Two Days Gone

by Randall Silvis

  “The song is ‘Black Magic Woman’ and the guitar player is Carlos Santana. And he didn’t write the song. In fact, it was recorded by Fleetwood Mac two years before Santana covered it. You really suck at just about everything, don’t you?”

  Bowen smiled in spite of himself, then was startled by the buzzing of his cell phone. He looked at the number. “Channel Four,” he said before silencing the phone. “So back to the matter at hand. You make it outside just in time to see your car leaving. But instead of picking up the phone and calling for assistance, you go running after the car.”

  “Staggering is more like it. I wrote staggering, didn’t I?”

  “You go staggering away in pursuit.”

  “I wasn’t in pursuit so much as I was hoping to ascertain the perp’s probable flight path. So that I could then call for assistance.”

  “You didn’t say that in here,” Bowen said and tapped a finger to the report.

  “I just now thought of it. I mean that was probably my intent.”

  “Probably.”

  “Listen, you’re the guy who forced the pills on me. Threatened me, in fact, with something awful—I forget what exactly—if I didn’t take them. So if there are some holes in my memory, you put them there.”

  “It was twenty milligrams of Valium, for Chrissakes. A mild relaxant.”

  DeMarco shrugged. “Maybe it was the right to the jaw. I think Inman might have banged my head on the floor a couple times while he was at it.”

  “Are you making this up as you go along?”

  “Certain details are coming back to me. I wasn’t fucking chasing the car. Do I look like a Labrador retriever to you? I wanted to see which way it turned at the corner.”

  “But you also saw and recognized Bonnie’s vehicle parked along the street.”

  “I did.”

  “So you approached that vehicle with your weapon drawn.”

  “As I recall.”

  “So you were wearing your weapon when Inman coldcocked you in the kitchen.”

  “That doesn’t seem likely,” DeMarco said.

  “Yet you had it when you went outside.”

  “Now there’s another hole in my memory. At some point I must have retrieved it from the bedroom. Then I staggered outside.”

  “Is that how you now recall it?”

  “I’m just trying to fill in the gaps. Not much is certain.”

  “So it would seem.”

  “Seeing Bonnie with her throat slit kind of slapped me awake though. You know what I mean?”

  “Except that you still failed to call in for assistance.”

  “I thought you read my report carefully.”

  “Okay, you attempted to make the call once you were in pursuit in Bonnie’s vehicle. But your cell phone battery was dead.”

  “You ever notice how technology always lets you down when you need it most?”

  “You’re fucking driving me nuts. I’m trying to make some sense of this…this…”

  “Report?”

  “This assemblage of inconsistencies. And if I didn’t know you better, I would say that you’re making every effort to subvert my understanding.”

  DeMarco chuckled.

  “What’s so damn funny?”

  “Sorry, I just thought of this line from Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. ‘I test very high on insubordination.’ Not that it has any application here, you understand.”

  “We’re talking about a multiple homicide, Ryan.”

  “Which I’ve been beating out my brains over ever since day one. Look, I’m not attempting to subvert your understanding in any way, shape, or form. I’m just feeling a little giddy, I guess, because it’s over. At long fucking last, this ugly, horrendous episode is finally over. And yes, I am also more than a little bit testy about how it went down. It cost us a good man. A very good man.”

  Several moments passed. “All right,” Bowen said. “You can’t make a call because your cell phone’s dead. You continue in pursuit. Where did you catch up with them?”

  “I never really caught up. I would see a pair of taillights every now and then, enough that I could stay with them. Where I really lost some time was after Inman abandoned the car in the clearing.”

  “Right,” Bowen said. “It’s what, maybe six in the morning by then? Still fairly dark. Yet somehow you managed to track them to a campsite you didn’t even know existed.”

  “I followed my ears. After the first gunshot, it wasn’t all that difficult.”

  “And what you saw there strikes me as very bizarre indeed.”

  “Indeed,” DeMarco said.

  “Why would Inman use birdshot?”

  DeMarco shrugged. “He’s a sadist. If anything should be clear by now, it’s that.”

  “He shot Huston three times with birdshot just to make him suffer?”

  “That’s all I can figure.”

  “Then he finishes him off with three .22 longs to the chest. Using a fifty-year-old revolver.”

  “The word weird doesn’t even scratch the surface of a guy like him.”

  “I would say not. Because then he apparently wades into the water and starts cutting himself. Why would he do that?”

  “You’re asking me to explain irrational actions.”

  “I’m asking you to speculate.”

  “He’s a sadist and a masochist. He was seriously insane.”

  Bowen scowled and shook his head. “So you arrive on scene. You check on Huston. See it’s too late for him. And you order Inman out of the water.”

  “At which point he comes at me with that long mofo of a knife.”

  “End of story.”

  “End of his anyway.”

  “He falls back into the water; you wade in and drag the body out.”

  “And that water was cold.”

  “But wait, now it’s time for a miracle. Suddenly your cell phone works!”

  “I went back to the clearing, plugged in the charger in my car, and made the call. I guess I forgot to put that part in my report.”

  “Still groggy?” Bowen said.

  “Nope. Right now I feel as clear as this beautiful autumn day. A little tired though. Hungry and tired.”

  “Let’s talk about the crime scene for just a minute. Apparently there’s some evidence of rope burns around Inman’s wrists and ankles. But you didn’t find any rope?”

  “At the campsite? Nothing but rocks.”

  “Any idea then where those rope burns might have come from?”

  “Maybe he and Bonnie had a little rough sex before coming to my place.”

  “Culminating, apparently, in the slitting of her throat.”

  “Let me refresh your memory, Kyle. Carl Inman? Insane.”

  Bowen blew out another heavy breath. “And while you waited for the units to arrive, you built yourself a nice big fire. Kind of a signal fire, was that your intent?”

  “My intent was to keep my cold, frozen balls from falling off.”

  “You know, you’ve always been a bit of a loose cannon, but this time… There are a hell of a lot of holes in your story this time.”

  “So I’m not a natural storyteller. Just another one of the many deficits I’m learning to live with.”

  “There are no suspicions whatsoever on your part that maybe, being so groggy and all, you got a few things wrong?”

  “For instance?” DeMarco said.

  “Like maybe it was Huston doing the cutting on Inman? That would explain the rope burns at least.”

  “Seems quite a stretch to me,” DeMarco said.

  “You’re not even willing to consider the possibility?”

  “That scenario would require that Huston somehow overpowered Inman, tied him up…with rope he found where? There was no rope in my car, I can tel
l you that. He then somehow was able to convince Inman to stand chest deep in freezing water so that Huston could slice away at him? And then what? Knowing that Inman would freeze and or bleed to death before he could get back to civilization, he then handed him an unregistered weapon, loaded with birdshot, for fuck’s sake, then sat on the shore and said, ‘Okay, your turn, shoot me.’ You think that’s the more plausible story?”

  “What I think is that it’s not outside the realm of possibility that you might be hoping to rewrite a bit of history. For Huston’s sake.”

  DeMarco said nothing. After a few seconds, he turned in his chair and gazed out the window again. The bareness of the trees made his chest ache. The sky was heartbreakingly blue.

  Finally he faced Bowen again. “Are you asking me if it’s possible that a good, decent, and compassionate man could resort to torture?”

  “That’s what I’m asking.”

  “You tell me,” DeMarco said. “You have a wife and a little girl who mean the world to you. Let’s say you come home one night and find them butchered. What would you do to the man responsible? What would you consider a suitable punishment?”

  Bowen stared down at DeMarco’s report. He sat very still for half a minute. Then he pulled open a drawer, removed a manila folder, slipped the report inside the folder, and closed the cover. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Take your frozen balls and get out of here.”

  DeMarco stood. “Oh, they’re both nicely thawed by now. You wanna check?”

  Sixty-Four

  Before returning home in the afternoon, DeMarco drove to the village of Oniontown. From the O’Patchens’ driveway, he could see Rosemary in her backyard. On her hands and knees, she was moving down the rows of withered tomato plants in her garden, pulling them up by the roots and stuffing them into a plastic bucket. As DeMarco approached, she looked up at him. Her eyes were red and swollen, cheeks slick with tears and streaked with the dirt from her hands.

  “Where’s Ed?” DeMarco asked.

  “Sitting by the TV,” she said. “I think he’s hoping the news will change somehow. But it’s not going to. ‘Last member of Huston family brutally slain before killer is brought down by state police.’”

  She yanked a tomato plant from the ground and shook the dirt from its roots. “At least you got the son of a bitch,” she said. “At least you got him.”

  DeMarco knelt beside her. He picked up the bucket and held it while she stuffed the dead plant inside. “How are you at keeping secrets?” he said.

  Sixty-Five

  The day of Huston’s funeral was appropriately gray and chilled. Now that his innocence had been proclaimed over the Internet and beamed from one broadcasting tower to the next across several continents, his colleagues and neighbors were quick to claim him again as a close friend whose innocence they had never doubted. The jealousy they had felt for Huston alive became a personal sense of loss for Huston dead. On the day of the announcement of his death, every bookstore in the country sold out every copy of his work in stock, and tens of thousands of copies were back-ordered.

  At the crowded gravesite, coeds hugged copies of Huston’s novels to their Halston stadium jackets, sobbed, and shivered while thin, sensitive boys looked on longingly and plotted ways to turn grief into sexual conquest. The poet Denton, in a charcoal cashmere overcoat, a lavender wool scarf wrapped twice around his throat, spoke for fifteen minutes about the special relationship he and Thomas Huston had shared. “Colleagues, friends, and even collaborators,” he said, “laborers toiling side by side in the vineyards of truth,” “brother soldiers…warrior poets.” Afterward, he threw back his head and recited Poe’s “Lenore” and “Annabel Lee.” His shaggy chestnut hair lifted in the gusty breeze, his eyes glimmered with tears, and his voice quavered just enough to be heard.

  DeMarco stood well behind the deep half-moon of mourners. Only occasional snatches of Denton’s recitation reached his ears. DeMarco had meant to remain at the ceremony only briefly, then to return to the silence of home and the thoughts that nagged at him, but he lingered on until shortly after the coffin was lowered into the ground and the feature-length histrionics of sobbing and keening began. Rosemary and Ed O’Patchen were the first to lean over the grave for a final good-bye. They stood side by side, motionless for half a minute, Ed’s ungloved hand resting in the middle of his wife’s back. When the couple turned away to make room for the others queuing up behind them, Rosemary’s eyes found DeMarco at the rear of the crowd, and with a whispered word, she directed her husband’s gaze to him. Though their cheeks were red with cold and shiny with tears, both O’Patchens greeted DeMarco with a subtle smile only he understood. He nodded once, then turned and walked the long, winding asphalt pathway back to his car alone.

  What had been troubling DeMarco was the nagging question of why Inman had shown up at DeMarco’s house three nights earlier. Why would he risk capture by confronting DeMarco? The two men shared no history. DeMarco had never busted him, had had no role in any of Inman’s previous arrests. All DeMarco could figure was that, at some point, Bonnie had mentioned the sergeant to her boyfriend, and something in her tone of voice had tripped Inman’s jealousy trigger again, so he made a slight detour in his escape route, slit Bonnie’s throat, and came after DeMarco. Given the convolutions of the criminal psyche, DeMarco considered this a plausible explanation, yet it failed to quiet the mumblings in his brain. For that reason he had ordered that Bonnie’s vehicle be impounded and scrutinized, but it produced no further rationale for Inman’s behavior. The small trunk was crammed with their clothing in two suitcases and three duffels, the glove box held road maps for Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Texas, and in Bonnie’s purse was their traveling money, two packets of three thousand dollars each in Citizen Bank wrappers. None of it spoke to DeMarco, not a word of insinuation. It left him only with a vague uneasiness that refused to gel.

  And now footsteps intruded on the uneasiness, long strides coming up from the rear—brisk movement, the solid slap of soles growing louder by the second. A man, DeMarco thought, or a tall, athletic woman in flats, not heels. Slowing only a little he turned at the waist.

  “Hey,” Nathan Briessen said. His black overcoat hung open, black cable-stitched turtleneck sweater and jeans. His cheeks were red from the cold, eyes red rimmed from a deeper chill.

  “Hey,” DeMarco answered.

  The young man came alongside and matched his stride to DeMarco’s. For a while they walked in silence. Then DeMarco told him, “I’m sorry, Nathan. I know he was a good friend to you.”

  The young man nodded. His gaze held the distance. “How did you like the show?” he asked.

  “Touching,” said DeMarco.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t set up a table and do a book signing while he was at it.”

  “Denton?”

  “Fucking self-promoting son of a bitch. I wanted to strangle him.”

  DeMarco cut a glance at the young man’s face, the grim set of jaw. And now he understood Nathan’s need for company, the anger, outrage mixed with grief.

  Nathan said, “To use a man’s funeral like that. Especially a man like Thomas. He’d have been disgusted by that, you know.”

  “Maybe,” DeMarco said. “Or maybe just amused. Able to forgive his friends their excesses.”

  “Friends?” Nathan said, then shook his head.

  They walked in silence awhile longer. They reached the sidewalk finally and turned right, continued beside the long line of cars parked at the curb.

  DeMarco said, “So Thomas didn’t consider Denton a friend? You know this for a fact?”

  “He would never come right out and bash somebody, you know? He just wasn’t like that. But Denton’s constant self-promoting… Thomas found it distasteful, to say the least.”

  DeMarco said, “Tell me about the self-promoting.”

  “He never passed up a cha
nce to put himself in the spotlight. The man was constantly angling for the department chair, full professorship…or just to be the center of attention. He was obsessed with it. Just like today. Insisting on giving the eulogy. And then turning it into the Robert Denton show.”

  DeMarco thought he recognized the young man’s car as they passed it, a blue BMW coupe. But Nathan continued walking. DeMarco remained silent.

  Nathan said, “Every time he published a poem in some obscure literary journal, he’d send out a press release, for Chrissakes. To the local papers, the campus paper, the alumni newsletter. He’d even send out emails to the entire student and faculty lists.”

  “And Thomas didn’t approve of that?”

  “To him it was all about the work, you know?”

  DeMarco nodded. “He was a special man, all right.”

  They came to DeMarco’s car then. Both men paused beside the right rear fender. DeMarco turned to face the young man and waited.

  Nathan stared past him. “Even that thing up in Albion,” he said. “He even sent out press releases on that. That one really got Thomas’s hackles up.”

  At the mention of Albion, something pinched at a corner of DeMarco’s brain, in the same brain wrinkle that had been twitching with uneasiness. “What thing in Albion?”

  “At the correctional facility. The poetry class for the inmates.”

  “Denton taught a class at the prison?”

  “From what I hear he’s been teaching a class there every semester for the past couple of years at least. He sends out a new announcement every semester.”

  All of a sudden DeMarco felt a heaviness in his chest, a tightness that made his heart beat fast and his breathing come quick and shallow. “I take it you weren’t aware that Carl Inman did his time in Albion. Until a few weeks ago.”

  The young man locked his eyes on DeMarco’s. “Are you serious?” he said. “Fuck, you are serious.”

  “You really didn’t know?”

  “I swear to God I didn’t.”

  Sixty-Six

  DeMarco could have contacted the correctional center by telephone, but then he would have had no excuse for not going home. Home was as gray as the sky and as stagnant as a grave. The thirty-minute drive to Albion would provide not only a sense of movement, some kind of forward progress, but would also allow him time to consider all the implications of this latest bit of news. Nathan’s tip about the poet might in fact be a dead end, but DeMarco doubted it. The pinch in his brain that had been harassing him since Huston’s death had not only subsided now but had been replaced by a kind of lightness, a decrease in intercranium pressure. The day seemed brighter by a lumen or two, the air fresher. Something had been changed by Nathan’s revelation. The fog of ignorance was lifting.