by Neal Bowers
“Don’t talk,” Ann Louise whispered as she fumbled to stroke him. He moved from breast to breast, kissing her nipples, pinching them lightly with his lips as they grew more firm. She was breathing quickly, shifting herself beneath him, trying to put him inside her. But he was too limp. He could feel her rubbing against him, but nothing was happening. How could he want her so much and have nothing happen? He kept kissing and fondling, willing himself to grow hard; but the more he thought, the less rigid he became. A sad balloon. Party’s over.
When he fell over to one side of Ann Louise and lay on his back, a light sweat breaking out on his forehead and chest, she turned to him and said, “Don’t worry. It’s all right.” She brushed his hair away from his damp face and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “Really, it’s okay.”
“Was it as good for you as it was for me?” The question was said with such bitterness that Ann Louise drew back.
“Don’t worry. These things happen.”
“Yeah, these things happen—to diabetics. Looks like I’m due for a penile implant or one of those vacuum tubes Foster Brooks advertises in the diabetes magazines. Maybe a double dose of Viagra.”
“For God’s sake, your mother just died, and we’re in her bed. It’s really my fault. This was the wrong place, probably the wrong time.”
Davis wanted to blame her but couldn’t. The failure was all his. A real man could fuck in the middle of a goddamned family reunion, on the table with the potato salad and fried chicken. He almost said as much to Ann Louise but saw how the image debased the moment. Was this just a casual fuck? An attempted casual fuck, he should say. Shit, he thought too much. Why analyze everything to hell and gone. It didn’t happen because it didn’t happen. Comfort in tautology. Que será será, and other sappy slogans.
Ann Louise shifted closer and pulled his arm around her. “Can we just lie here awhile?”
Davis worried that she was patronizing him, even when she turned over and scooched herself against him. Spoons. Funny how automatically he slipped into position, drawing himself so close to Ann Louise he could feel the slight hairs at the nape of her neck against his nose and lips. “I’m not impotent,” he said.
“Let’s not talk about it. Everything’s fine.”
“I just have trouble now and then, especially when I’m under stress and my blood sugars have been all over the place.”
“Shhh. I like just lying here with you.”
Somehow it was all wrong. Every word she said was wrong. He knew she was trying to reassure him, hoping to dismiss his failure as something of no consequence, but her efforts made him feel worse. The more he tried to let the tension pass, the more it grew, until he bounded out of bed and began searching for his clothes in the darkened room.
“Davis, don’t be like that.”
“Like what? Limp?”
She was sitting now, the sheet pulled up around her. “Come on and lie down, just for a little bit.” She patted the mattress beside her.
“Been there, haven’t done that.” The words were coming too fast, flashing their double edges. In a way, he wanted them to hurt her, but mostly he wanted to wound himself. “Hey, did you hear the one about the guy who couldn’t get it up?”
“Yeah, he ran away and missed the best part of sex.”
“Come on. Don’t give me that bullshit. It’s not about being close and cuddling; it’s about humping and panting and coming. The godalmighty orgasm is the be-all and end-all. Everything else is either foreplay or fatigue.”
“You can’t really believe that.”
“Can and do. What else would the point be? Did we dance our way back here and get horizontal just to neck? You can’t tell me you’re not disappointed.”
“I’m disappointed in the way you’re acting now.”
“For Christ’s sake! I despise being schmoozed. I’d have a lot more respect for you if you’d just give it to me straight. Ha! Did you hear that phallic reference? You give it to me straight. I sure as hell couldn’t give it to you. The wimpy little noodle kept bending over.”
Ann Louise moved to the edge of the bed and began to gather her clothes, pulling on panties, fastening her bra. “I’d better go.”
“Yeah, right. Better move on out of here, now that you know the score. No score tonight. Zero. Nothing to nothing.” Davis was laughing and moving erratically around the room. He had one sock on his foot and the other pulled over his hand and was gesturing wildly, a puppet show run amuck. “Swear to God, I don’t know why you came over here. What did you expect to find? Nobody lives here anymore. Didn’t you know that?” His breath was coming harder, and when he squatted in the middle of the room, rasping coarsely, Ann Louise knew he was in trouble.
“You took too much insulin, didn’t you? Davis, what should I do?”
His eyes were fixed on nothing, and his shuddering breath was his only response. He had skidded out of the lanes of language. Too late to say that a jar of preserves, anything sweet would do. When Ann Louise rushed back from the kitchen with the sugar container and fed him heaping teaspoons, he couldn’t swallow them. The grains coagulated and rolled from the corners of his mouth. He did better when she dumped sugar into a tall glass and filled it with water, stirring hard with a table knife. Davis took the crude solution blindly and swallowed the contents in three long gulps, even the sediment at the bottom. He kept swallowing as long as Ann Louise mixed them, until his eyes began to move around the room and he slurred, “What’s going on?” Looking around him, Davis felt consciousness return, a slow seepage throughout the body. “Oh, Jesus.” For the first time, he felt the glass in his hand, the coarse sugar granules on his lips and around his teeth. Ann Louise was crouched beside him, wearing only her underwear. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Are you all right?”
He looked at her so long without speaking that she asked the question again. “Yes. Thank you. Oh, Jesus, I’m sorry.” The apology was not so much for the insulin reaction as for the disease itself.
Ann Louise helped him stand, and after she got him into bed, slid in behind and pulled up close, repeating, “It’s all right. Everything’s all right.” Her words were palpable against his neck, warm touches of breath seeming to travel down his spine until he was suffused with Ann Louise and fell asleep.
CHAPTER 14
__________
LYING CHILLED AND alone beneath a single sheet, Davis might have been in the morgue. His thoughts were shards of a scene he couldn’t immediately reconstruct, so he lay immobile, wondering if he could move. The more he focused on lifting an arm or sliding a leg from beneath the sheet, the more leaden he felt. Deadweight. Dead. Stupid idea. He was breathing, lying in his mother’s bed. His dead mother. But even after the powdery dream had blown away, he pretended he was dead. There was the ceiling, dull white above him, the underside of infinity. He closed his eyes and exhaled all his breath, waiting until his lungs forced him to accept the air again.
The gritty sweetness in his mouth called back the end of the evening, and his failure. “Way to go, stud,” he said, looking down at his penis, which bulged beneath his pants, half erect from the pressure of his bladder. As he sat on the edge of the bed, he considered that he might be half dressed or half undressed. “Half-cocked is more like it. Definitely half-socked.” He extended his legs and studied his one bare foot, thinking how symbolic it was to be half dressed in either direction.
The sun was up, but the day was overcast. A light rain had fallen sometime during the night, deepening the dark street, beading the grass. Davis was fumbling in the bathroom when the phone rang. He counted seven rings before silence. Nobody he wanted to talk to. No need to talk. Words seemed useless. This would be a day of useless words. Nothing that mattered could be said in the face of death, in the unresponsive face of his mother decked out in her blue dress for the subterranean silence.
When the phone insisted again, he worried that someone would come to check on him if he didn’t answer. Nothing would be worse t
han Aunt Goldie’s simpering face at his front door.
“Are you all right?” It was Ann Louise. Somehow, Davis hadn’t thought she would be the caller. Wasn’t last night enough for her? What more proof did she need, unless she was thinking of taking him on as a project: the resurrection of Davis Banks. “Davis?”
“Right here.”
“Sorry I had to leave before you woke up. This Winningham thing has got me going in circles. Can you come down here—to the station, I mean? There are some things we need to talk about.”
Was she really going to revisit their pathetic encounter of last night? No way was Davis prepared for that conversation. “Uh, I don’t think there’s anything else to say. Inaction speaks louder than words.” The self-deprecation was his disguise, his way of hiding in plain view.
“I mean about Winningham. We need to talk about him and some other things. Aren’t you at least curious to know what we’ve learned?”
So it was all business now. Detective Wilson on the line. “Give me an hour,” Davis said, about to hang up when he heard Ann Louise’s voice at arm’s length.
“Why didn’t you tell me about the intruder? I gave you every chance last night.”
“Well, something else came up—or didn’t.”
“Any idea why he was in your mother’s house?”
Davis paused, thinking he would tell Ann Louise the whole story of Haupt, but it was too complicated, and he wasn’t in the mood. “Probably one of those burglars who finds his jobs in the obituaries.”
“In case you’re interested, he’s going to be all right. They’ll keep him in the hospital for a few days for observation. Are you going to press charges?”
“Don’t think pressing works very well with me.”
Ann Louise hung up, leaving Davis to wait for the dial tone, then the off-the-hook wail. She had known about the Haupt episode all along, had been testing him, letting him fail her again. Maybe he was on her list of suspects in Winningham’s death.
*
When he entered the station, Davis smelled coffee and knew he needed to eat. Whatever his blood sugar level might be, he was hungry, so he was glad to find Ann Louise standing near her cubicle at a little table offering bagels, doughnuts, and cinnamon buns. He had slipped several syringes and one of the bottles of insulin into his pants pocket. As he approached, he flashed the small vial and motioned toward Ann Louise’s desk, where he could inject himself without attracting attention. She stayed near the table, keeping a casual lookout, and when he walked over, she asked, “Are you okay?”
“Well, you know how it is. Night of carousing with the ladies.”
Ann Louise didn’t laugh or even acknowledge the remark. Instead, she walked to her cubicle. Davis followed and sat at the corner of her desk, a bagel with cream cheese balanced atop his cup of coffee as he scooted the chair around. “So, what gives, Detective?”
Ann Louise took a deep breath and then entered the official role he was forcing on her. “We’ve got preliminary tests back from the coroner. It’s Winningham, all right.”
“Great. Got your man. Good for you, Detective.”
“Look, Davis, can we drop the sarcasm? I’m not in the mood for it. What happened last night happened. Okay?”
“Hey, can’t argue with that kind of logic.”
“Shit. Just let up a little, will you? You might learn something.”
Davis felt too uneasy to cooperate completely. His wisecracks were his only cover. To give them up was to stand exposed again. He imagined his penis, small in the folds of his briefs. “Let the lesson continue.”
Fixing him firmly with her gaze, Ann Louise said, “Dental records for Winningham match the teeth we found. That makes the identification a dead certainty.”
Dead certainty. Certainly dead. The phrase mutated and spread through Davis’s brain, making him smile.
“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. Go on. Got anything else to teach me?”
“Goddamn you, Davis. I said to lighten up. If you don’t stop the smart-ass stuff, I’ll get somebody to show you the door.”
Davis smiled more broadly, thinking of doors and entries and failures; but he forced himself to stop. “Okay. You’re right. Go ahead.”
“We were able to lift some fingerprints from the prescription bottle and the handle of the shovel. Most of them were Winningham’s.”
“Who left the other ones?”
“The pharmacist, the guy at the hardware store who sold Winningham the shovel, who knows?”
“Maybe the person who murdered him?”
“It’s not a murder, Davis. Nothing about the remains suggests a struggle or any kind of attack. Charles Winningham put himself in the bottom of your father’s grave, took those pills, bagged his head to suffocate himself, and waited for the weight to come down on him.”
“But somebody could have slipped him the pills and put him there. That has to be at least a possibility, doesn’t it?”
“All the evidence points to suicide.”
“Okay, then, as far as you’re concerned, Charles Winningham killed himself, and you solved the mystery. Case closed.”
“Not really closed. There are questions we need to answer.”
“Seems to me you have all the answers.”
“Every death is the end of a story, but the ending doesn’t always make sense until we have the rest of the story.”
“Jesus, that sounds like something I might say to a sophomore literature class. If you ever want to swap jobs for a few weeks . . .”
“Don’t you want to know why Winningham chose your father’s grave?”
“Well, let’s see—it was available. How’s that?”
“So you’re content to think of it as a random choice? Might as well have been another grave in another cemetery?”
“Why not?”
“What if Winningham knew your father?”
“My father was a shift supervisor at Trane Manufacturing. He didn’t hang out with many lawyers.”
“Still doesn’t mean they couldn’t have known each other. Clarksville’s not that big.”
“Wait a minute. I see where this is going. You want to play out the Romeo and Juliet plot, only with two men instead of a couple of horny teenagers. You think Winningham killed himself in despair when my father died, because . . . hell, I don’t even want to finish the thought.” But he had finished it in his head, where it tumbled like a clump of garbage swept downstream.
“I don’t believe in randomness where suicides are concerned. People kill themselves for specific reasons and in well-chosen places. Suicide is the irrational conclusion to a line of rational thinking.”
“They teach you that at some police seminar? Christ almighty! What if Winningham just wanted to vanish, wanted to leave a mystery behind? He could have planned for a long time and just happened to choose my father’s grave. The scheme would have been more important than the particular place. All that mattered was pulling it off. Death by disappearance. Has a certain appeal, don’t you think? Anyhow, I’m still holding out for murder.”
Phones were ringing all around them, a twittering grove. Davis sipped his coffee and waited for Ann Louise’s answer, which was a piece of paper pushed across the desk. “We found this in Winningham’s wallet.”
After wiping his fingertips on his pants, Davis pulled the little square toward him. A newspaper clipping. His father’s obituary. “And this would prove what?”
“You don’t find it odd that the man buried under your father had your father’s obituary in his pocket?”
“Apart from the irony, you mean?”
“So, this is just a coincidence.” Ann Louise was beginning to sound like a grammar school teacher who couldn’t understand her pupil’s thickheadedness.
“If Winningham was planning to kill himself, he probably clipped this from the newspaper so he’d know when and where to go with his bottle of pills and his shovel.”
“Come on, Davis. You don’t think h
e could have remembered that Ralph Banks was being buried in Greenwood Cemetery two days after this notice was published?”
“How the hell do I know what kind of memory the man had? He was a lawyer. Maybe he was a demon for documentation.”
“Davis, I’m looking for the story that leads up to the ending we’ve discovered. If Winningham and your father were having a relationship, Winningham’s decision to kill himself and be buried with your father makes sense. Everything falls into place.”
“And if they didn’t know each other, if the grave was randomly chosen, how does that screw up your narrative?”
“You’re forgetting that I followed this case eight years ago, even though I wasn’t one of the investigators. And I’ve gone back and looked at the file. One of the things that came out in the papers and led to a lot of gossip was Winningham’s homosexual activities. We’ve got statements from some of the men who knew him. Knew him in that way.”
“Got anything in the file that says my father was one of Winningham’s lovers?”
“It’s just hard to account for Winningham’s suicide any other way. He was well off, had a good legal practice, a nice home. You’ve seen the house yourself.”
“Had a nutty wife, too. Or wasn’t she allergic to the world back then? Maybe she killed him.”
“Well, there’s no point in going any further with this.”
“How much further could you go? You’ve started with the speculation that Winningham killed himself, and followed that up by assuming he did it in my father’s grave because the two of them were lovers. Ever consider writing cheap novels?”
Ann Louise stood and looked at her watch. “I’ve got to check with the coroner again, and then we need to get your father reinterred.”
His father. Davis hadn’t even thought about his father. For eight years he had been dependably underground, but now he was out in the world once more. “Where’s the coffin?”
“Coroner’s in charge of it. Said he wanted to check for anything we might have missed.”
“He’s not going to do anything to my father, is he? I mean, he can’t without my permission, right? That can’t be legal.”
