Detective,” he said, “merely talking to someone doesn’t qualify as obstruction. In the second place, Mr. Malone’s encounter with Mr. Washburn was less a conversation than a physical altercation—one that Mr. Malone did nothing to provoke. And their discussion, such as it was, did not touch upon the murder of Miss Fletcher.

  “In the third place,” Tolliver said, “if I’m to believe the reports in the news, your investigation has been focusing on Simon Lanik. If Mr. Lanik killed Miss Fletcher, then it would seem Napoleon Washburn had nothing to do with her death. And therefore my client’s dealings with Mr. Washburn could not reasonably be viewed as an obstruction of your investigation.”

  There was a fourth place, which had to do with my status as a citizen of the United States of America and my God-given right under the First Amendment to talk to anyone I pleased, but by then Moretti had begun to give me one of his slow-burning looks.

  He asked a few questions about what had happened in Washburn’s house and then stood up to take his leave. Tolliver asked him if he had any information on where Washburn might have gone. “Nothing I can share,” Moretti said.

  “But you do intend to arrest him for assaulting Mr. Malone.”

  “It’s right at the top of my list,” Moretti said.

  • • •

  After our meeting, Tolliver drove me out to Poe Washburn’s house. The firefighters had done their best, but the place was a wreck. The second floor had been gutted and most of the ro
of had fallen in. The whole thing would need to be torn down and rebuilt from the ground.

  Tolliver looked at it and said, “Maybe you should leave all this alone.”

  I knew he wasn’t talking about the house.

  I thanked him for the ride. Promised to let him know if Moretti contacted me again. My truck was where I’d left it. I climbed in and watched Tolliver drive away.

  I didn’t go looking for Poe Washburn. I went home.

  That night Sophie cooked a stir-fry: peppers and broccoli and tofu served over brown rice. After dinner I went into the bedroom to lie down. Her shift at the hospital started at ten, but before she left she came in to see me.

  “Does your head hurt?” she asked, kneeling by the bed.

  “It’s not bad,” I told her.

  “If it hurts, take something.”

  “All right.”

  “You’re still supposed to be resting,” she said. “A few more days.”

  She was telling me something, and asking me something too. I took her hand and she leaned in suddenly and kissed me hard on the lips.

  Afterward she touched her forehead to mine and whispered, “Stop getting dragged out of burning buildings.”

  That was Saturday. I rested that night and all day Sunday. But on Monday I couldn’t rest. On Monday they buried Jana Fletcher.

  15

  The funeral was held in Geneva, New York, the town where Jana grew up. Roger Tolliver told me when and where; he offered to let me ride with him. I drove myself instead, ninety-five miles, most of it on the Thruway. It rained for part of the drive but cleared at the end, and as I drove south on the town’s main street I could see blue sky over the water of Seneca Lake.

  I was early, so I parked the truck and walked to the lake. There were students riding bicycles on a path along the shore. Geneva is home to two colleges that share a single campus—Hobart and William Smith. The campus takes up nearly two hundred acres and the parts of it I saw were pretty: lush and green, with old buildings faced in weathered stone. Jana’s mother worked as a cook in one of the dining halls; her name was Lydia—and those were the only two things Jana ever told me about her mother.