The Last Dead Girl

by Harry Dolan

  The guy in the orange T-shirt sighed theatrically. “You can’t go by that,” he said. “I swear he plays a hell of a bass.”

  “What’s the band called?” Jana asked.

  T-shirt guy’s eyes twinkled. “Take a guess.”

  She waited a beat. “My Idiot Friend?”

  He laughed. “Where were you when we were looking for names?”

  She could definitely spend a day in Binghamton.

  “What is it really?” she said.

  “The Orangemen,” he told her, pointing at his shirt.

  She wrinkled her nose.

  “I know,” he said. “We’re awful with band names. Don’t let it stop you from coming.”

  “We’ll see,” she said.

  “Cool. And now I’ll leave you alone. ’Cause, you know, I don’t want to be the weird guy at the rest stop. But something about you made me want to introduce myself.”

  He held out a hand.

  “I’m Luke,” he said.

  23

  Eli Daw died on the night of September 6, 1996. The Rome Sentinel covered the story on the front page, but the Sentinel’s archives weren’t online yet. I wound up spending part of my Sunday afternoon in the basement of the public library, looking through old issues on microfilm.

  The initial report contained the bare facts. Eli was shot once in the heart at approximately eleven fifty-five p.m. It happened at his home, a trailer on Humaston Road. No weapon recovered at the scene. Subsequent stories reported that Luke Daw’s car had been found the next day, abandoned in a drugstore parking lot near the bus station downtown. A handgun had been recovered from a storm drain nearby. Luke was being sought for questioning.

  The Sentinel ran pictures of both cousins. Eli Daw looked like an amiable goof, with ruddy cheeks and wavy hair and ears that stuck out from his head. Luke Daw was something else. You could have cast him as the bad boy in a soap opera. He had an intense expression and piercing eyes.

  Two things from the coverage jumped out at me. One of them I expected: the lead detective on the case was Frank Moretti. The other surprised me: Eli Daw had a wife.

  I asked the woman at the circulation desk for a phone book and found a number for Wendy Daw. I entered it into my cell phone and walked out into the sunshine on the library’s front lawn. I let my thumb hover over the green call button, tried to imagine what I would say.

  I think your late husband was a murderer. And his cousin Luke might still be running around killing people. Do you have time to talk?

  I decided to fib. I punched the button and when she answered I said, “Hi, my name is David Malone. I’m writing a book about unsolved murder cases, and I’d like to talk with you about your late husband.”

  “Eli?” she said. “I don’t think he’s worth a book.”

  “Well, he’ll be one chapter out of many. Could we meet? I can come to you.”

  “I can’t. It’s Sunday. I’m cooking dinner.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “I work tomorrow.”

  “I could buy you lunch.”

  “I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”

  I started to ask her to reconsider and realized she’d hung up on me.

  I found her number under RECENT CALLS and punched the green button again. Waited as it rang. Four times, five, six. No answering machine. No voice mail. Seven, eight, nine. I punched the red button to end the call. Strolled on the library lawn. After a minute I tried again. Wendy Daw picked up on the fifth ring.

  “You’re persistent,” she said.

  “It’s important,” I told her.

  “The thing is, I don’t see any point in talking about Eli.”

  “I understand it could be painful—”

  “It’s not painful. It’s just something better left in the past. I don’t think I’d want to be quoted in a book.”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “We can talk on background.”

  “Background?”

  “Just for research. I won’t quote you.”

  “I don’t know. I’d rather not.”

  “We can make it deep background,” I said.

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means once we talk, you’ll never hear from me again. If I pass you on the street, I’ll pretend I don’t know you.”

  She laughed. Not much of a laugh, but enough.

  “All right,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

  • • •

  I met Wendy Daw at an outdoor café across from the IRS Regional Examination Center on Arsenal Street—a building of gray brick and few windows and undistinguished architecture. A suitable home for accountants who spent their days reviewing tax returns. Wendy worked there as a secretary.

  “You wouldn’t believe what goes on in there,” she told me. “The drudgery.”

  “I think I can imagine,” I said.

  “You really, really can’t.”

  She ordered a salad for lunch, said she was trying to lose weight. She had always carried an extra ten or fifteen pounds, she told me, and always right around her middle. She had fine, brittle hair that she wore parted in the center, and dots of acne on her cheeks. She was dressed very professionally, in a skirt and heels and a navy blue blazer. She was twenty-four years old, the same age Eli Daw would have been if he had lived.

  I asked her how they met.

  “We went to high school together,” she said, “but he never said a word to me there. I ran into him a couple years after graduation, at a party at Mohawk Valley Community College. I was working on an associate’s degree. Business and information sciences. Not much use, but it’ll get you a job answering phones for the IRS.”

  “Was Eli a student there?”

  “No. He played bass in a band, with Luke and a couple of others. Cover songs. He came over to talk to me between sets. Five months later he asked me to marry him, and I said yes. I had a good feeling about him. I thought he was going places.”

  She delivered the last line evenly, with no hint of irony. When I didn’t respond, she said, “You’re too polite to be writing a book. Either that, or you haven’t done much research yet.”

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  “Well, take this down then,” she said, gesturing at the notebook I’d brought along for the sake of appearances. “Eli Daw dressed like a farmer and drove a beat-up white van. He wasn’t going anywhere. The only reason he graduated from high school is that he kept showing up for four years and they wanted him to move on.”

  “Why did you agree to marry him?”

  “I took a look in a mirror and asked myself how many proposals I thought I had coming my way.”

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” I said.

  She rolled her eyes. “Now you tell me. We got married in the spring of ’95. He got shot a year and a half later. In the meantime we lived in a trailer. I finished my degree and worked temp jobs. He had the band.”

  “Did the band make any money?”

  “The band played gigs that paid a hundred dollars a night, split four ways. The band didn’t last.”

  She went quiet for a moment, picking at her salad. I ate a bite of the sandwich I’d ordered. The sun came out from behind a cloud.

  “I’ve heard that Eli and Luke might’ve had other ways of making money,” I said. “Maybe illegal ways.”

  Wendy Daw smiled. She had a gap between her front teeth that might have been sexy, if only it had been a bit smaller.

  “Is that your way of asking me if they sold drugs?” she said.

  “Did they?”

  “We’re on deep background?”

  “The deepest.”

  “Then yes. Mostly pot, but other things too. Coke. Pills. Meth, if they could get it. Truth is, the band was mostly an excuse to sell pot to college kids. Professors too, f
rom what Eli said.”

  “Professors?”

  “You think professors at a community college don’t smoke pot? How else would they make it through the day?”

  “Do you think that’s what got Eli killed—dealing?” I asked.

  She moved the salad around on her plate. “I don’t know.”

  “What happened that night?”

  I waited for her answer. She stared off into the distance, recalling the details.

  “I went to bed early,” she said. “Eli stayed up with a beer watching television. I woke when I heard the shot. Only, when you wake up to a gunshot, you don’t realize it was a gunshot. I sat up in bed, knowing something was wrong, not knowing what. I could hear the TV in the other room. I called out to Eli and when he didn’t answer I got up and went out there. Found him bleeding on the floor. The door of the trailer stood open. I heard a car driving off, fast.”

  “But you didn’t get a look at the car?” I asked.

  “I was looking at Eli,” she said, “and trying to cover the hole in his chest.”

  “Do you think Luke was the one who shot him?”

  She shrugged. “That’s what the police thought. If he was, I think he came there meaning to do it. I think he shot him as soon as he opened the door.”

  “Did the two of them ever argue?”

  “They grew up together, with just their grandfather to raise them. They argued all their lives. Had fights too—knock-down, bloody-knuckle fights, from what I heard. Not as much when they got older.”

  “What happened to their parents?”

  I watched her do the long-distance stare again, as if she were trying to decide how much to tell, and how to tell it.

  “Their fathers were never in the picture,” she said. “They were one-night stands who didn’t stick around. Their mothers were young—Holly and Maggie Daw—sixteen and eighteen. They got pregnant around the same time. Luke was born first, Eli two months later. Eli’s mother—the sixteen-year-old—died in childbirth, so Luke’s mother took care of both boys for a while. But when they were old enough for kindergarten, she took off. They’d get a card from her now and then—Christmas and birthdays—but she never came back. Their grandfather took charge of them from then on.”

  “What was he like?” I asked.

  “I never met him,” Wendy said. “Eli called him a farmer, but what he really did was manage someone else’s farm—a dairy farm out on Humaston Road. Luke and Eli worked for him every summer, as soon as they were old enough. And if they screwed up, Grandpa would knock them around—take them out behind the toolshed or lock them in the root cellar or whatever people do out in the country.”

  “Is he still alive?”

  “He died a few years ago. Ran the farm into the ground first. The owner couldn’t afford to pay the taxes. I think the state owns the land now. Grandpa Daw moved himself and his grandsons out of the farmhouse, which was falling down anyway, and into a trailer. He didn’t own the patch of ground where he put the trailer, but no one cared enough about it to chase him off. He spent his last years drinking and collecting Social Security.”

  “Is that the trailer where you and Eli lived?”

  She looked across the table at me with a faint smile. “No. Luke kept that one. Eli got another one, about a mile down the road. I told him we had to have a place of our own, if he wanted me to marry him.” The smile turned bitter. “I didn’t sell myself cheap.”

  I felt bad then—for deceiving her, for tricking her into talking about things best left in the past. But I didn’t stop.

  “If I wanted to find Luke Daw,” I said, “how would I go about it?”

  “What would you want him for?”

  I stuck with my lie. “For the book.”

  “He’s on the run from the police,” she said. “You think he’d talk to you?”

  “It’s worth a try. Who would he go to for help? Would he try to get in touch with his mother?”

  “I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”

  “What about friends—maybe the other guys in the band?”

  She shook her head. “One of them OD’d. The other moved out west. Luke wasn’t all that close to either one.”

  She finished her salad, glanced at the gray building across the street as if she might be thinking about heading back.

  “Do you remember a teacher named Cathy Pruett?” I asked her. “She taught at your high school.”

  “Sure. She died—she was murdered.”

  “Did Luke or Eli ever talk about her?”

  I watched Wendy Daw tip her head to the side, puzzled.

  “No. Why would they?” she said.

  “I just wondered. She was killed a few weeks before Eli.”

  We sat in silence while the waitress came with the bill and went away again. I could see Wendy thinking, putting things together.

  “Wait—do you think Luke killed her?”

  Luke and Eli both, I thought. But I didn’t say it. I didn’t want to speak ill of her dead husband.

  “I’m wondering if there might be a connection,” I told her. “Two unsolved murders in the same city around the same time . . .”

  “But Cathy Pruett’s murder was solved. Her husband did it.”

  “He was convicted,” I said. “Some people think he’s innocent. One of them was a woman I knew, Jana Fletcher. I think she might have believed that Luke killed Cathy Pruett. Did Jana ever try to contact you?”

  “No. But her name’s familiar. She was murdered too.”

  “Yes.”

  Wendy Daw stared at me with narrowed eyes. “You’re not really writing a book, are you?”

  I decided to resort to the truth.

  “No. I’m trying to find out who killed Jana.” I pulled my wallet from my pocket and found the photograph of Jana that her mother had given me. “Jana spoke to a lot of people about the Pruett case,” I said, showing the photo to Wendy Daw. “Are you sure she never tried to talk to you?”

  I didn’t really expect her to recognize the photo, and after she looked at it she said, “I’m sure. I never saw her.”

  She might have studied the photo a little too long. It seems that way to me now, though it could be a detail I’m inventing. At the time, she seemed natural enough.

  Not long after, she thanked me for lunch and crossed the street, steady in her high heels. I watched her slip inside the gray brick building.

  I never suspected she was lying.

  24

  Interlude:

  September 1996

  Jana Fletcher heard the calls of owls—a whole chorus of them in the dark. Hooo, hooo, hooo, hooo, hooo.

  She walked in starlight along the shoulder of the road. The air felt clean and cool. The road made a gentle arc through the woods, and up ahead she saw a single lighted window.

  She looked back the way she’d come. She could barely make out the shape of the car she’d left behind.

  Hooo, hooo, hooo.

  She turned again to face the window, and the deer came out of nowhere.

  Three of them—one larger than the others. They bounded up into the road in a clatter of hooves, the big one leading. Jana watched them cross the center line coming toward her, and the big one passed in front of her, an arm’s length away. A dark eye taking her in as it went by, cantering down from the road and into the deep of the woods.

  The second one followed without looking at her, leapt down and thrashed through the brush. A flash of white tail, and then nothing.

  The third one stopped.

  The clip of hooves turning a quarter circle. Then quiet. Even the night chorus seemed to fade back: Hooo, hooo. The deer’s sober eyes fixed on Jana’s. The animal gave off a wet, earthy smell. Its brown ears shifted; its nostrils breathed.

  Jana focused on the deer’s eyes, took a gentle step towa
rd it. The creature ducked its head down and brought it up again. Jana lifted a hand to touch its shoulder. Felt it tense and then relax.

  “Beautiful,” she whispered.

  She felt the fur beneath her fingers, spread her fingers wide apart. The deer ducked its head again and turned away. Her hand trailed along its back as it moved. She watched it climb down from the road and trot off into the woods.

  • • •

  Jana reached the window, but she couldn’t see in through the curtains. She could hear muffled voices inside. She stood on a patch of grass in her bare feet. A few drops of rain began to fall.

  She mounted two steps and knocked on the door. Felt a raindrop on her cheek. She knocked again, louder, with the side of her fist. Started counting, one two three, in time with the beating of her heart. When she got to twenty, she pounded on the door again. Pounded until her hand began to ache.

  The door opened.

  He filled the doorway, wearing jeans hastily put on, no shirt. She watched his face. Annoyance. Then shock. Then disbelief.

  He sputtered out her name: “Jana.”

  Stupid girl, she thought. You’re not even ready. She reached behind her and pulled the gun from her back pocket and shot Eli Daw in the heart.

  • • •

  There was more noise than she expected. The gunshot, of course, a whip-crack sound that she felt through her hand, her arm, her whole body. Plus the television: the source of the muffled voices. Not so muffled now, with the door open.

  Also the screaming.

  Not from Eli Daw. He had fallen back obligingly and lay now on the floor with blood bubbling out of him. A big dumb animal with wide eyes, his mouth moving, making empty words. No screaming from him.

  It came from farther back in the trailer. A woman’s voice. “Oh my god! Eli! Who’s there? What happened?”

  On and on like that, with minor variations. Jana stepped over Eli Daw and went to find the voice, holding the gun out in front of her. She glanced at the television. An interrogation scene on a cop show, the hotheaded detective railing at the suspect. Jana moved through the trailer and came to a half-open door.

  A bedroom. A naked woman.