Loose Ends

by Neal Bowers

  Ted the coroner didn’t look so much chastened as satisfied. He had lost the fight but managed to push his opponent past her limits. The pleasure he took in Ann Louise’s lost composure made Davis mad. “You’re a smug little bastard, aren’t you?” he asked Ted, who shook his head as he walked toward the backhoe.

  Ann Louise was sitting on the grass near the graves.

  “Hey, at least you didn’t have to shoot him.”

  Ann Louise laughed. “Don’t think it didn’t occur to me.”

  The wind had picked up and was making the branches clatter in the big oaks uphill. Davis looked toward them and saw someone step behind one of the trees. He locked onto the spot, waiting for the figure to reappear, but nothing moved. One of the men could have slipped away to piss in private, but all the members of the group were still in sight. Keeping his eyes on the tree, he paced up the incline.

  Although the trees weren’t leafed out and gave only a broken shade, the grove was cooler than the open area near the graves. He pretended not to be moving toward any particular tree but kept the exact one at the edge of his vision and, when the moment felt right, turned suddenly and walked to it. No one. He looked up into the mostly bare branches and then down. At the base of the tree lay five cigarette butts, all the same brand, all smoked down to the filter. When he looked downhill from this point, he could see the grave site clearly. Ann Louise was small and alone, her knees pulled against her chest. She could be mistaken for a sculpted headstone, melancholy fixed perpetually in marble; or for a spirit loitering in the late hours of the afternoon, a vision of grace.

  A gust shuffled the branches and pushed Davis into the open. He picked up one of the filters, then let it fall, wiping his fingers hard against his pants. A commotion downhill drew his attention to the police van winding Greenwood’s lane toward Ann Louise, who stood spooling it in, her right hand circling as if turning a crank.

  The crew worked so efficiently that by the time Davis reached the graves, tripods for lights were being erected, orange and black wires running to the back of the truck. Ann Louise was giving directions as she helped unload metal boxes, and when everything was lined up neatly on the grass, she gave the signal to start the generator. Davis expected the sputtering to even into a full roar, but it never did. The sound kept vacillating, like a drill touching to bore and backing away, then again. “Do you really need the lights?” he shouted to Ann Louise.

  She glanced at her watch and said something that sounded like “Dark being one,” but which Davis interpreted as “It will be dark before we’re done.”

  The first one back down the ladder was the coroner, this time with a satchel slung over one shoulder. Those crowded around the grave kept adjusting the tripod lights, apparently in response to the coroner’s directions, and someone retrieved a huge flashlight from the van to hand over the edge. After Ted had been under for a few minutes, Ann Louise descended the ladder. Davis wondered which one was Virgil and which Dante. Didn’t work because Ann Louise had to be Beatrice. She had no business in the underworld.

  Davis ventured to the edge of the grave only once and could see very little—two people squatting in a game of marbles, each one brushing the soil for a better shot, picking up aggies and cat’s-eyes. Most of the time, he paced between his father’s coffin and the hole that grew more illuminated as the sun declined. Finally, the light surrounding the opening was brighter than anything else in the cemetery, and Davis hung back near his father’s shadowed box.

  When Ann Louise climbed into the upper reaches of the light and looked around for him, he knew he was invisible. Her eyes would have to adjust to find him leaning against his father, tête-à-tête of the living and the dead. He liked the feeling of being between worlds, so he didn’t help her, didn’t move at all. When she finally called his name, he answered with a single word that might have been a cough in the sputtering generator—“Here.”

  Squinting as she moved in his direction, Ann Louise snapped off latex gloves. “Shouldn’t you get something to eat?”

  Davis usually despised being reminded of his diabetes, even in oblique ways, but Ann Louise’s concern didn’t provoke him. “I will, as soon as you tell me what you’ve found.”

  “We’ll have to tag and photograph everything, go through the whole routine. It’s gonna take at least a couple of hours for us to get Mr. Winningham out of there.”

  “You’re still convinced it’s Winningham.”

  Ann Louise gave a tolerant smile. “Go eat. I’ll stop by your mother’s place to fill you in when we’re done.”

  Davis protested only mildly. Ann Louise nudged him on, and soon he was walking among the twilit headstones. Each name seemed cut into darkness, and when he saw the rear window of his mother’s car just beyond the cemetery wall, Gaylon’s smeared word loomed like another family name. “Good old clan of Lier,” Davis mumbled to himself. In the distance, the generator ripped the evening, and the glow from the graveside lights burnished the darkening air.

  When Davis started the car, its rumble boxed him in. “This is what the generator sounds like inside the coffin.” Foolish thoughts, he knew, but still they swarmed him. “Last time my father and mother will both be on the earth.” He pictured his mother, hushed and patient in her little parlor at Berkley’s, his father’s bones resonant with the roar that ran the lights. Two boxes. Three, if you counted the car. Stupid idea. Dead is dead. You can’t be mobile and be dead. Yet it was his turn. He was next in the order of things. “In the great disorder.” He forced the alteration, then said aloud, with emphasis on each word, “Leave it alone,” and jerked the car into the street.

  While waiting in the drive-through line at the burger place, he pricked a finger and did a blood sugar check. 210. Not bad for a day of no monitoring. High but not in the panic zone. What the hell did it matter, anyway? Might as well binge on cheesecake and milk shakes and crawl into the coffin with his father or mother. Save the expense of another funeral. But he was already calculating how much insulin he would need to take when he got home. Shifting to reach for the bag when it was handed through the window, he felt the cassette press into his hip.

  As soon as he entered the house, Davis knew someone had been smoking inside. Odd how smokers believe they can fan the air or smudge out a butt and be undetected. His father had been a well-known secret smoker for years before his first heart attack. Davis would find him in the garage, a cloud slowly dispersing toward the rafters, the whole place stinking of tobacco, his father’s breath bitter with it.

  The smell evoked more nostalgia than fear, so Davis calmly closed the door and went into the kitchen with his burger and fries. When he loaded his syringe with insulin, he drew it full, 100 cc’s, two days’ worth, but this bolus wasn’t for him. Holding the syringe like a knife ready for stabbing, he dropped his hands to his sides and called out, “Okay, Buford. Come on out and let me see you.” Thinking of the hand clasping his chin and throat, of the cigarette filters crushed behind the tree, Davis waited for Ann Louise’s jealous ex-husband to step from his dark corner.

  Edging along the wall from the kitchen to the hallway, Davis began flipping on the lights. Bathroom, empty. Mother’s bedroom, nothing. As he was about to turn off the light and close the door to his old bedroom turned storage area, he noticed something odd about the clothes hung on the line along one end of the room. Tilting his head to see around some boxes, he could clearly make out boots. Someone had sandwiched himself into the old clothes. “How does the story go from here?” he asked inside his own head, a question so vivid it seemed to have been spoken by someone else. Better to make the first move than to wait for Buford to garrote him if he turned to run. So he charged through the room, directly into the line of clothes, plunging in the needle and emptying it into the first solid thing he hit.

  “Goddamn!” came a voice, and someone pushed hard and stumbled into the middle of the room. It was Haupt, the syringe hanging from his left bicep. “What the fuck have you done to me?” He was mov
ing quickly toward Davis, the two of them knocking over stacks of old magazines and record albums.

  Davis managed to get out of the room when Haupt fell, his feet tangled in some of the clothes knocked from the line. “You bastard!” he screamed as Davis slammed the door. But there was no lock and no way to block the door. All Haupt had to do was get to his feet. Hearing him scuttle amid the clutter, Davis jittered another needle into the insulin vial and filled a second syringe.

  Haupt found Davis in the dining room on the far side of the table. “What did you stick me with, you little dickhead?”

  “You’ll know soon enough.” Davis skittered one way and then another with each surge Haupt made around the table.

  “You know how your mother died? You really want to know? I fucked her brains out. That’s how she died. Who do you think you are, coming ’round to my house, bothering my family?” As he was saying “my family,” Haupt lunged across the table, sliding into Davis just as another needle went in, this one in his upper back. For a moment, he seemed unable to get up from the jumble of chairs, but he rose with a fierce noise in his throat. “Damn,” he said, wiping the sweat that now suffused him. “What’d you do to me?” He was beginning to shake violently.

  Davis had backed out of the dining room and was standing near the front door when Haupt collapsed. He had given him enough insulin to produce a deadly reaction, but he felt an odd, almost scientific, detachment from the scene, even as he dialed 911 and told the operator to send someone prepared to handle severe insulin shock. After hanging up, he pulled a dining room chair near Haupt’s tumbled body and observed.

  CHAPTER 12

  __________

  WHEN DAVIS TOLD the medics he had injected Haupt with 200 cc’s of insulin, they exchanged incredulous looks. But there he was, a man exhibiting all the symptoms of a major insulin reaction. While one member of the team set up a glucose drip, the other injected glucagon. With the help of the policeman who was taking Davis’s statement, the medics loaded Haupt’s limber body into the ambulance and howled away.

  “You say he was hidin’ in the house when you came home,” the officer repeated.

  “Yes, in that back room where the old clothes and boxes are stored. And I knew someone was in the house because I could smell cigarette smoke. How many times do I have to tell you the same things?” Davis’s tension was expending itself as exasperation. The last thing he needed was a cop who circled his cases like a cliché.

  “How do you suppose he got into the house, sir?”

  The officer had looked around for broken latches or windows and found nothing awry. Davis could tell him that Haupt had a key, but that would lead into matters involving his mother. So far, he hadn’t admitted knowing Haupt.

  “Look, I’m a diabetic, and I really need to eat. Is it possible for us to continue this conversation in the kitchen?” Davis was already moving in the direction of his cold burger and fries.

  Flipping his notebook closed, the officer said, “I guess the rest can wait until tomorrow. Will you be here, sir?”

  For a moment, Davis didn’t know what the right answer was, but then he remembered. “Uh, no, I’ll be at my mother’s funeral. Berkley’s.”

  “Very sorry for your loss, sir.” And with that, the cop was gone.

  As he prepared another syringe, Davis discovered he had used almost all his insulin on Haupt. He needed at least ten units for himself but could draw only a little more than six from the vial. To compensate, he promised himself he wouldn’t eat all the french fries. Then he sat down at the kitchen table and devoured everything in the sack.

  “Must have a death wish,” he reasoned. “Or I was really, really hungry.” He concluded it was better to be hungry to die than to die hungry. Haupt, if he were conscious, would be ravenous. The insulin surging through his blood in search of sugar to metabolize would make him want to eat the sheet the medics pulled beneath his chin. Davis had once devoured an entire box of assorted chocolates while sitting in the middle of his kitchen floor. He had found it covered with dust in the back of a cabinet above the sink, nuts and nougats and syrupy fillings, all of them stale. Didn’t matter. The brain muttered, “Sugar,” and the mouth fed.

  The more he thought of Haupt, the more Davis regretted what he had done. His charge had been at Buford and was meant to even things between them. All Haupt’s rage came after Davis stabbed him with the needle. Either the attack had infuriated him or the insulin had made him belligerent. What was it the kid who helped revive him at the airport had said? My daddy had a smart mouth, too, when the insulin whalloped him. Yes. Something like that.

  Davis wandered the house, pondering hidden things. Haupt could have been after money. But Ellen Banks was far from wealthy, and she never would have kept money in the house, not any real amount. Then again, Ellen Banks wouldn’t shack up at Howard Johnson’s with a married man.

  All the drawers in the bureau and dresser were closed. Closet doors were shut. Davis’s old bedroom was too much of a jumble to give up any immediate clues. Maybe Haupt had just started his search when Davis came home. Playing out the scene as if he were Haupt, Davis pretended to enter the front door and stood for a moment drawing on his imaginary cigarette.

  Where was the cigarette? All the ashtrays had been removed years ago. “Probably flushed it,” he concluded, but when he lifted the toilet lid, he saw the bloody tissue from his morning finger prick still floating on the water. “Maybe the son of a bitch swallowed it,” he said, dropping the lid in loud punctuation. “Field-dressed it and ate it. A real commando.” He said this to his face in the mirror. Scalded by fluorescence, he looked every year of his age. Striking an oratorical pose, he gestured at his reflection and intoned, “The truth will set you free.” As if in answer, the face in the mirror contorted the statement, “The truth will fret you. See?”

  Damned right, he was fretting. And talking to himself. “My, how witty. Well, you always were a clever boy.” The voice he used was as close as he could come to Tony Perkins’s rendition of Norman Bates’s mother. “Wouldn’t hurt a fly.” Then in his own voice, “But I’d shoot Sergeant Haupt full of enough insulin to kill three men.” Lifting his chin to study his neck, he could still make out the pressure points of Buford’s fingertips, a faint discoloration along the windpipe.

  Narrowing his search to Haupt’s hiding place, Davis entered what his mother called the dump zone. The only vestige of his old bedroom was the curtains, which had matched the bedspread and throw pillows, all of them in shades of brown. Sweet dreams of chocolate. The clothes Haupt had hid among hung from a sagging line running the full length of one end of the room. Dresses, coats, blouses, slacks, even an old one-piece swimsuit Davis recalled his mother wearing. She had been sitting on the edge of a pool at some little pink motel during one of their rare family vacations, striking what she called her Lana Turner pose. He was nine or ten and madly paddling in the deeper end.

  In the corner closet, Davis found some of his father’s clothes—shirts, a few suits, and several pairs of shoes. Reaching to brush away a cobweb, he tipped into the shoulders of the coats and caught an unexpected scent of him—Old Spice and tobacco and something else Davis couldn’t identify, an almost floral fragrance tinged sour, like water in a vase. He inhaled and thought of the coffin, of the sunken grin on the still-recognizable face of his father. Eight years without air. When Davis clicked the closet door shut, it was the lid of another casket.

  In a large box beneath one of the windows, he found photographs, hundreds of them still in the envelopes, just as they had come from the developer. All his mother’s vows to organize them in albums had come to this, a jumble of poses, a past that could be sifted but never organized. There were people Davis didn’t recognize, others he thought he knew but couldn’t name. As he dug deeper, the years lost their color. Odd how the past looked so much more vivid in black and white, cleaner and simpler, purged of the clutter of the moment. Nothing left but the plainest recollection, the singular details. Hi
s mother and father stood out in sharp relief against a background of ocean, or hugging under mistletoe. Deceptive. Davis was there, too, from graduation gown to diapers. Flash, and the years were gone.

  Wandering the room, Davis thumped his toe against suitcases, peeked into boxes of Christmas ornaments and old quilts. A croquet set was propped up in one corner, the mallet heads grass-stained and the striped balls scarred. Even the wire wickets were there, caked with a little dirt from the last game. All games blended in his father’s fierce determination to win, his foot atop his ball, which rested against Davis’s, and then the swing of his mallet, sending Davis bounding across the grass and into the neighbor’s yard.

  “It’s a dump, all right,” Davis said aloud to dispel the scene. Even the phonograph records, stacked waist-high in one corner, made him shake his head. LPs in their scuffed jackets, the nineteen-seventies faces of Herb Alpert and Merle Haggard. Tennessee Ernie Ford’s Christmas album. That’s what Haupt was after, some vintage vinyl. Could have been looking for “their” song. Then the thought of Haupt as a sentimentalist, blubbering in a corner while listening to George Jones moan out “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” made Davis smile. “Yeah, right. Haupt and my mother were in big love.”

  Davis scanned the room one last time before shutting the door, then went to the living room sofa, bending halfway and letting himself drop. When he bounced against the cushion, he felt the cassette in his hip pocket. He pulled it out and studied it. Property of the dead. Technically, he was a grave robber.

  The cheap, generic cassette was unlabeled, plain black. Why waste good money on something that was going to be shoveled under? To go for high fidelity, you’d have to believe in an afterlife with tape players. Standard issue for the dead, or maybe every soul with access to God’s state-of-the-cosmos unit.