Loose Ends

by Neal Bowers

  “The court order for the exhumation gives him the right to do whatever he thinks is necessary, but I doubt he’ll touch your father’s body.”

  Davis was thinking of the cassette recording and wondering if anything else might be hidden in the casket. Could be photographs of Ralph Banks and Charles Winningham going at it in the Ramada Inn. No, he couldn’t let himself think that way. His father was as straight as Davis himself. Bad comparison after last night’s poor performance. And Davis kept hearing the woman’s voice on the tape. What if it was his mother with another man? She could have been driven to affairs by his father’s indifference to her, by his preference for men. If that were true, placing the tape beneath his head would have carried a double load of bitterness.

  “I want to see my father.” Davis’s tone was matter-of-fact, as if his father were waiting in a holding cell and could speak with him.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Oh, that’s right, you’re afraid of Dr. Ted. Sorry, I forgot that little wrinkle.” The ploy was transparent, but he didn’t have any other leverage with Ann Louise. He certainly couldn’t wink slyly and say, “For last night’s sake, sweetheart.”

  Ann Louise stood without speaking, then turned suddenly and said, “Follow me.” They walked out of the station and entered through a plate-glass door two buildings down the street. Downhill. A guard in the entryway said, “Mornin’, Detective,” as Ann Louise passed, pulling Davis in her wake. When they reached the rear of the building, Ann Louise made Davis wait while she went through a set of swinging hospital doors, the kind found in emergency rooms.

  What emergency could arise in a morgue? A little postmortem twitching might make the nightman jumpy, but who would hit those doors with a gurney, yelling “Stat!”? When Ann Louise didn’t return right away, Davis eased his way inside and followed the voices.

  On a stainless-steel table at the end of a green room awash in bright light lay something twisted, compressed like a bundle of roots in shrink-wrap. “Winningham,” thought Davis, but as he looked around, he saw his father’s coffin, empty. “What the hell’s going on here?” he challenged, bulling his way across the room.

  Ann Louise was saying his name over and over, and the coroner was yelling, “Get out of here! Now!” But Davis was uncontrollably drawn to the table, to the small body of the man who had been his father. He was shrunken to half his size, completely stripped of his clothing. The room smelled of formaldehyde and backwash land after the water has dried up.

  “Daddy?” Davis was standing against the table, looking down at the husk, at what could have been half man/half locust. “The pupal stage,” he thought. Then he realized he was looking at the arches of the pelvic area. His father’s penis was gone. “What have you done to him, you son of a bitch?” He had turned on Dr. Ted and was backing him across the room when Ann Louise grabbed one of his arms and twisted it behind him, tipping his whole body forward. The more he struggled, the harder she bore down, until his arm was electrified with pain. When he hit the swinging doors, head lowered like a goat’s, Ann Louise gave him a push and let him go.

  “What kind of pervert is he?” Davis had his back to the wall and felt his legs give way beneath him. “Don’t let him do that to my daddy, please. Please don’t let him.” The sobs rose in him like huge bubbles, bouncing his whole body with each release. “Oh, God, why is he doing that? Don’t let him. Don’t let him.”

  Ann Louise knelt beside him, repeating his name until he looked at her. Then, very deliberately, she said, “I’ll take care of it. Right now. Okay?”

  Something in her face calmed Davis. He believed her, knew she would stop what the coroner was doing. Somehow, she would stop him.

  “You stay here. Understand?”

  Even if he had wanted to get up, Davis wasn’t sure his legs would support him. So he slumped against the cold cinder blocks for what seemed a long time, daubing his eyes with his shirtsleeve. He tried to imagine what Ann Louise and the coroner were saying to each other and wished she would put Dr. Ted in an arm hold and bang his head into the wall. Maybe she would take out her pistol and study it while making veiled threats. Was she capable of that?

  When she came through the swinging doors, she was perfectly composed. “Come on. Everything’s all right now. Your father’s back in his coffin, and we’ll rebury him this afternoon.”

  Unsteady on his feet, Davis touched the corridor wall at intervals as they left the building. The morning air immediately made him feel better. Then, without warning, he vomited.

  Ann Louise placed an arm around his shoulders and handed him a tissue from her jacket pocket. “Come on, let’s get you away from here. Nothing to be sorry about,” she said, as Davis kept saying he was sorry. “Is your blood meter in your car?”

  Davis nodded, feeling the acid in his throat, and nodded again when Ann Louise asked if he had parked in the uphill lot.

  When they reached the car, Ann Louise retrieved the monitor from the backseat and handed it to Davis, watching him as he pricked a finger and placed a blood drop on the little strip. The countdown from forty-five seconds to the result—330—left them staring at each other.

  “You need a shot, don’t you?”

  Davis nodded and fumbled the vial and syringe from his pocket. He calculated that three or four units would do, then stuck himself in the fleshy part of his stomach.

  Ann Louise winced and said, “I’ve gotta get back to the station. Will you be okay now?”

  He answered yes but knew it was a lie, at least in the long run. He would definitely not be all right. No one would be all right. When he looked in the side mirror, he saw his father’s shrunken face.

  CHAPTER 15

  __________

  WHEN DAVIS PARKED in front of Marie Winningham’s, he tried to remember driving there but couldn’t. No turns, no stoplights, just the straight route of his intent. Marie Winningham might have a portion of the truth, and Davis had fixed his mind on her as a stricken man grasps the wheel and focuses on the emergency room. If she couldn’t mend him, she might at least commiserate.

  When no one answered the doorbell or the knocks, Davis stabbed against the wood with the thick side of his fist. Then he wandered around the house, trying to see movement inside. The ground was matted with years of unraked leaves, but scrappy grass showed where wind had whipped clear spaces. A few jonquils thrust yellow-green blades through the deepest mulch.

  When he rounded the house and started along the back side, Davis heard talking. Tilting an ear toward the shuttered window, he picked up disconnected bits of a voice: “. . . more healing . . . lost connection with . . . drift with your breath to . . .” A man’s voice, rhetorically polished, almost histrionic.

  Davis continued along the outside wall, trying the kitchen door, thinking he would explain himself after getting inside. He didn’t have time for quirkiness or shyness. He needed answers. When he pushed the rear garage door, it opened to a Volvo, new under its layers of dust, but not a recent model. The last person to drive it was probably Charles Winningham. On the other side, against the overhead door, black trash bags were piled floor to ceiling, spilling toward the center of the room. Lifting one, Davis was surprised by its lightness. Inside, he found only sandwich bags, hundreds of them, crumpled. The same with every other trash bag he opened.

  The door to the kitchen was unlocked but wouldn’t give until Davis bumped it with his shoulder. A wide arc on the linoleum showed where the door had dragged for years. Pulling up on the knob as he pushed kept it from stuttering across the floor.

  The kitchen at first appeared to be immaculate, but then Davis realized it was simply lacking signs of habitation—no dishes, knickknacks, curtains. Surfaces were steel-wool-scoured, but the room looked unused. He stood in front of the sink, studying his thin reflection in a pane of the window. A place for ghosts, spare spirits of the scraped and stripped-down world of Marie Winningham.

  Where a table should have been in the adjoinin
g dining room, Davis found only space, a small ballroom, if anyone cared to dance. Beyond, in the center of the house, was the room with the stone fireplace, where he and Ann Louise had tried to talk to Marie. Resonant here was the voice he had heard from outside, clearer now: “Listen to your blood. You can hear it moving through your veins, a steady flow. Listen. Listen to your breath. Let it slow. Let yourself drift on your own blood.”

  He followed the voice to a closed door at the end of a short hallway. “Imagine how clean the stones are in sunlight, the stones in the middle of the stream, the stones in the harbor of yourself.” Louder now, just beyond the door, “This is your central purity, the crystal essence. Look around. Imagine it. Breathe the deep, clear air of it.”

  Quietly opening the door, Davis was dazzled by light, crumpled and broken refractions from all directions. Eyes closed, Marie Winningham balanced on a wooden stool, listening to the taped voice. She was wearing a dress several sizes too big for her. Bleached white, it was shapeless, as if it had been pounded with stones. Around her, the walls were hung with aluminum foil, the ceiling likewise covered. Sensing his presence, she looked directly at him, tipping a moment on the stool before screaming and running to a corner tented with plastic. Davis tried to explain himself, but still she screamed, while the taped voice held its complacent tone.

  “I’m with the police, Mrs. Winningham. Remember me from yesterday? The police.” He kept repeating these simple words in various combinations until the screaming stopped and the blurred figure behind the plastic ordered him to leave. “I need to ask you a few more questions. Please, Mrs. Winningham. We can do it here or down at the station.”

  A long silence followed. Then she slipped through a flap in the plastic and pulled sandwich bags onto her hands as she quivered forward.

  “Do you know we’ve found your husband’s body?”

  “I don’t have a husband. I don’t have anybody.” Fumbling with her makeshift gloves, she made little cuffs by tucking the ends under.

  “Do you know where your husband went when he left?”

  Marie backed up until she was touching the plastic sheeting but didn’t answer.

  “Did your husband ever mention the name Ralph Banks?”

  “Ask him.”

  “You don’t seem to understand. Your husband is dead. We found his body yesterday.”

  “The air’s no good. You’ve ruined the air.” She was back inside her translucent corner, and Davis could see her fitting an oxygen mask over her face. Then the thrush and click of the machine obliterated his questions. He wanted to pull her from her veiled space and force her to listen to him.

  Stopping just outside the plastic wall, he whispered, “Are you crazy, Mrs. Winningham?” The question was ridiculous. A part of being crazy is not knowing it. Then again, maybe self-knowledge is the crazy person’s one point of lucidity. He asked again, in a louder voice. No reply. “Was your husband crazy? Was he the kind of man who would kill himself and try to hide his own body?” Realizing one thing didn’t logically follow the other, Davis said in a softer voice, “I mean the other way around.” What a joke, talking nonsense to a silhouette on oxygen. The taped voice was saying, “You are a whole person. Focus on your wholeness.” Imitating the soothing tone, Davis said, “Of course, you’re crazy, completely crazy, but that’s a kind of wholeness.” Then he was gone, down the hallway and out the front door.

  The mail carrier was crossing the lawn when Davis stepped onto the porch. “Mornin’,” he said as he shuffled an armload of envelopes. For a moment, Davis struggled to reenter the real world, the everyday place where people went about their lives. Inside, Marie Winningham was cornered in a room wrapped in foil, packed away like a leftover. But here was a man moving through the familiar steps of an ordinary day.

  When he stepped forward to put his delivery into the box, Davis said, “I’ll take those to Aunt Marie.”

  Pausing to study him for a moment, the carrier handed the small bundle to Davis and ventured a question. “How’s your aunt doing?”

  “Do you know her?”

  “Not hardly. Been on this route over five years and never seen her. In fact, you’re the only person I’ve ever seen at this house.”

  “But you know about her.”

  “I’m not one to talk about folks. Wouldn’t want anybody talkin’ ’bout me, but they say she ain’t been the same since her husband disappeared. That was before I started with the post office.”

  Davis wanted to extract more information but couldn’t think of the right questions to ask, so he started talking. “It’s a sad situation. I haven’t seen Aunt Marie but twice since Uncle Charles left. She was bad the last time I was here, but she’s talking crazy now. Lots of stuff about murderers and her being warned to keep her mouth shut.”

  The carrier shifted his leather bag from one shoulder to the other and said, “They was people had reason to kill Charles Winningham, or so I’m told.”

  “Well, my uncle wasn’t a saint; I know that. Might even go so far as to say he was a little twisted, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. Son of a bitch was—excuse me, didn’t mean to use that term. I’m sorry. He was your uncle.” Embarrassed, the carrier turned to walk away, but Davis stopped him.

  “The way I hear it, some guy named Banks was tied up in it.”

  “Beg pardon.”

  “Banks, Ralph Banks, I think was the name. You know—him and Winningham.”

  “Could be. I just moved here from Ashland City about five years ago. But people still talk about Winningham. And the ol’ lady—I mean your aunt—is . . . well, nobody never sees her, and you know how people go on. No offense intended.”

  “That’s all right. You have a good day, now.” Davis gestured with the mail clenched in his right hand and turned as if he were going back inside. The carrier shrugged under the weight of his bag and kicked off through the leaves.

  Not a first-class envelope in the bunch. Everything was a solicitation or blind mailing. Half of the eight pieces were addressed to occupant. Davis didn’t know what he had expected to find but felt disappointed as he clunked the bulk mailings into the box just outside the front door. Should have asked the mailman if anyone ever wrote to Aunt Marie. No, bad question, because even he didn’t write to his weird aunt. The carrier might know that. Got to be careful how the story spins out. No knots in the thread. No dropped stitches. Could preface the question by saying, “I’m not much of a letter writer myself, but surely other people write to my aunt.” That would do it. Why hadn’t he thought quickly enough?

  Lifting his wrist and the broken crystal of his watch, Davis realized he had mindlessly put it on when he dressed, even though its hands had crash-landed in the vicinity of twelve-thirty. “Couldn’t be later than eleven,” he thought, reading the overcast sky. Nothing to do now but go home and get ready for the funeral. No point in chasing down the mailman or trying to get Marie Winningham to make sense. Nobody knew anything, or there was nothing to know. Either way, he was snared by questions, their little hooks digging in and holding firm.

  *

  As he neared his mother’s house, Davis noticed a Fort Campbell sticker on the rear bumper of a car parked at the curb. Lots of army base stickers around Clarksville, nothing at all out of the ordinary, but this one might be on Haupt’s car. The thought clarified as Davis turned into the driveway. Haupt would have driven himself from the base, and his car would still be wherever he had parked it. He sure as hell didn’t drive away in it. Jogging back to the car, Davis convinced himself it was Haupt’s. The doors were locked, but he could see things piled on the backseat when he put his face close to the window and held his hands like blinders to cut down on the glare. Boxes tossed amid plastic bags. Might be things Haupt had taken from the house. “Damn him!” Davis said, his breath fogging the glass.

  Working with a straightened coat hanger retrieved from the house, he was able to snake between the glass and the rubber insulation at the
top of the driver’s window. Contorting himself and bending the wire until it went down true, he snagged the lock and was inside. The air in the car was stale with tobacco. Davis scratched through papers in the glove compartment until he found a registration slip. “The good sergeant,” he said to his left eye in the mirror.

  With both front windows rolled down, Davis pulled the largest box onto the front seat. Tucked shut, the top sprang open when he pulled on the middle of the flaps. A woman’s coat. Charcoal. In the smaller boxes were black pumps and toilet items, including a blow-dryer and a small mirror with magnification on one side and normal reflection on the other. Davis held it close, until his face was so near it was unrecognizable. The plastic bags held a nightgown, bathrobe, slippers.

  Haupt was not stealing these things. He was trying to return them. They were the personal effects of Ellen Banks, the things she had with her when she died. Haupt must have thrown them into the car at the Howard Johnson’s and then packed them later for return. He had probably let himself into the house to prowl around a bit and make sure he could safely unload his secret cargo. Or was the dirty bastard putting together a hoard of memories to cart away? Was Haupt coming or going? Davis tried hard to remember seeing any of the items in his mother’s house. The coat? The blow-dryer, maybe?

  Pulling the backseat loose from its brackets, he peered into the trunk. Too dark to see what was there, so he crawled through and felt his way around, his hand finally touching canvas. A duffel bag. He dragged it with him as he climbed back into the car. Haupt’s necessities: shaving kit, socks, underwear. The son of a bitch was ready to roll. All he needed was a woman. Ellen Banks. Any woman. Ellen fucking Banks.

  *

  Davis unpacked the parcels. The coat was easy to hang in its usual place, but he fumbled with the nightgown and bathrobe, finally jamming them into a bureau drawer. The pumps dropped neatly among the shoes; the toiletries had places on the dresser or in the bathroom. A hair-spray spritzer fit exactly inside a little circle in the dust.